I did not manage to get up early and go for a swim today, but I wasn’t really expecting myself to. Suddenly doing some exercise after a long period of… not doing that left me feeling a bit stiff (eyy) so I thought I would take today off and make an effort to go tomorrow. Easing into it and all that.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Today was the latest Nintendo Direct, a presentation that many have been assuming will be one of the last big shows Nintendo do while the Switch is still their current platform. The Switch’s as-yet unnamed successor has not yet been announced — and a clearly increasingly irritable Nintendo has been repeatedly pointing out that it has nothing to announce aside from the existence of a successor as yet — but it’s clear that the console is currently doing its victory lap ahead of graceful retirement.
That does not mean there’s nothing interesting coming for Switch, however! On the contrary, there were some really cool things showed at the Nintendo Direct, including some long-awaited news on Metroid Prime 4.
As always, the reaction to the show on the Internet has either been breathless enthusiasm or varying degrees of “well I never liked Nintendo anyway“, but taking as balanced a viewpoint as is possible from someone who likes the Switch and probably uses it as his primary gaming platform, I thought it was a good presentation. Nothing earth-shatteringly amazing, but lots of things that were good. And, to be honest, that’s absolutely fine.
A notable highlight from the show was definitely the new Zelda game, in which you get to play Zelda herself rather than Link. It adopts the same tilt-shifted toy-like style seen in the Link’s Awakening remake from a while back; it’s nice to see that applied to an all-original game rather than a remake.
One thing I’ve been puzzled by is the number of people who seem to just want “Zelda where you play as Zelda but she’s just swinging a sword around like Link”. This is not what we’re getting with Echoes of Wisdom, as the new game is known, and as far as I’m concerned that’s a great thing. Instead, we have the ability to capture “echoes” of objects and monsters in Zelda’s wand, then summon these for various purposes. I can see this potentially being a very interesting mechanic, and a factor which sets Echoes of Wisdom apart from other Zelda games. I’m mostly just glad we’re not getting another Breath of the Wild-style Zelda, though; Breath of the Wild was great and I’m sure Tears of the Kingdom is also, but Zelda is at its best when it’s being experimental, interesting and notably different from one entry to the next.
Outside of Zelda, I was also thrilled to see the announcement of Ace Attorney Investigations for Switch, including the first ever official localisation of Ace Attorney Investigations 2. I was particularly pleased to see the game features the option to play with new high-res sprites or the original pixel art; that’s a nice touch indeed, particularly as Ace Attorney Investigations has actual character sprites walking around as well as the animated busts seen in the rest of the series.
What else? Dragon Quest III HD-2D or whatever it’s called looks great. I’m all for Dragon Quest being remade and made more generally accessible. It’s curious that III appears to be coming out before I and II but I guess they had their reasons. I’m looking forward to giving it a go, and hoping that IV, V and VI get a similar treatment; I’m lucky enough to have copies of the DS versions (they’re pricy these days!) but I would like to play them on the big screen.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy looked very cool. I like the art style of the Danganronpa guy whose name I can never remember, and this looks like quite a different style of game. I dig it, but I’d like to see more of it.
The new project from Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu, aka the Final Fantasy grandaddies, looked a little underwhelming visually, but potentially mechanically interesting. I have faith that they can pull something cool out of the bag, based on their past post-Final Fantasy work together — The Last Story is a wonderful game, for instance.
Mario & Luigi getting a new entry in the form of Brothership is welcome news, even if I have never managed to get caught up on any of the Super Mario RPG-adjacent series. I do have a copy of the Super Mario RPG remake and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on Switch waiting for me to play, but it’ll be after Final Fantasy XIV’s new expansion Dawntrail before I get to those.
Metroid Prime 4 I’m excited to see on behalf of everyone else, even though my experience with Metroid pretty much starts and finishes with the excellent Super Metroid. I have the Wii version of Prime Trilogy to get to at some point, so I’ll have to make the time for that. I liked Super Metroid a lot, so it’s a series I’ve always been meaning to delve deeper into.
You know, the more I think about the Direct as a whole, the more I feel like it actually was a pretty strong one. I’m struggling to think of any games that were shown where I felt “ugh, this isn’t for me”. Sure, some certainly appeal more than others, but I’m pretty sure I could have some fun with absolutely everything that was shown off today. This is a good thing, and makes me feel like whenever the Switch’s successor is finally announced, the good ol’ Switch is still gonna be kicking for a while yet. And if Nintendo has any sense, said Switch successor will be backwards compatible. Here’s hoping; sometimes they have sense, sometimes they do not.
So yeah. They did a good. I’m looking forward to finding out more about all the games they showed — not just the ones I remembered to talk about here — and feel pretty confident Switch will continue to bring the hits for quite some time to come yet.
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