Topic: E3 2021 Discussion Thread

Lol if you thought that was only a 5/10, you're going to be waiting until the heat death of the universe before you get a 10/10

@WoomyNNYes Final Fantasy Origin was probably one of the most boring AAA announcements I have ever seen from a company I value as high as Square. Some of the YouTube comments made me feel more emotion than the trailer. This feels like a fan fiction with Cor Leonis, Prompto dressed up as Lightning, and a race swapped Gladiolus, all dressed up in modern clothes. I can’t. I just can’t.

And it’s questionable at best and downright ridiculous at worst that the FF1-6 collection isn’t coming to Switch. I’d buy that in a heartbeat and I know many other people here who would too.

@BruceCM I’ll take a gander at the LiS 3 gameplay later, I was almost dead from exhaustion last night so I skimmed through the whole presentation in 15 minutes… but I know I’ll like it. The initial trailers and story had me hooked.

Let's face it, the Outer Worlds 2 trailer was pretty much every E3 trailer ever but with added self-awareness.

@TheJGG Honestly, when the game first leaked, I thought it was going to be this cool game where you travel a reimagined world of Final Fantasy 1, and you play as a character who looked as if they were from the world itself. I imagined they would dive into Chaos' backstory more, and would actually make it an interesting soulslike final fantasy game with a compelling story. Instead we got Cor with a color swap, and some guy that's prompto. It also just feels.. edgy.. instead of dark. Especially because they kept saying things like "GOTTA KILL CHAOS" or, "IT'S A THIRST", as well as showing blood and gore in the trailer itself..

So far from the E3 conferences, I can't help but have two big takeaways:

• Aside from some Wholesome Direct games and Mario + Rabbids, almost everything shown at E3 so far just hasn't grabbed me. Most games these days feel like a post-Fortnite violence fest. It just feels to me that mainstream games either have to be gruesome or gleefully anarchic. Am I alone in feeling this way? I'm really jaded with mainstream games containing a grisly aesthetic. So many of the new games revealed just felt same-y and generic. Like, palette swaps of Apex Legends, Destiny, grimdark Bloodborne-esque, etc.

I feel like the only games that I get excited about anymore are cozier JRPG's, comfy games and Nintendo's aesthetic.

• The second big takeaway is that the pandemic really did push back game development across the board. All of the conferences so far felt kind of sparse with AAA games.

I think there's a bunch of games that look interesting to me, they're just not the ones given any time for me to care. They show enough to look like potentially cool games, but then they move on without giving you a hook to really keep it in mind by the time you're done with it. Compare that to the super quick Octopath teaser, where despite being surrounded by massive Nintendo announcements, had something that made it stick out to me immediately, and thus I remembered it (also it kept coming back in Directs which helped)

That being said, there was Atomic Heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHhEMTAtTqc

the aesthetic that doesn't look bizarre or intentionally cold and robotic is kinda standard, but otherwise this is so odd it has my attention

@TheJGG Final Fantasy games look awesome, but I've never been able to get into turn based combat - not criticism.(exception, Mario+Rabbids). The Square Enix games I have interest in are Kingdom Hearts and Forgotton Anne. I never got to play any Kingdom Hearts, but have wanted to for a while. I assumed they'd come to the Switch, but here we are, as you know they haven't come. I liked Forgotton Anne, and have been hoping for a sequel.

Edit: I see Capcom is tomorrow. I don't own any Capcom games, but I'll be curious to see what they present.

I think the highlight of E3 for me so far is all of the memes around Final Fantasy Origin... I just can't believe it's not a joke. It looks like a parody of all the things people have criticized the series for over the years, but it's all being played straight. I'm just convinced it has to be a joke, it would explain why the demo still doesn't even launch.

On a more positive note, I'm excited for the Final Fantasy Pixel Collection, though I'm annoyed they didn't really talk about any details and that they aren't coming to console. I'll get them on Steam, but I would have loved it if they got a physical Switch release to go with all the others. I liked how the screenshots they showed looked (I would've been perfectly happy with a Collection of Mana-style emulated collection, but I do like the touched up sprites from the trailer) and I like that there seem to be some QoL updates. I don't get why they couldn't at least mention when to expect the first game to release, though.

Otherwise, Square's presentation was just... really bad. I didn't watch Microsoft's, but going off of what I've seen and heard, it doesn't sound like it'd really have much of interest to me, either (I'm excited for Eiyuden Chronicle and I think Slime Rancher 2 and Psychonauts 2 will be cool, can't say much else though). I'm just hoping Capcom and Nintendo can make up for these first few days of the E3 season.

I'm just wondering why Square didn't show something related to XVI, since we're promised news for it this year. That would've honestly saved their e3 presentation..

Pretty much my thoughts. The memes are just awesome, because this concept is so weird, and not a good, Death Stranding kind of weird. The character designs is probably the most bleeding issue, Nomura must have been very high when he was making the characters.

Square’s mediocre showing makes me very cautious about Nintendo because I’m relying on them to make my summer good. They can either win E3 or have such a poor showing that the only game I buy this summer will be Skyward Sword. Please Nintendo… you can do this!!

@Ulysses That's been going on for much longer than Fortnite. Pretty much since Halo and CoD gripped the market in the early 2000s, the industry has clamored for grimdark shooters. There's been a bit more variety lately with open world fantasy games like Skyrim and BotW, but a lot of non-Nintendo games have felt like copy/pastes of the same few games lately. Part of the reason I don't play that many non-Nintendo games.

@TheJGG I heard that Nomura's been quoted as saying that he ran out ideas back in 2013, but I'm not entirely sure about that.

Also, I agree with you. I'm sort of scared that since all these other companies are suffering from the pandemic this year, Nintendo might have a 40 minute direct where everything is padded out and probably filler. I'm not expecting much, but it's still sort of a worry I have in the back of my mind, since I rather them show games we don't know anything about, or new games than show Skyward Sword HD and Mario Golf, with them taking up half the direct each.

@TheJGG Jack's design almost looks like it was Nomura addressing the complaints of his over-the-top designs by trying to make the most plain and unremarkable RPG protagonist imaginable. The pink-haired guy really didn't fit in with the world at all. The third guy didn't seem that bad (though still unfitting for a game in FFI's world), but he only got a few seconds of screentime anyway. I still think Nintendo's probably going to have some solid games, but I'm really hoping they can turn things around. At least we already know what to expect from Capcom since they announced their lineup ahead of time.

@VoidofLight My guess is Sony got exclusive marketing rights along with console exclusivity or something like that, I can't imagine any other reason for Square to not mention it aside from showing a 5-second clip at the very end of the presentation. We've had a few teases that Sony has a presentation coming in a few weeks (Geoff Keighley saying more would be announced regarding Death Stranding: Director's Cut in a couple weeks and Horizon Forbidden West's release date being announced "very soon"), so I really hope we see something good there. Sony's in dire need of some good news for the PS5's lineup as well, honestly. There's so much up in the air in terms of Sony's lineup at this point that it's making me kind of worried.

I want everyone who ever complained about Switch being too underpowered and what games it is "missing" to remember this E3 carefully. You ain't missing ****.

I was actually really looking forward to this year's E3, so I'm really underwhelmed by the whole thing. And its not just the games (both what they did and inexplicably didn't show), but also the presentation. I was hoping they'd bring a level of excitement or at least an understanding of how the games they have could come across as interesting. But I guess they decided to just do the same terrible, boring events they did last year, but just at E3 this time. Awful decision, I hate it.

Hoping Capcom and Nintendo can save something from this...unfortunate debacle.

@VIIIAxel I hope that's the case, and that we'll end up seeing it soon.

So what time exactly is Nintendo's E3 show?

@VoidofLight That... made me laugh very hard. Well that explains... quite a lot. In fact it explains pretty much everything. Why Final Fantasy VII Remake was made to begin with, why Kingdom Hearts III apparently relies on Avengers style time travel?! (I haven't finished the game so it's unclear..) and why he made a canonical Kingdom Hearts rhythm game.

I don't think Nintendo will pad their Direct out as blatantly as Ubisoft and Square did, but they won't pull eighty games out of their hat like Wholesome did. Ubisoft's was downright pathetic because of the fact that it was Rainbow Six Siege that did this.

@VIIIAxel I agree, it was just awful. It makes even less sense that Jack, or whatever his name was (pretty bland) wears a polo and f*cking jeans, because who the hell does that in a dark fantasy world? Oh wait, his long lost twin brother from eons in the future, Cor Leonis. The pink guy... there always needs to be a pink guy in Tetsuya Nomura's games, don't question it. I think Haru from Persona 5 crossdressed as the third guy because I didn't even care who they were. No screentime at all.

"Help me Capcom-and Nintendo. You're our only hope."

@Zeldafan79 Nintendo's E3 show is at 9am PST on the 15th of June... so that's 12pm EST in case you don't know. To be clear that's 4:00pm UTC, so convert back or forward as you please

Nintendo has already won E3 just based off the fact that we will get a Smash DLC reveal and SMTV.