Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

Meh, it was okay. I'll probably double-dip on Persona 3 Reload but otherwise nothing that appealing to me.

Am I the only one getting a bit sick of HD2D? It's starting to feel a little lazy now tbh.

@Buizel The problem with HD-2D is that it's in an engine that could do more, but they found something and decided this is what UE4 does for us now.

Octopath
Octopath the Second
Octopath the First But Its Really The Third
Octopath But Triangular
Octopath Remake from the SNES
Dragon Quest 3
Dragon Quest 1 and 2 After 3
Elliot's Thesaurus Adventure

All in 7 years. And you could show imagery from each one and you'd not know. That's the issue.

A weirdly paced direct I thought.

It seemed to lose steam near the end but then again I'm not particular interested in Octopath Traveler/HD-2D stuff but I can imagine that being quite exciting if you're into that.

@Haruki_NLI yeah in concept I think it's pretty cool. And I really liked Octopath Traveler.

It's just in practice is feels really uninspired. Every game looks more-or-less the same.

Compare with pixel art from the 80s to 00s and there's a world of difference between games in the same genre, on the same console, in the same series, etc. I get a lot of this was driven by technical limitations/advances but...yeah, we have the technical capabilities now, so why does everything look the same?

They said they’d give more info soon, and still no release date, so I’m still thinking there’s gonna be a Direct before September.

Exactly how I expected it to go. FF tactics was cool though. I'd say octopath was as well, but i still haven't played the first two. That Elliot game did look solid though. And why wasnt there a release date for age of imprisonment yet?

Wow, forget Mario Kart and Donkey Kong, we've got Plants vs Zombies coming, it's going to be epic - he says sarcastically. Really? PvZ in 2025? no, we didn't need that at all. What's next? Angry Birds.

I may be the only one there was only 1 game in the entire Direct that appealed to me, Age of Imprisonment. I enjoy the button bashing of Hyrule Warrior games. Nothing else appealed to me though, all looked quite boring to me, so many Final Fantasy 2D style games? what was that about. Felt more like a Square Enix presentation than a Nintendo Direct.

Hopefully a new Mario is coming soon, Odyssey was released several months after the Switch, so hopefully that will be the case for Switch 2 as well. But honestly if the next Mario or Zelda is going to take 2-3 years before release I'm going to get bored fast, we need an Animal Crossing or Link To The Past remake at least to tied us over. An Ocarina of Time remake would be the dream come true, I will keep wishing on a star for that one.

Come on, Nintendo, give us something to salivate over.

I checked out the Japanese version of the Partner Showcase and there were some games present that were questionably absent from the English version. Namely DQ1-3 (DQ1+2 had a big segment and then there was the announcement of a free DQ3 update for Switch 2) and Daemon X Machina Titanic Scion.

@Grumblevolcano not an upgrade path, a free update for DQ3

Eh, it was all right for what it is I guess. Happy to see Pac-Man World 2 make a comeback, though.

@Sylamp Thanks for the correction, I'll update my comment.

Yeah that was... okay. 7/10 I'd say. They waste time on the annual releases, ended on two HD2D games which was kinda underwhelming, and then they showed Age of Imprisonment... but it's another teaser trailer with no release date. Yay?

Honestly the big thing is this Direct was mostly the same type of stuff we saw on Switch 1. I think most of us, myself included, were hoping for more heavy hitters. They knocked out the 2 obvious ports (Sparking Zero, P3R), and then not much past that other than Kiwami 2. Where's something like Death Stranding Director's Cut, RDR2, DMC V, etc?

That Cronos game was by far the most interesting to me honestly. I'll be picking up Kiwami 2 and Sparking Zero as well.

I would love to take an ungodly dose of copium and predict that this relatively light direct will precede a major one next week like what happened in spring, but… an early September direct seems much more likely lol. At least this might have gotten the contractually obliged stuff out of the way for a real winner in September.

I will go out on a limb and predict that there will be no Metroid Prime 4 direct, as there isn’t much to reveal about the game. At this point I feel like it’s not really a major game that’s meant to reinvent the series, and don’t think it will expand on the original trilogy too much except for maybe having more areas. I’m sure it’ll be great, but to me it seems like the real focus of development was making the game a technical showcase. And announcing the release date in early September for a late November release isn’t unheard of given it feels of similar significance to Echoes of Wisdom, which released 3 months after its announcement last year.

Didn't get much right, did I? 😅
Still, I loved the announcement of The Adventures of Elliot. And I'm glad to see another Monster Hunter Stories. Not much else that piqued my interest though. Even Octopath Traveler Zero looks kind of lame to me and I loved the first two. Oh well...

That Direct was great if you own a PS5, and have games other than those shown coming.

I'll say what I've said elsewhere:

@Haruki_NLI this is exactly my takeaway as well. If you’re avid in maintaining a physical library, then the Partner Showcase just gave you a better reason to stick with PS5 for third party games. I liked a number of the announcements, but am less than interested to pick them up for Switch 2 if game key cards are the physical option for their releases.

The one exception for me is PvZ. I would pick it up digitally for S2 because it works well in mobile form.

@Enriesto It's interesting that we are already seeing substantial support from parties who largely ignored Switch, even with day and date release party, which is very surprising.

But likewise a lot of the companies who did support Switch seem absent.

@Haruki_NLI I’m not surprised at those absences (I’m assuming you’re referring to FromSoft and bigger IPs from Square Enix?), since it was a short presentation, and they’d prefer to time updates for larger releases in a way that gives them the most traction - which to me loudly signals a general Direct in the next couple months some time.

I was.... whelmed by this Direct. I know people were talking up the possibility of all of the Microsoft games coming at once but I feel like these people were just setting themselves up for disappointment. Broadly there wasn't anything in here that blew me away. But it was still nice to see a fairly decent amount of support on display with, broadly, most of the games looking fairly decent in terms of image quality. It was mid sure, but I was also expecting it to be a bit mid

Also I don't understand how Just Dance is still a thing with yearly editions. These aren't even new songs. It's like hooray, Smash Mouth - All Stars is in Just Dance now. I know I'm probably not the target demographic but even so, does anyone actually care?

This is true. But it's also a game that requires RT and on similarly powered devices (eg the Deck) runs at sub-native with FSR and Frame Gen at 25fps with dips into sub 20fps. So the fact that it's running on Switch 2 at all is a bit of a minor miracle. A miracle no doubt assisted by NVidia's better upscaler and RT efficiency

But yeah, outside of some of the more landscape scenes and especially when you were in close quarters it looked pretty rough. Lots of noise on characters in particular. Probably not the platform to play this game on. But as a tech demo it's not bad