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06/18/2024: The Summer Nintendo Direct

(Warning: Nothing major beside spoilers for today's Nintendo Direct and that there might be some grammar and spelling errors as I have been up for over 20 hours.)

It’s that time of the year again; it’s time the Nintendo Direct, the famous online presentation that Nintendo give out 2 to 3 times a year. Now while there was one back in February, it was a Nintendo Partners’ Direct instead, which means it only showcased 3rd party games. As result, the event was smaller and not as exciting, compared to the regular Direct. And since none of the 3rd party games they announced for the Partners’ Direct interest me, I decided to skip out on it.

Then in the last few months, Nintendo has been doing questionable things that make me not like them as much. Questionable things such as shutting down the Switch emulator (and their forked copycats) on GitHub in March, turning off Internet services for the 3DS and the WiiU in April, taking down all the Nintendo characters in Gary’s Mods, a few weeks later and just last month, announced that they were ending support for Twitter on the Switch in June (people said it was Twitter’s fault as they starting pricing the API code, which allowed integration in the first place). All of these things (and hearing other terrible gaming news), makes me second doubt on liking Nintendo to the point that I might’ve suffer an autistic burnout from it.

But thankfully on May 7th, the CEO of Nintendo made three announcements that brought my faith back into liking the franchise (just by a bit). The first one is that there will be a Nintendo Direct this month as it’ll be nearly a month since Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has been out and that Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, the last main game that they announced in the last Nintendo Direct, is about to come out.

Then the second (and the biggest) announcement is that the rumored successor to the Switch is REAL and it’s coming out right before the end of March 2025, which is the end of the financial year for businesses! I know people keep hyping on the successor for a long time as it’s been 7 years since the Switch came out and the console is starting to show its’ age due to how slow it runs some of their newer games. But prior to confirming it’s real, there’s been reports that the successor was supposed to come out later this year, but they pushed it back to next year to prevent Christmas rush from happening.

Then the third announcement is that even though the Switch successor is real…they’re not going to announce it in this month’s Nintendo Direct, which annoyed some. Despite that, people knew there’s a catch on announcing the successor as they know that Nintendo rather wait until September/October as they like to wait at least 6 months before release day to officially name the successor, what it looks like and how much it’s going to cost.

Since the big announcement, everyone started hyping up on the Nintendo Direct more than they had since last fall’s Direct, when they announced The Thousand-Year Door remake. Of course everyone knows if you hype it up too much, you’ll be left disappointment at the end. So in order to prevent that from happing to me, I tend to keep my expectations very low in order to not disappoint myself if the presentation didn’t give me what I want.

Thankfully I was awake at 9am when Nintendo Direct aired and man, they threw some punches! Like the first thing they announced was a new Mario and Luigi game! I was shocked that they would bring the series back since it would be the first new Mario and Luigi game in 9 YEARS since the studio that used to make the series, AlphaDream shut down in 2019 due to poor sales from their last game (which was a remake of their third game)!

Now, I only saw a LP (Let's Play) of the first two games and have an emulation of the first game on my laptop that I haven’t touch yet (but I might because of this announcement) and that I never got attached to the series compared to Super Mario RPG. But I know that there’s people on the Internet who grew up with the Mario and Luigi series and were starting to get nostalgic for them as of late. So the new game will be perfect for them.

Then I saw that Donkey Kong Country Returns is getting a Switch port. That there’s a new Mario Party game that have 2 boards from the first 2 games. That we’re finally get to play as Zelda in her own “game” (as Nintendo refuse to acknowledge the two CDi games where Zelda was a playable character) for once and it’s using the same art style from remake version of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which came out in 2019!

And that Metroid Prime 4 is real and it’s coming out next year! Now while I haven’t played the Prime series, I heard that Prime 4 has been in development hell for 7 years and at one point, it had to start over from scratch! Now Metroid fans can sleep a little better now knowing that the game has finally a release window and just right before the Switch 2 comes out!

But the biggest surprise that came out from the Direct for me is that Capcom has announced that they are releasing the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection for the Switch on Sept. 6th. This is a big deal for the Ace Attorney fandom as not only the first Ace Attorney Investigations (a spin-off game that has you play as the fan favorite prosecutor Miles Edgeworth) is getting a remaster, but the sequel, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is FINALLY getting an official English release as it was never release outside of Japan after 13 YEARS!!!! It’s because of that, if you wanted to play the highly praised sequel prior to today's announcement, you have to play a fan translation of the game from the Internet.

But now the downside of the official release is that Capcom have to give the characters that appear in the second game new English names, which upset those who played the fan translation version. And some of the new names they gave to the characters are…questionable and people are already complaining about it! I know that it's been 8 years since I last saw the LP of the Ace Attorney Investigations 2, so I can understand why some are upset over the change. But we knew it was going to happen sooner or later. So, you can say that there's a "catch" in the second game finally getting an offical English release. But at least there's good memes coming out of this.

Other highlights that I can think of is that Hello Kitty Island Adventure has finally escaped Apple Arcade jail by coming to the Switch next year. That Dragon Quest 1-2 is going to have a HD-2D remake that will come out next year after Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D. That Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics is bringing seven, well liked games to the Switch, which made fighting game fans happy. That Horizon: Zero Dawn is getting a Lego version of their video game and Stray is coming to the Switch later this year.

Overall, this was a pretty good Nintendo Direct, which is surprising because many thought Nintendo was going to announce more remakes and remasters of their old games as the Switch is heading towards the end of its life cycle. But it’s nice to see that Nintendo has a few more tricks up their sleeves as we draw closer to the Switch 2 announcement date.

Out of all the games, I’m interested in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, Hello Kitty Island Adventure and Ace Attorney Investigations Collection. Too bad I’m broke due to having no job or income. Oh well, I’ll just watch a Long Play of some of the games instead when they eventually come out.

At least this will keep Nintendo fans occupied for a while as we wait for the day the Switch 2 is announced. And hopefully Nintendo won't do anymore questionable choices for the rest of the year that will cause fans to hate them once more. Only time can tell on that one...