Nintendo Direct weeks are always fun! (Thoughts on the Nintendo Direct 2.9.22)

     Hey friends, I hope you're doing well this week, I know that I am, because we just got confirmation this morning of the new Nintendo Direct tomorrow that will be 40 minutes long. It's not a full hour, but 40 minutes is a lot of time to relay a good amount of news! I'm not hoping for anything major, but they said we would get more news on games coming in the first half of 2022, so we will most likely get more information on Kirby and the Forgotten Land, as well as Splatoon 3 and the remakes for Advance Wars 1 and 2. I hope we'll get news on something new or weird, but I'm not holding my breath for Zelda Breath of the Wild 2 or Metroid Prime 4 news, but we can always hope! I'm writing this little intro the day before the direct, so I can't say anything about the actual event, but I am really excited, but also trying not to get my hopes up, since it is only February. Either way, let's fast forward to tomorrow afternoon and write about the things we get from it!

The Direct Cometh!

    Okay so wow, that was quite the direct, I must say! There were pretty incredible announcements and I'll get right into it! The show started off with a trailer for Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, which is another Warriors-esque game, which seems to be a thing that Nintendo wants to keep going with Koei Tecmo, as Legend of Zelda and Fire Emblem have both gotten two games of this type now (unless you count Hyrule Warriors's three separate releases as three different games). It looks pretty cool, and I like that it looks to be based around Three Houses which came out a few years ago. It's coming out June 24, so we still have a little while to wait for it. Next up, we got another trailer for Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, along with the release date of April 8. I really like the animated style that WayForward went with for this game, it makes the characters pop, especially compared to how it looked on GBA and DS. This has never really been the type of game that I'm a huge fan of, but I'm excited for fans of the originals! After this, we got the announcement of... No Man's Sky. Honestly I'm just surprised that it's coming to Switch after all this time, and more interestingly, this didn't mention anything about being a Cloud Version! I'm not going to play it on Switch, if I wanted to play it, I would probably do it on PS4, but it's cool that Switch owners will be able to play it if they want to. The announcement of Mario Strikers: Battle League was one that I never thought I would see! Mario Strikers has been gone since the Wii version, Mario Strikers Charged which came out 15 years ago, but I'm so happy to see it back here. The additions seem pretty cool with a new gear system to upgrade your team's abilities as well as choosing the team colors based on the captain of the team. It looks so weird to see Mario wearing Waluigi's colors, but it is a cool aesthetic change. It looks like it's going to be a fun time when it comes out in June, and let's hope they've learned from the online from Mario Party: Superstars. This first part of the direct ended with a long demonstration of Splatoon 3's version of Salmon Run, a co-op horde mode that was added in Splatoon 2. This time around they're adding some boss fights to the proceedings, which is cool, but again, Splatoon isn't really my cup of tea. It's cool, and I'm happy for people that like it, but I'm not a huge fan of shooters. It's set for a Summer release though, so hopefully fans won't have too much longer to wait for their next batch of "inky-splatty" goodness.

    The second batch of highlights kicked off with remakes of the first two games of the Front Mission series, the first one coming out this summer. I've never even heard of these games, but they're Tactical RPGs, so I have to assume that some people are really excited to play those. A Disney-Pixar kart racing game was announced as a free to play game coming this summer. It's called Disney Speedstorm, so I'm somewhat interested in that at least. It looks like the characters reuse the designs from Disney Infinity, so at least it lives on in some small way! Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Assassin's Creed: The Ezio Collection, and SD Gundam: Battle Alliance were announced as remasters of older games that are all coming out relatively soon. I can't say anything about SD Gundam, but I really loved playing The Force Unleashed back on Xbox 360, and the three Ezio games (Assassins Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations) were probably the highest point of the entire Assassin's Creed franchise, so it's good that those are all being put on Switch. The next reveal was a remaster of PS1 RPG classic, Chrono Cross. I've never played this game, but I've heard it's something of a sequel to Chrono Trigger for SNES, and I know that many people love it. I'm happy that it's being put back into the hands of fans around the world after such a long time. It's also bundled with Radical Dreamers, which is apparently a text based adventure game that Chrono Cross was based off of. The full package is coming on April 7 as Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition. Kirby and the Forgotten Land got a new trailer following this, and honestly, every time they show me a new trailer, I am somehow even more sold than I was originally. This trailer showed off a new "Mouthful mode" where Kirby can inhale different machines and control them. Kirby is shown taking control of a car, a vending machine, a lightbulb, a traffic cone, and a few others. It looks like a crazy mechanic to be sure, but so is the ability to upgrade Kirby's copy abilities to become even more powerful than they already were, which was also shown off. I'm ecstatic for this game and I can't wait until it comes out on March 25. 

    The next sequence began with the MLB The Show 22, which is a new baseball game that's produced by Playstation Studios, but is now coming to Xbox and Switch, which is a weird phenomenon in itself. It's a baseball game, so if you like baseball, you might like this too, not much else to say about this one. The Kingdom Hearts Cloud versions are coming to Switch, and they'll be sold in one big pack as "Kingdom Hearts Integrum Masterpiece for Cloud," which is the only thing more baffling than the decision to make them cloud versions in the first place. Please play these games on anything else if you can, this sounds like the worst possible way to play them, and I say this as a huge fan of the series. Next, they showed a wild announcement with Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series. Klonoa and Klonoa 2 were great platformers from the PS1 era/ maybe early PS2, but these have both been remastered for modern consoles and I for one am very excited, and I'm almost certainly not the only one who will check these out on July 8th! Portal and Portal 2 are both coming to Switch as well, which is exciting, especially for folks who have never played them before. Truly, everyone should at least try them out, Portal 2 is an incredible puzzle game and builds beautifully on what was set up in the original, then adds more stuff on top. Live A Live, which is another game that I've never heard of, is being remade in the HD-2D style like Octopath Traveler, which is exciting for fans of JRPGs because apparently it's never been released outside of Japan! There are many different timelines and stories in this game, which looks pretty cool, I must admit! Wii Sports is back in rare form with Nintendo Switch Sports! Tennis, Bowling, and Chambara (sword fighting) are all back from previous titles, but they're also adding Soccer, Badminton, and Volleyball. Golf is going to be added in a patch sometime after the game is released on April 29th, but if you're interested in trying out Bowling, Chambara, and Tennis online, there will be an online play test from February 18-20. Next up in the announcement lineup was another Taiko Drumming game, called Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival. It looks like a fairly fun rhythm game with all the fun of playing a Taiko Drum without the drum. They announced a new demo for Triangle Strategy which will let you play until the end of Chapter 3 as well as updates to Metroid Dread, adding a one-hit mode for hard core players and a Rookie Mode which will give more health to newer players. They're also adding a new Boss Rush mode which is coming in April with another free DLC. Cuphead's long awaited DLC, The Delicious Last Course, is finally coming on June 30th, which looks fantastic as the original game was!

    In what may have been the biggest announcement of the day for at least a large percentage of people, Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings are both added to the SNES and NES Switch Online apps. I love Earthbound a lot, I've played through it only twice I think, but I'm really excited to try out Beginnings, which was released in Japan as Mother 1. No release of Mother 3, of course, but that's to be expected at this point. We got a sizzle reel of games here towards the end, nothing incredibly interesting as far as I can tell. Zombie Army 4 Dead War, which is actually pretty fun, but it's been out for a while on other consoles, GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon looks like a pretty stylish sidescrolling ARPG from Konami, amazingly. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles wins the award for longest title I've ever heard, and looks to be a pretty standard fighting game based on the Demon Slayer anime, though it's impossible to tell if that's the case, Lego Brawls was next in the sizzle reel, it looks to be a side scrolling fighting game, maybe in the vein of Smash Bros. though I think this was an Apple Arcade title. The Sizzle reel was wrapped up with Two Point Campus, a college running simulator in the same vein as Two Point Hospital.  Mario Kart had... some news, not Mario Kart 9 like I was hoping for, but a new set of remastered tracks for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe that will be coming from other games in the series. They will be releasing Eight maps at a time and eventually will add 48 more tracks to the game by the end of 2023, which is a whole lot of content that you can get for $24.99 if you wanted all of it. In the first wave of new tracks, we're getting Coconut Mall from Mario Kart Wii, Choco Mountain from Mario Kart 64, and Tokyo Blur from Mario Kart Tour (which is the mobile game) along with 5 others. The first post is coming March 15. I really wish we were just getting some news about Mario Kart 9, but this is a huge undertaking and I'm sure owners of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe will love it. The final announcement finally arrived after 40 minutes of Nintendo Direct goodness, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is coming out in September. I haven't played much of Xenoblade in the past, but I've heard really great things about the first two games as well as X, which came out for the Wii U.

    It's an exciting time for the games industry as a whole, but as a big Nintendo fan, I am especially excited for some of these titles, with my favorite ones probably being Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Mario Strikers Battle League, and I'm curious to play Klonoa and Chrono Cross after hearing so much about those games! They talked about so many different games that it's hard to talk about all of the different developments here, but I'm pretty excited about what we'll see in the near future! 

    Sorry that this was such a long post, but there was a lot of stuff to cover. Thanks so much for all the support as always, and I hope you're having a good week! Are you excited for any of these games that they talked about today? I hope there were at least a few games that caught your interest as well, like I said, I'm excited for some of this stuff. I'm also really excited for their next presentation which will probably take place in July if previous years are things to go off of. February isn't normally a time to get all the crazy news out, so I'm especially excited to see what they consider bigger news, and hopefully we'll get more information on the sequel to Breath of the Wild which is supposed to be coming out this year! Until next time, friends, I'm Jonathan, your Self-Proclaimed Nintendo Fan, and I'll talk to you again soon.