Nintendo Direct time again! (June 18, 2024)

    It's official! We're getting another Nintendo Direct tomorrow morning, as was reported a few weeks ago by Furukawa, the current President and CEO of Nintendo. We didn't know anything about the date until this morning (June 17), so before this, I'm going to do a bit of speculation on what we can see in the showcase tomorrow. For starters, it's going to be a tricky one, we know that the successor to the Switch is being announced in this fiscal year, but there's reportedly going to be nothing about that in the presentation tomorrow. The presentation is going to be 40 minutes long, so we will have 40 minutes of Switch game footage, which apparently they'll have, but who knows what it will be! As always, it would be amazing to get a remaster of Kid Icarus Uprising or a new Kirby game, we could get Wind Waker HD or Twilight Princess HD, but if nothing else, we will almost certainly get some final information about Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, which is slated to come out in less than 2 weeks. Let's hope that we get some interesting announcements tomorrow!

Wow, that was a lot!

    Okay, first of all, I got nothing right in my very few predictions above, which is fine, because what we got was pretty nuts to be honest. We started off this direct with Mario and Luigi: Brothership, the first Mario and Luigi game to come out since Paper Jam in 2015, as well as the first game in the series to come out for the Switch. It should be said that AlphaDream, the studio behind this series, went out of business a few years ago, so it's a little up in the air as to who is developing this new title, but from the first bits of gameplay, it looks very true to those older titles. It's coming out on November 7, so we don't even have too terribly long to wait for it! We saw some more of the Nintendo World Championships game coming July 18. They didn't have much else to show besides what we've already seen, but it looks like it could be a fun time, a bit different from the NES Remix titles from Wii U, but inspired by the same type of challenges. There were a lot of smaller announcements, such as a new free update for Among Us and Disney Illusion Island, both coming right after the show, but the next big title for me was Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. It's a remake of a Wii game, but that game was fantastic, and if we're not going to get a new Donkey Kong Country game this console generations, at least we can play both Tropical Freeze and Returns. It's unclear if there will be any new content added in the vein of "Funky Mode" from Tropical Freeze's Switch port, but they said it will include the levels that were added to the 3DS version of the game, if nothing else. They're making an HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest III which is coming out November 14, and then they're also remaking the first two games which will come out some time next year. I've never played any Dragon Quest games, but I know I've heard a lot of people talk about this project, and I'm very happy for them at least.

    There was a series for 3DS of eShop titles called "Denpa Men," and I don't remember much about them other than the fact that it used the Augmented Reality component of the 3DS Camera, but they're making The New Denpa Men which looks pretty cool. I didn't think they would keep making those, but they were pretty alright games from what I can remember, pretty standard dungeon crawlers. This one is going to be free to play, so it's worth trying out at least when it comes out on July 22. We got some new Nintendo Switch Online titles, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords, and Metroid Zero Mission for GBA, and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64 NSO app. They next announced a Marvel Vs. Capcom collection, which includes Marvel Vs. Capcom 1 and 2, along with X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super heroes, X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter, and The Punisher (which is a beat-'em-up). I am so excited about this, because truly any way you can play Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is going to be worth it, just such a fun game. They announced a new Mario Party game here, called Super Mario Party Jamboree. I'm a little concerned about it being called "Super Mario Party," since that game had to be played with the Joy-Cons and those controllers don't have the best track records for being functional as far as joy sticks are concerned. It looks like it'll be fun, though I am concerned about some of the gimmicks for boards, including one where it showed the players racing cars around a board. I was happy to see that Mario's Rainbow Castle is being included from Mario Party 1 along with Western Land from Mario Party 2. If nothing else, we did see a few different boards, leading me to believe that there are more than just 5 boards this time around. It's coming out on October 17, and I'm pretty excited for it!

    A new top-down Zelda game was introduced in the form of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. For the first time in a mainline Zelda game, you get to play as Princess Zelda herself! She's going to play very differently from Link, relying on an item called a Tri-Rod to make copies or "Echoes" of items that she encounters, as well as enemies that she's able to defeat. It looks like such a cool new idea, and I've been waiting for a long time to be able to play as the titular princess. We won't have to wait too long, since the game is coming out September 26! Capcom is putting out the Ace Attorney Investigations games in a collection, which I think means that all of the games from the Ace Attorney series have been rereleased. These two games feature Phoenix Wright's rival prosecutor, Miles Edgeworth, as the playable character, and it looks pretty cool! The collection is coming out on September 6. There were a lot of good looking titles that I'm not really looking forward to (like Romancing Saga 2's remake, which does look very nice), but the final announcement certainly caught my interest. Metroid Prime 4 is finally back after the project was announced to be restarted about 6 years ago now, and today we got our first look at actual footage for the game! It looks really nice, and we got the full title, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Not much was shown, but it is coming next year, which is pretty exciting to see any sort of footage about it!

    Nintendo Directs are always good, even if there's nothing in particular to be excited about, it's just nice to get some more news, but this one delivered. I think there's a good chance that this presentation was the last one to focus solely on the Switch, since the next one may introduce the next console as well as show some titles for it. With that in mind, they went out swinging on this console that was underpowered when it entered the arena over 7 years ago. I hope that all these titles are going to do well, I'm very excited for quite a few things that we saw, and I hope that I'm not alone in being excited for the future!

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends. Did you watch the Nintendo Direct this morning? I'd love to hear what your favorite announcement was. I know I didn't cover everything that was announced this morning, but the ones that caught my attention I just had to talk a bit about today. How exciting is it that we're finally getting a Princess Zelda game, huh? We've all been waiting for that for a long time, and I hope it pays off! I hope you're having a great week, friends, and thanks again for all of your support. Until next time, this is Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed games journalist, and I'll talk to you again soon!