Nintendo’s Playing the Long Summer Announcement Game

It’s been a peculiar summer for video game announcements and the reveal events in which they’ve taken place, though it’s not an unprecedented one. With E3 2022 not happening, announcements are being made individually through smaller events like the Summer Game Fest and assorted digital events held by publishers and hardware manufacturers. They’re not all happening within mid-June but throughout all the summer months, with Nintendo being the most unusual about this format.

Nintendo skipped having the usual lengthy E3 Nintendo Direct that tends to be full of announcements, despite having plenty to show for their upcoming lineup this fall and beyond, despite the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild being delayed to spring 2023. But their plans have become clearer in the last week: They’re going to stretch the E3 Direct across the whole damned summer.

The fun kicked off with the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Direct last Wednesday, which outlined most of the game’s features. It will occur in the same universe as the previous games and will include a beautiful world to explore, one perhaps on par with the large zones in its numbered predecessor. The purposes of most playable characters were outlined, this time coming with designs noticeably less horny than those from the second game despite having the same designer (Masatsugu Saito). There were elements blurred out in the menus to prevent spoilers, though it will be interesting, and perhaps welcome to a portion of the audience, if no Nopon character will be among the main party. The game appears to be pushing the Switch to its limits presentation wise, performance slightly be damned, but it looks as if it could be as good as the previous game.

That’s as quick of a rundown of the Direct I can give, as someone who’s yet to play Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and thus can’t articulate all the features being kept or changed for the third game in detail. (I’m hoping to make my way through the second game in the next month and the expansion later in the year, but there’s no chance I’ll have them finished before this game arrives.) This Direct was a nice primer ahead of the game’s July 29th arrival, moved up from the original September date provided with the reveal in February.

The newest part of Nintendo’s Summer of Fun was a Nintendo Direct… Mini: Partner Showcase. It had been nearly two years since the last third-party-driven Partner Showcase, to the point that plenty of fans thought they couldn’t possibly come back when one was rumored to happen over the weekend. The last time one happened, though? October 2020, close enough to the last E3-deprived summer in 2020. This summer is a lot like that one, so this should have been expected. The Direct was, well, directly uploaded to YouTube, but contained enough good announcements that I wonder if it could have been livestreamed.

The Direct was full of ports and titles already announced, but still made for an entertaining time. Among them was NieR: Automata The End of YoRha, the ultimate edition of the game originally released for PlayStation 4 and Steam in early 2017 that will come with a bunch of new outfits. Dragon Quest Treasures was also revealed, an action RPG that very visibly used to be a new Dragon Quest Monsters games that will release on December 9th. Square Enix also announced a new game known as Harvestella, a game with mixture of life simulation content and combat that makes it resemble Rune Factory with a bigger budget. Between these and Live A Live, the only Nintendo-published game on the Direct that also received a demo and Treehouse presentation, there was a lot of Square Enix here.

This was apparently so much that it explains why the bound-to-happen port of Tactics Ogre Reborn didn’t appear after its listing popped up too early on the PlayStation Store a couple of weeks ago. There’s no way it will skip the system Square Enix just released a strategy RPG on, perhaps, so this one will have to wait.

Not to say there weren’t other cool announcements, like for the Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection, which will include every version of every mainline Mega Man Battle Network game. Return to Monkey Island was also revealed, the art style of which is dividing fans as badly as other recent Monkey Island remakes. Sonic Frontiers looks a bit better than initial showings suggested, but not by much yet, and they have no intention of delaying it. There was even a remake of Pac-Man World known as Pac-Man World Re-Pac.

The “big” announcement was saved for last: Persona 5 Royal, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 3 Portable are all coming to Switch. Sure, they’re ports, but were “big” in the sense that people have been begging for the older Persona games to come to Switch for years, particularly after Persona 5’s Joker made his way into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. This seriously intensified in the last couple of weeks when they were announced for Xbox platforms before Nintendo ones. The logic was that they were being saved for the next Direct, which panned out. Royal will release on October 21st, the same date as the ports to the Xbox platforms, PlayStation 5, and Steam. But the other ports will release in only digital forms sometime next year.

Nintendo’s fun should continue through the rest of the summer, because we’re overdue for a Direct that shows a slate of upcoming Nintendo-published titles. It would be nice to get another look at the BotW sequel, but it would be a good time to confirm news like a release date for Bayonetta 3, the new Fire Emblem game with a protagonist whose hair is apparently branded by Pepsi as seen through leaked screenshots, and those sure-to-be-true rumors about a Metroid Prime remaster (being sold separately!), among other stuff. That has to be coming soon, but let’s not undermine the good announcements we’ve received thus far. You can’t say Nintendo doesn’t know how to keep their audiences satisfied just enough these days.