Nintendo Direct 6/18/24 at 7 AM PDT/10 AM EDT

[Pyoopi]

Okay after seeing the direct, I really like:

Mario & Luigi: Brothership
I miss AlphaDream so much and was so sad how they went bankrupt in 2019. I'm so happy to see this again as I love this art style a lot. I hope Yoko Shimamura will be composing the music in this game. I love her work so much.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure
I saw how Apple was gatekeeping it and hoped maybe it'd be released on Android. Now that it'll be released on Switch, I feel intrigued. I learned there is online co-op which this person on Twitter detailed:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1803112021665235164

I personally don't believe it'll be better than Animal Crossing. It looks a little clunky but I do like having the power to decorate my home and see what boundaries I can push in cutesy-wutesy games.

Super Mario Party Jamboree
I like this one but how many damn Mario Party games am I collecting at this point? It does looks really cool, fun and better than Mario Party Superstars. I love the maps and more playable characters. I think I could put this on the backburner for Christmas or something.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
And I really like this one too. It was definitely not on my radar. I really like how playful/silly this one looks.

I was just hoping I'd get Fantasy Life to play during fall+winter, now I am staring at three more games?? A true game hell.. good god, lol.

 

[Mr.Fox]

Quick scroll, so sorry if I missed anyone, but it didn’t look like anyone is hyped for Tales of the Shire? I guess I’ll be smoking my pipe weed alone then lol

I was happy with most of the reveals. I can’t turn down a Mario game, so M&L and Jamboree were a nice surprise…but I agree with the Mario Party burnout overall.

As much as I love DK games, not excited for another remake…especially that one. DKC 1-3 are top tier platformers. DKCR and Tropical Freeze, while enjoyable, ramped up the difficulty way too much for completionists, and made the games really tedious at times.

I like the Marvel/Capcom bundle, especially since it has The Punisher which was a great arcade game. Got my hopes up a little too high thinking the X-Men arcade game would’ve been there…still waiting on that and The Simpsons arcade game ports. Thankfully last year’s Cowabunga Collection got the TMNT arcade games off my checklist. It was an amazing bundle.

 

[Zane]

But truth be told, I don't know how to feel about the actual Echoes of Wisdom mechanic. The whole time I couldn't help but feel it was too gimmicky and clunky, and too...Animal Crossing-esque and Dragon Quest Builders-esque if that makes sense? Why can't Zelda just have a magical staff that makes things go ZAP and BOOM? Why does she and Princess Peach need to have a random little fairy companion?

I had a similar reaction to Echoes of Wisdom! I was initially very hyped (especially because I adore the Link’s Awakening art style) but I don’t know how I feel about the echo mechanic, especially being used for combat.. Zelda is shown being able to fight with magic in Smash Bros and is also shown with a sword in Twilight Princess so why does she need a weird wand? :U idk, I’ll have to see a lot more about the game before I decide to get it now.

 

[McRibbie]

• Mario & Luigi is back, somehow? The world reminds me a bit of Bowser's Fury a little bit. Like the artstyle enough but feel as if it's a bit too clean and bright for my tastes, haven't really bothered with the series much apart from Dream Team Bros. but I've enjoyed both Super Mario RPG and TTYD, so will probably pick it up.
• A very, very long time ago, I saw a datamine for Nintendo Switch Sports that had two sports that weren't in the game. Basketball, and dodgeball. However, once they did the "you can unlock catalogue items you've not unlocked before" update last March with the last lot of catalogue items, I assumed it was over, that they'd been scrapped and stopped playing once I'd unlocked the last catalogue items, so it was extremely surprising that it finally turned up in today's Direct. I knew the game went through some development hell, but this is a new level of development hell where you go completely silent on updates for over a year (admittedly, Switch Sports has simultaneously the best and worst utilisation of updates to me; the weekly unlockables always kept me engaged, but the updates felt the most like they were going "we'll finish this using updates" a Nintendo game has ever felt) However: rooftop b-ball! On top of one of the other buildings in Spocco Square! The one that used to house the "random" button, that's apparently got a little restaurant next to it? With a little minigame side-mode... this is really good, actually? Are they going to finally finish and release dodgeball this autumn in the building in the middle? Will they add free roam next to the train station? Unironically wild, I love it, probably gonna dig it out again and just screw around playing random sports sometime soon.
• however, I would like to say that with the announcement of the rest of the year's lineup, Nintendo has gone a full 2 years without putting out a new full-price game that uses the free update system now that we know what the rest of 2024 looks like. We're getting updates for 2 out of 3 games that came out that year that utilise it, but it seems like for the time being, they've stopped. Not entirely sure if they're gonna start again on the successor, tho.
• Donkey Kong Country Returns is one of those games Nintendo just can't stop porting, can it? It's come out on the Wii, the 3DS, the Wii U and the Switch now. Good to see the new levels that were added in the 3DS version are also there (if they could only do that for Yoshi's Wooly World, that'd be perfect), its HD scrub-up looks better than Luigi's Mansion 2, I'm probably gonna get this because I didn't get it on the Wii or 3DS but god, I really need to finish Tropical Freeze first.
• Four entire games for NSO Expansion pack, we're really eating well this month... and two of them ended up being foreshadowing for other titles in the Direct. They're not completely essential; one's the GBA port of LTTP with a multiplayer side mode, the other's the GBA remake of the first Metroid... but in terms of Nintendo's own stuff, a good portion of the GBA library's just ports. On the other hand, we've also got Perfect Dark, which is also getting a new entry in the near future (on Xbox, although the way things are going with them recently it's inevitably going to end up on other consoles) and Turok in the Western version of the 18+ N64 app that came out last December in Japan (their version also has Jet Force Gemini and Goldeneye on it). But no more roadmaps for either. N64 continues to be good on title variety (there's 15 more titles than both Wii or Wii U ever had, with more to come) but continually bad on emulation quality, GBA seems to have most of its memorable titles already and I don't think we're getting the titles I want the most for it (ie. Pokémon) until 2026 and the 30th anniversary... but we have absolutely no idea what's coming for each, which is simultaneously interesting and excruciating, imo. Hopefully the regular NES/SNES/GB drops also continue to happen a couple of weeks beforehand, because this year's been pretty good for NSO?
• after spending a good 6 years slowly but surely learning how to make Proper Mario Party again, I'm glad NdCube have finally done it. Not a huge fan of the setting or general vibe (it looks like the Mario theme park... come on guys, I thought we were moving past the era of Generic Mario! Get some costumes in there! Get a brand new character in there to MC! Give it the sauce) but there's a decent amount of boards (with a couple of older ones that didn't make it into Mario Party Superstars, clearly) with good concepts that affect things, a hell of a load of minigames, and as is now the norm for Mario Party, online multiplayer. One for the maybe pile.
• Finally, they answered the question "what if Zelda was a girl?". The combination of Link's Awakening remake-style visuals and gameplay with a load of stylistic and gameplay cues taken from BOTW and TOTK is genuinely interesting, and I love the idea of summoning furniture and even enemies to solve puzzles. Still need to finish TOTK, Link's Awakening and even Skyward Sword, tho (this is a recurring theme, do not let me buy video games)
• Metroid Prime 4 looks visually very good but it's very much a maybe, as it's the Nintendo version of Stuff That Isn't Really My Thing. If I play more of Prime Remastered and go "yeah, OK, this is good", yeah... but I've historically struggled to get into Metroid.
• Overall? The Switch's writing is so on the wall that Nintendo themselves have said they're going to announce the next console before the end of March 2025, and yup, the software output for 2024 sure reflects that, with basically nothing coming from Nintendo EPD themselves (aside from the last of the Splatoon updates, the Side Order DLC and the Surprise Return Of Nintendo Switch Sports). Eagerly anticipating the successor's announcement at this point, hopefully it's sometime in the next couple of months so that the next Nintendo Direct can talk about the launch year titles... hopefully there's an Animal Crossing game in there somewhere?
• also yeah, in some ways it's extremely reassuring to see nothing AC-related there. This time around we're definitely not waiting 7 or so years for the next game, that's gonna be a 5-6 year turnaround max. Next year at the earliest, 2026 at the latest.

 

[Doo]

I’m excited for Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Kind of depends on the price as to whether I’ll get it but I’m glad it’s not gonna be locked to a subscription anymore. I was really hoping it would come to switch, that was honestly the highlight of the direct for me The Denpa men game looks interesting - I’ll definitely try that out. I’ll say as someone who’s never played a Zelda game, this new one looks… more like a game I could understand how to play I doubt I’ll get it but it does look quite different so I wonder how that’ll go down with people.

 

[Chris]

I finally got around to watching this on my lunch break today.

Solid Direct. There were 6-7 titles announced that I'm interested in. I certainly won't buy them all (especially ones with close release dates) but it's good to be aware of them.

 

[DarthGohan1]

Really excited for the new Metroid Prime game, I've lost track of how long it's been since the last one... 15 or 20 years? Can't wait to play it.

Couple interesting games added to Switch online, I haven't played Metroid Zero Mission in forever, may have to give that a go.

Feels inevitable that we'll be getting a Switch 2 announcement at some point in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised with a 1st half of 2025 launch. If I had to guess... maybe March 2025?

 

[Snek]

I take what I said back. I am definitely looking forward to the new Mario & Luigi game. I thought AlphaDream went bankrupt so we wouldn't be getting them again.

 

[Louise_]

I may get the hello kitty island adventure looks good

 

[Romaki]

Very happy for my boy Miles. I still need to play Ace Attorney on my Steam account. I was hoping to maybe play the "Apollo trilogy" during Christmas break, but I think I'll play those games beforehand since that's the timeline anyway.

I hope that Hello Kitty game also comes to Steam. It's very cute and looks nice, not sure if I want it digitally on my Switch though. Ideally I'd either finish it on Steam or play it endlessly on my phone. I rarely play Switch on the go, it's mostly my AC and Pokémon console. Maybe Professor Layton too if it remains exclusive too.

I probably won't get the Zelda game. Very exciting to see her in the protagonist role, but it reminds me of the DS titles that I did not enjoy. The only Legend of Zelda titles I truly enjoyed were BotW and TotK, the other games were always rather meh for me. I'm sure they're amazing adventure titles, but I just need what those two games gave me.

 

[Kitsuragi]

i forgot to come here while it was streaming, ha

overall not a bad direct. mario & luigi look great. everything else looked okay, interested in hello kitty island adventure ^_^ i don't think ive ever seen my boyfriend as excited as when they finally showed prime 4, he looked like he was ready to eat the TV