E3 2015 - Nintendo

Nintendo's now standard digital event at E3 has gone from quirky to downright farcical as Iwata, Miyamoto and Reggie are recreated in terrifying Muppet form for their first appearances at this event. As the three step in front of the cameras they begin a horrific mutation into Peppy, Fox and Falco from the Star Fox games.
I understand this is drawing reference to Miyamoto's influence from the Thunderbirds puppets when creating Star Fox but it's a rather early signifier of Nintendo's loss of direction this E3.

Nintendo's comedy-infused videos have set them apart from competitors and have often been well-received but now it seems they've stepped too far into cheesy and lazy reference humour without any actual games to back it up. Iwata and Reggie even turn to Fox and goad him into doing a barrel roll...y'know? because internet memes...

You've gone too far now Nintendo, this is just sick...

A trailer begins for Star Fox Zero and whilst some of the environments appear visually polished, Fox's actual ship and a lot of the enemy spacecraft look surprisingly poor graphically. The gameplay itself seems to have all the space-battle maneouvres and functionality fans have wanted since the N64 version so no immediate concerns there. A new addition is that your ship can morph into a ground-based mech walker for slightly different shooting, looking like some kind of robot chicken.

I'm guessing some guests last year gave them that idea...

Next comes a documentary developer story where Miyamoto explains his inspiration for StarFox. "When you see an arch, you want to go under it right? That's the kind of game i wanted to make." I don't know if it's just the Japanese shrine backdrop but i feel like he's talking in abstract indecipherable metaphors, or maybe i just hope so. "Star Fox is a game where you use a control stick" ...I'm going to assume for everyone's sake there's something just lost in translation here.

Star Fox Zero has multiple vehicle forms besides the chicken-walker including the Landmaster tank and a gyro-copter drone supposedly giving the game significantly more replayability despite all forms appearing to fire the same kind of lasers.

There's also camera control with the gyroscopic sensors in the Wii U gamepad which are hopefully optional and besides pulling the control stick down to ascend, like games have been doing to simulate plane flight for years, there's sadly little else that really stands out about Star Fox Zero. It's currently scheduled for a holiday 2015 release.

A mercifully non-muppet Reggie talks to us about Nintendo's theme of transformation this E3 whilst standing in front of a massive wooden staircase, implying he's been transformed to about the size of a Pepsi bottle. He continues by talking about Mario Maker which if you were understandably indifferent to before, i recommend you watch the finals of Nintendo's World Championships this year. 

"Cosmo" was one of the finalists, this wasn't featured in Cosmopolitan magazine...I checked...

You'll see some professional speedrunners demonstrating the kind of insanity you can actually create with the game. I've admittedly been swayed by this into believing Mario Maker will be a very creative, expressive, maddeningly challenging and ultimately fun game considering what initially looked like just a level editor.

Next comes an interview with a developer from Skylanders: Superchargers who're collaborating with Nintendo to bring in new Donkey Kong and Bowser Amiibo's that work with the game. Skylanders being a kind of racing shooter and third person action game it seems, so really this is an entire segment devoted to two DLC characters.

Following a horrible cringey masturbatory and pointless clip of muppet Nintendo bigwigs dancing to the invincibility theme of Super Mario Bros, we're introduced to The Legend Of Zelda: Triforce Heroes.

This looks like a modernised Four Swords on 3DS but with three different coloured Link characters instead of four. All the standard Zelda action, platforming and puzzles are there, except now you can wear different outfits for different abilities and stand on each other's heads. Autumn (Fall) 2015 we're told whilst another developer interview about Triforce Heroes promotes its new focus on co-op, multiplayer and fashion...

An exasperated guy in the unproductive brainstorming session is now deeply regretting his half joking suggestion of Link in drag...

The same developers go on to promote Hyrule Warriors: Legends. A 3DS version of the Hyrule Warriors game on Wii U, whose trailer was already leaked ahead of E3 along with its Wind Waker exclusive characters. Following this comes said trailer for said game releasing early 2016. For those unaware Hyrule Warriors is essentially Dynasty Warriors with Zelda characters, fighting huge hordes of enemies with specific character abilities and weapons.

Does anyone else feel like they're padding this out? I mean I'm actually interested in Hyrule Warriors on 3DS, and yet we're 20 minutes into this conference/event and nothing new really noteworthy or impressive has appeared.

Speaking of unimpressive, Muppet Iwata force pushes Reggie to the floor for some reason and a trailer appears for Metroid Prime: Federation Force and "Blast Ball" A 3DS shooter similar to Metroid Prime: Hunters but with less story and creativity. A large component of this seems to be a football game where you shoot a gun to propel the ball into the goal.

No one asked for this...

I don't care if this next bit sounds harsh but that's fucking Pong. That's literally just the modern equivalent of Pong with a loosely connected franchise slapped on the branding as if taunting the many fans who are still waiting for an actual Metroid game. Nintendo keep bringing in memes, Robot Chicken and Mega64 to make them seem relevant and relatable but it's shit like this that undoes it all and paints them as completely out of touch with both their fans and modern game advancements.

A mostly cutscene and CG trailer for Fire Emblem Fates is next, following on the success of Awakening and personally i fear unable to live up to it. Another trailer plays almost entirely in Japanese, down to the title, with no further explanation given by developers or subtitles or anything so i don't know for certain what game this even is.

Discussions with peers have lead me to think it might be the Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei crossover, since we see a character described as Chrom (From Fire Emblem: Awakening) and "Parallel Universes" mentioned. I haven't played the SMT games but the theory is strengthened by modern day characters fighting alongside Fire Emblem's knights and sorcerer types. Still, it would've been nice to get any kind of explanation rather than another vignette of Iwata with a bunch of bananas.

Is it just called "FE"? Is it an acronym for Fire Emblem? Then who are the other people with flower powers and J-pop careers? Why was there about 5 seconds gameplay in a 2 minute trailer?

The next mostly CG trailer is for Xenoblade Chronicles X due 4th December this year, which is the most impacting part of the trailer since they've been teasing this game for three years running now.

Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer is our next trailer. A 3DS game due 25th September 2015. Supposedly transforming the obsessive compulsive gardening gameplay into interior design...So if you like that kind of thing, go nuts i guess.

Oh and another Animal Crossing game for Wii U called Amiibo Festival but that's just Mario Party/Monopoly with mass coin collecting, a different skin and quaint anecdotes instead of minigames. Holiday 2015 if you desperately needed to play Mario Party with more anthropomorphism.

Nintendo directly equating money to happiness here...

Next we hear from Nintendo's yarn specialist working on Yoshi's Woolly World who promises a perfect balance between challenge and fun with plenty of replayability, co-op functionality and of course yarn plushie Yoshi amiibos. Again the most prominent aspect of the trailer being a release date of October 16th 2015.

More stupid dancing clips from the muppets and a trailer for a derivative Pokemon-style game called YokaiWatch available holiday 2015.

Following this is a trailer for a 3DS crossover title involving the Mario and Luigi 3DS games and Paper Mario RPGS, telling me that Nintendo's theme of E3 has more evidence of being "Parallel Universes" than "Transformation". Regardless both games have a solid following with a strong comedic writing style so this mash-up titled Mario & Luigi Paper Jam could in fact be fruitful. That is, by spring 2016 anyway.

Was the world crying out for another Mario Tennis game? Well tough shit you're getting one anyway. "Ultra Smash" on Wii U will flop flaccidly into stores holiday 2015.

Another developer interview promotes Mario Maker and explains how Miyamoto and his team used to draw all the courses on graph and tracing paper. We see the ideas behind the very first Mario levels and how well-designed they are. No question there but it's increasingly irrelevant to today's proceedings and doesn't help the criticism that Nintendo is forever stuck in the past.

We're so lost as to what innovation is we're demonstrating how tracing paper works...

Appropriately Reggie finishes by reminiscing about Nintendo's glory days under the guise of celebrating Mario's 30th anniversary. It's unnecessary to be nostalgic in the digital event Reggie, 90% of these games were only made by fucking nostalgia. He goes on to claim there's a little Mario in all of us, making us sound infected rather than blessed.

The grand finale is then a montage of fan-made Mario videos, including children indoctrinated from a young age, people playing Mario tunes of a variety of different instruments and a horde of white Marios chasing a single black Mario through a car park corridor (I'm not even joking).

Super Mario: Plantation Getaway coming Spring 1876.

And that's it. That's actually it. Even without comparing Nintendo's event to the other conferences i would struggle to call this even a mediocre showing. The bare minimum amount of innovation and effort on display throughout, full of cheesy, pandering or simply irrelevant filler to make up for a lack of content and a repeating of footage and news that was already made public before the event. One of the weakest showings by Nintendo for years and already i see publications taking their Muppet personas as a literal metaphor for their incompetence.

Besides a handful of decent 3DS titles and the now over-promoted Mario Maker,
this was a disappointing showcase by Nintendo.