So, let's talk about that Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase.

Ahh, Nintendo. They're definitely the strangest company in the gaming industry. If you think you figured out their plans, they'll pull off a u-turn that you won't expect. This is one of those times.

Basically, June was the busiest month within gaming. Tons and tons of announcements from the Summer Game Fest, that Microsoft Showcase, and that Sonic Central showcase that we don't talk about. We expected Nintendo to do a Direct within the middle of June, but that turned out false. And then we heard leaks and rumors that there was gonna be one on the 29th. Obviously, that was a day off, and it was entirely focused on third-party games for the system.

How was it...

It was surprisingly better than I thought.

Basically, these Partner Showcase when they began in 2020 had huge negative feedback. Thankfully, when the last one came on October of that year, they actually managed to turn the ship around, and it turned out fairly decent.

This one however, managed to make the past Partner Showcases look lacking compared to this one. And it had games that interested me a bit. Let's see what they had to offer in this Showcase:

Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak

Okay, I'll be honest here, Monster Hunter is that game series where I don't have a strong opinion on. I mean, it looks alright, has a good art style, but yeah, it's nothing that got me jumping out of my chair. But there's people who are looking forward to it, so I don't have anything against it, just not my cup of tea.

NieR:Automata The End of YoRHa Edition

Now this is an interesting announcement. NieR:Automata is that one game that was very popular back in 2017. I can see why it got popular (😏), but let's not get into that. It looks pretty cool, it's also nice to see that they're also bringing every DLC to the Switch version (hopefully they do the same with the other consoles as well). So yeah, cool announcement.

Super Bomberman R 2

I'm not buying what looks like the same fucking game. Nice try, Konami.

Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection

Mega Man is another game that while admittedly is kinda fun to play, I didn't really sucked much time into it, but it's nice that Capcom is doing collections of Mega Man games (even though it'd be as smart to do new entries to the series while also doing collections of old entries).

Pac-Man World: Re-Pac

Behold, the announcement that made the Partner Showcase frickin' great. Now, I'll be real here, Pac-Man representation on the Switch is admittedly too much. There's more Pac-Man games on Switch than on the other consoles, and that's not even counting the exclusives, collections, and re-releases, and this is one of them, but this is a series that was long forgotten from Bandai Namco, and there was a bit of a cult following of the game, including the second and third entries of the series. Regardless, I'm happy that a long forgotten game is being brought back to consoles for the new generation of gamers.

Return to Monkey Island

This one I admittedly wasn't excited for. It's not because of the art style or anything. It's more because I never grew up playing this game franchise. From the research I did, the original game was created by LucasArts that was PC exclusive (which doesn't surprise me because there were so much game exclusives on PC even before Steam was a thing). And until 2010, the other games (new and remade) were developed by many other studios until Disney bought Lucasfilm (LucasArts' parent company) in 2012 and the series went silence (including LucasArts itself) because Star Wars was making Disney, Lucasfilm, and EA the big bread in the bowl. Wouldn't be until 2021 Disney and Lucasfilm decided to revive LucasArts, now Lucasfilm Games, and it seems they're now reviving their old game franchises for the new generation, and Monkey Island was one of them. So yeah, there's your simplistic history of Monkey Island, let's get to the next game.

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope

Nope.avi

Sonic Frontiers

 

 

We live in a timeline where Sega's former gaming competitor did a better showcase of Sonic Frontiers than any of the marketing we got prior to this. I was originally going to make an article about this situation, but I'll simplify it for this occasion. What should've been a great marketing push to show what it offers, instead we got an IGN First with 7 minutes of Sonic running in a realistic world doing... nothing. We then got another gameplay footage of Sonic fighting robots, again, not showing off any kind of highlight that makes it different than the other open world games in the market. And then we were told that this was some kind of early build Sega gave to IGN to preview, and they even had the audacity to say that we didn't understand it, even though they barely showed anything about Frontiers until the Direct Showcase that happened.

This is going off the rails, anyways. This trailer showcases the main thing that Sonic will be doing, and it's where while he's in the open-world zone, he finds these temples that takes him to Cyberspace levels that gives him keys to progress in the game. And... yeah it sounds lame, and it's also spot on with what Zippo said back on June 10th (18 days before the Mini Showcase). But overall, it's a hell of a lot better than the IGN First gameplay footage.

Persona series coming to the Switch

And that's what the Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase had to offer. In conclusion, pretty good. And I'll see you all next time.