Nintendo’s E3 presentations have perhaps the most distinct sense of company culture of any of the briefings. Just like their games, their E3 shows provide a refreshing break from the flash and violence of the rest of the expo (not that there’s anything wrong with flash and violence) to display something more humble, charming, and steeped in the heritage of the medium. Where Microsoft and Sony might leave you in awe, Nintendo is about heartwarming moments, and for that reason they’re usually good for a fun hour. This year they brought a mostly entertaining show, but I just wasn't feeling the games. They definitely came at it with a large number of titles, but many of these felt like niche releases, minor spin-offs to their most popular franchises, or titles we’d seen before. You assumed they were just working through all of this to get to the announcements that were going to make a big splash, but those announcements never came. Sequels to semi-obscure Japanese anime games and reworkings of existing popular titles are perfectly capable of being fun in their own right, but you can’t have a media briefing be all these kinds of games just like you can’t have a sandwich that’s all bread.

Nintendo at least had a lot of spirit in their format. In terms of the way they presented themselves, they knocked it out of the park. No one else had a press conference for which the first bullet point in my notes was “Puppets!!!?”. Seeing Iwata, Reggie, and Miyamoto as these outlandish comedy characters isn’t as surprising now as it was when they first started doing it and so this was a creative way to change it up. A big part of the fun was just in the way that the puppets moved. Another big positive for me was the amount of time Nintendo put aside to let developers of games talk about their creative process. This was a continuing theme from previous years and it’s often interesting to hear Miyamoto specifically speak because his games aren’t using the same cultural reference points that a lot of other game creators are using. He’s not pulling from Black Hawk Down and Scarface, he’s pulling from his childhood in the Japanese countryside and visits to temples.

If people are going to accept a new Star Fox, now seems as good a time as any to put that out there, although it’s probably worth mentioning that a lot of the reputation Star Fox has is because Star Fox 64 was doing things with 3D graphics that were ground-breaking at the time. Now however, we’re at an entirely different place technologically. The ability to transform the Arwing into a walker and participate in ground combat with it looks both enjoyable and hilarious. Not “Four is too many” hilarious, but still, pretty good. Of course, one reason this is a big deal is that it's a resurrected mechanic from the cancelled Star Fox 2. My major worry is that I don’t think it was made very clear exactly how the game will control in the demonstrations and while Star Fox Zero wasn’t a bad game to see, looking at how well Sony and Microsoft managed to open their conferences, this wasn’t hitting the same bar.

As a business decision the Skylanders Amiibos entirely line up. Nintendo need to get the Amiibos into more games and Skylanders is likely what inspired the toys in the first place, it’s just the kind of deal that you thought wouldn’t have come together on the business end. Of all the states I expected Metroid Prime to return in, the Federation Force game wasn’t one of them. I’m not quite sure I “get it”, the game wasn’t certainly doing anything for me graphically, but there was also nothing particularly offensive about it. There’s also generally the sense that all of Nintendo’s IPs are being milked for more spin-offs than ever before, for better or worse. You can definitely see it in what they’re doing with Animal Crossing now. The Happy Home Designer actually looks like something that you’d expect from The Sims rather than our aforementioned anthropomorphic slice-of-life game, but it looks like a strong fit for the series. Players want to decorate and enjoy decorating their homes in that franchise but even after so many entries there are still strong limitations in the ways you can do that which don’t apply in other games where you can play interior decorator. In Happy Home Designer there appear to be big fixes for that issue. I also think there’s potential behind the Animal Crossing board game interpretation Amiibo Festival. It looked just as cute and twee as you’d want it to and it was interesting to see a game in this style adding more explanation for why a character gains or loses currency when they land on a space. With a waning Mario Party this might be just the board game game Nintendo would benefit from putting out.

Speaking of which, Yoshi’s Wooly World still looks adorable. I don’t think the Amiibo skins for the Yoshis fit terribly well with the aesthetic, but it’s a game where coins are those fake gems you find in craft stores and you can hit baskets to get bundles of yarn to throw at enemies. That’s wonderful. I don’t understand anything that happened during the Yo-Kai Watch trailer so we won’t talk about that one. Next up was Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam. The Mario & Luigi games and Paper Mario series are not as popular as they once were so to put them together and have one united Mario RPG helps smartly consolidate fanaticism for both games into a larger whole. The two feel like a match not just because of their RPG cores, but also their comedic flavour. There’s another Mario Tennis game which it’s difficult to feel too excited about outside of the fact that we may get to see Waluigi in a game again. And then we hit our not so grand finale.

I think this moment here where Super Mario Maker became the closing game for Nintendo is a big part of what went wrong with this presentation. We know that Super Mario Maker is an amazing-looking game, and we knew that going into this video briefing because we’d already seen it at the Nintendo World Championship. People were blown away, it had the minds of both gamers looking to build and play levels buzzing, and if those levels had been shown for the first time alongside Miyamoto and Tezuka’s joyous and inspiring discussion of creating the original Super Mario Bros. maps on graph paper, the reaction would have been big. Instead, we saw this as a game we already knew about, very much enjoyed the stories while waiting for the show to move onto the next game, and then found ourselves mildly startled when it abruptly ended. Better luck next year Nintendo, I still liked your closing montage.