Well I am actually writing this intro before a Direct was even announced (today is September 10). Because it’s pretty clear we’ll get a Direct this month at the same kind of time as every September in the last 8 years, and I assume 13 or 14 for the date of the Direct (*Edit: okay it was 14, let me update the title*).

There are rumors going for this one from Pyoro, one of the only “leakers” that has actually been somewhat trustworthy so far. Namely a DK game that SEEMS to be Mario vs DK-related… hopefully it’s not one of the Minis games and actually a return to the original MvD, which was a take on Donkey Kong 94. Then one for an F-Zero game, which he is heavily hinting at being F-Zero 99 (please no). And one that seems to be hinting at a remaster of the 2 Trace Memory games (the Wii one never came out in America), or at least a Wii game and a DS game that are linked somehow. And there’s no other leaker saying anything credible. Would be funny if this Direct was the one where Pyoro lost his credibility.

My true expectation is, of course, that even a bad Direct has one or two cool things, so in the end I’ll probably have some thing to be happy about here.

Well, let’s go and watch this Direct! These are live reactions as I’m watching the Direct.

IT IS TIME FOR THE GAMES OF THE YEAR 2022! I’m actually surprised at how good 2022 ended up being as far as games. There were a lot of good ones, so much so that I couldn’t play all the interesting ones. There was just no time. Not that all games were good, Sonic Frontiers and Return to Monkey Island exist, after all. But overall, there was plenty of good stuff.

So it is this time of the year where I can talk about all the great games I loved that came out that year. I usually do 6-7 GotY winners, one of which would be my grand TOP GotY choice, but I don’t know if I can do that this year.

I will also rant about the year as a whole, as usual, with a focus on the big 3.

There’s some games I was interested in during 2022 that I have yet to play, in case you’re wondering. Who knows if I’ll get to them, but if you think they’re really good and are sad they’re not named here, know that I probably hold no ill will against them, I probably just didn’t play it.

Amongst big games I haven’t played that could’ve had a chance: Digimon Survive (actually bought it but haven’t played it yet), A Plague Tale: Requiem, God of War Ragnarök, Horizon 2, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, Choo Choo Charles, Signalis, Soulstice, Sports Story… and many others. A lot of interesting games came out this year, was a bit hard to get to all of them.

So let’s go!

Click here to skip to the winners if you’re not interested in my inane rantings.

This was announced last year. It is Square Enix’s new HD-2D project after Octopath Traveler, also featuring a weird title.

I did play the first “test” demo for this one, but not the prologue demo which basically, IIRC, gets you through the first 3 chapters. I enjoyed the combat in that first demo, and I’m not sure much changed since (it has been a while), but I was decently hyped for the final product. I very much enjoyed Octopath, so I was pretty interested in seeing more of that.

So let’s go and see if it’s a good one!

One of the first few posts in this blog, after terminating my old blog The Save Points and starting JOBOCAN Game Reviews, was a reaction to the February Direct last year… So I figure… why not do it again? I’ve actually reacted to most “main” Nintendo Directs even though I wasn’t planning to, so I might as well keep it going. I haven’t been doing this for much else outside of E3 since the competition isn’t announcing or releasing anything, or doing fun events like this (and, when they do, they’re awful… Hi Playstation), but hey, at least Nintendo tries to be somewhat interesting.

I am writing this intro the day before the Direct, as I always do. I have no real predictions here. There are some weird rumors like a 1-2 Switch sequel, and TWO different Metroid Prime rumors that have been going on for years without anything happening (Prime Trilogy rumors being around since 2017, and those have transitioned into Prime 1 Remaster rumors more recently… pick a side, shitty fake leakers), but I’d say there’s nothing really good to latch on to that’s even slightly believable except the Batman one… which is extremely minor so who cares.

I don’t know what to expect beyond probably a bit of Splatoon 3 stuff since that’s probably coming out around E3 season, but otherwise, it could be anything. I am 99% sure Metroid Prime 4 won’t be there because it’s only been 3 years since it started development, so it’s not like it’s in hell status or anything, and I don’t think the BotW sequel will be there either as that will likely get a big E3-season blowout. So… Yeah, could be fun, might not be, I have no idea. There’s plenty it could be, but Nintendo is largely unpredictable. Like, last February’s Direct had 4-6 new first-party game announcements depending on how you count that. So there’s reason to believe they might do that again… but it’s Nintendo, they don’t do patterns, so they might not.

No idea if I’m actually gonna post this, we’ll see if I click the publish button after writing it. If I do post it… let’s go and watch this Direct!

My history with WarioWare is pretty limited. The only one I’ve played is a bit of the Wii one at a friend’s place, and otherwise I have purposely avoided the series. My reasoning was pretty simplistic: I liked Wario, specifically the Wario Land series, and saw this as a joke/insult to that series. Maybe it was undeserved, but I never “liked” WarioWare, despite never really playing it.

So this is my first WarioWare. I went into it with no idea if I’d like it. I do like this team’s other series, Rhythm Heaven, but I know they’re very different games. And this seems to be a pretty different take on WarioWare too.

So let’s go! I think this will be a short one.

Another one I dunno if I’ll post, we’ll see after the thing ends, see if I have any particularly big reactions or not. Or something to rant about like with the Playstation thingy where Sony had nothing to show. I will note I am writing this intro hours before the Direct starts.

There are rumors, but they’re very solid, because they literally come from Nintendo’s japanese website. Bayonetta 3 finally getting SOME real info would be solid, and I’m really curious about that Kirby game (Kirby Discovery of the Stars, I think that title is probably wrong). Outside of that leak, there’s lots of rumors for a new Xenoblade, I’m not putting a lot of stock into that one. And there’s some stuff like new systems added to NSO which… who cares, paying for online on a console is a scam.

I do have fairly low expectations overall for this Direct, but September directs always have some kind of big announcement. There’s definitely gonna be a bunch of stuff we already know about for some of the games coming out this year as well as some of the early-next-year stuff, the possibility of a Smash character reveal (though I could see that being later). We definitely won’t see Metroid Prime 4.

So it’s starting in a minute, let’s see if there’s something here, and after we’ll see if I’m even posting this. Let’s go!

Well I guess before I get to the Nintendo Direct, I’m gonna write my usual intro.

In-between my last post (the disappointing Squeenix direct) and this one, there’s been a few presentations, they weren’t good. Back 4 Blood got a bit presentation, it looks fine. PC Gaming Show was fairly boring but it had some interesting indies. The Future Games Show was pretty boring. Take-Two wasted everyone’s time with something WORSE than the Koch Media presentation. Capcom did nothing, might have been more useless than the Gearbox thing. Wow this E3 is bad.

And now it’s Nintendo’s turn. Literally only they can save this terrible E3. The bar is set so low.

Nintendo has a LOT of rumors going on. 2D Donkey Kong game by the Mario Odyssey team, a 3D Kirby, a 2D Metroid (this is a leftover rumor that ended up false last year lol), something Fire Emblem (so many different versions of this rumor), an exclusive RE game, new Mario Kart, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t recall because there’s so many fake rumors I can’t keep track. The big one is the Switch Pro… which won’t be shown in the Direct if it’s a real product Nintendo wants to release. I don’t know if any of those rumors will be true. The safe bet is to say they aren’t but some of them are certainly interesting and possible.

Outside of the rumors, there’s a lot of things we can assume will be there or not. BotW2 is almost definitely showing up though I believe it will only come out early next year. We’ll see at least one Smash character (maybe 2). Seems like we’ll see a new Monkey Ball, that got a real leak. Maybe we’ll see some Zelda 35th anniversary… stuff (I’m not counting on it). We’ll NOT see Metroid Prime 4. We’ll probably not see Bayonetta 3 but there’s a chance I guess. I don’t think we’ll see Splatoon 3. I don’t think we’ll see any Pokemon but there’s a small chance since there was no pre-E3 pokemon direct. Pikmin 4 has been “sort of” announced for years, a real announcement would be… a thing. And Nintendo generally does announce actual things at E3 so… I figure we’ll have one decently-big announcement maybe, whether it’s something from the rumors or not. After how bad the rest of this E3 has been, I’m not keeping my hopes up, but it would be hard for Nintendo to fail as hard as any of the other presentations.

As usual these are my “live” reactions to the event, I’m gonna edit those to make them readable and write overall thoughts at the end. The intro is written before seeing the show of course.

So anyways, let’s go. PLEASE Nintendo save this terrible E3. It really needs help.

Note: No I won’t do a post about the Treehouse stream, but I may talk about it in my “overall” E3 post after the event is over if there’s something shown there.

Last year E3 was skipped. Things were fine. There were a bunch of smaller events where games were announced, Nintendo took the great idea of waiting until the games were 2 months away from release before even announcing them (by randomly dropping the trailers on their youtube channel with no warning, which is great) which is WAY better than waiting years for any info, and a lot was delayed anyways on all fronts. As a result E3 showed itself to not be something that is needed anymore.

So E3 is coming back this year. Kinda? The ESA is gonna be running… something? On an app? People weirdly don’t know this, but the E3 presentations we watch on the internet aren’t actually E3 (they’re ran in separate buildings that are reserved by the game companies themselves, it just makes sense to have those running at the same time as actual E3 for some fan hype), with the actual E3 being the showfloor where journalists (largely) go down to try the new games/hardware and run interviews and presentations and such with the devs.

I usually post about E3 around a month before it happens, addressing rumors and what will happen there, with some predictions and such. This time it’s a bit of a different post than my usual because… I have no idea what E3 2021 is, and there’s no “real” info. What we have is basically useless.

Let’s see what I’ve got to say about this one!

Well it happened. After recently predicting that Directs were a thing of the past because Nintendo replaced them with something I figured was better, Directs are making a comeback after not having any full-length ones since September 2019. I really liked the style Nintendo went with in 2020, with them doing shadow drops of game announcements 2 months before releasing the game, and having mini Directs for third-parties and indies. There’s many advantages to that, like keeping expectations in check (unlike, say, Cyberpunk, which had a fake “gameplay” trailer YEARS before release with a ton of features that weren’t even in the final game) and compressing the entire hype cycle to almost no time at all. It was just great seeing a game and knowing it would be in my Switch in just 2 months… even if Origami King sucked. I’d argue it’s objectively superior to announce games that way than having Directs and similar types of events. I mean, E3 is always just a pile of “here’s all these games you won’t be able to play for another 3 years and they’ll suck anyways”.

But I can’t deny the appeal of a Direct-style presentation. A bunch of announcements and such in one spot is fun. So even though I don’t usually post reactions to Directs… why not this time? The last proper non-mini Direct was literally in 2019, and this is a long boy with 50 minutes of content. Not gonna even attempt predictions, we just know about a Smash character (I mean, what else would they announce for Smash that’s worth even having the game in a direct for?) and… games for the next 4 months. Not much to go by and there’s not any rumors of note. My expectations are not very high, but it’s mostly because the Switch already has a lot of stuff announced for 2020, so who knows how much more it might get.

Note that I am writing this intro before seeing the Direct, and that I’m writing my reactions as I’m watching. I’ll include a more thought-out overall thoughts section at the end once the Direct is over (and I’ll edit my reactions to make sure this is readable).

Well it’s starting in a minute now, so let’s go!