Nintendo has always made a point of being different. When everyone else made consoles with disks, they stuck to cartridges. When most consoles were about powerful 3D graphics, Nintendo made a machine to play tennis in the living room.
And this year, at E3, when everyone else was announcing breathtakingly vast, aggressively forward thinking or just hauntingly beautiful video games, Nintendo... didn't.
In almost every way this was a strange show for Nintendo, and ultimately a poor one. Its major announcements comprised Starfox Zero, which is a reboot of the animals-meets-Star Wars arcade shoot-em-up, Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash, a co-op Zelda spin-off and a handheld Metroid arena shooter.
Almost everything else it showed, including more information about its design-your-own-levels software Super Mario Maker, was either already known, marginal in terms of appeal, or explicitly mystifying. What was missing was even more egregious for its supporters: no Wii U Metroid, no news on Mario Kart 8 DLC, no details on a new Zelda or any new major franchises coming to the Wii U. "I was literally shaking with anger during that conference," wrote on fan on NeoGAF. "Tears formed in my eyes and my fists were clenched." While launching a Change.org petition is hardly unusual, fans are signing up in their thousands to ask Nintendo, quite straightforwardly, to announce something else.
Nintendo knows its show was a let down. While its president, Satoru Iwata, stopped short of actually apologising for the show he came very close, Tweeting in Japanese "thank you for your feedback. We hear you and we are committed to continuing to meet your expectations". Nintendo of America's president Regie Fils-Aime was more bullish, telling Polygon "typically what happens is a press briefing happens or our digital event happens, and then over the course of the next couple of days people see the games get to play the games and the appreciation and understanding of what we're doing increases". But whatever the nuances of Iwata's statement, the theme is clear; something is different with a company that just 12 months ago roundly "won" the entire conference.
As for Fils-Aime's statement, the fact is appreciation of this year's crop of games has not grown significantly since the announcement. In our hands-on with the games, most seemed solid and well designed, in the way Nintendo titles almost always are, but none were stand-out titles that demanded repeated play tests like Splatoon did in 2014, Mario Kart 8 did the year before and ZombiU in 2012.
Take Starfox Zero; ostensibly a fun new take on the established spaceship shooter genre, the new game is fun, fast and entertainingly weird. The mixture of motion and traditional controls takes 10 minutes to get used to, but the two-level demo as shown is broadly speaking a good advert for what will likely be a decent game. But graphically the game is unimpressive, with textures that appeared low-res and fairly basic effects. Compared to the work of art that are the Wii U's best games, such as Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon, it feels loose and slightly rushed.
Super Mario Maker is much more polished, and promises to give players a huge range of tools to make their own levels for the classic platformer. The ability to switch themes between different Mario games is handled beautifully, and the graphics are crisp and strangely fresh, given the archaic base material. It's also more clever and frankly interesting than you would expect, allowing players to combine elements to make new types of enemies — drop a star on cloud-flying enemy and it will suddenly spew power-ups instead of missiles — and given players can upload their own levels it's possible a healthy community will form around the title. But as rock-solid as Mario Maker appears to be, it's ultimately just a level-editor. It looks fun, but it's not Zelda.
Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash for Wii U was the best game in Nintendo's roster this year, made with the highest standards of design and polish and with snappy, fun controls. Being able to power-up your player to giant proportions mid-game is a nice twist, and matches are short and vivid. But at its core, as shown at E3, the actual game isn't too advanced on the two-button 1989 original Tennis for Game Boy. It's good, but how could it possibly not be?
Elsewhere The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes looked like a nice take on co-op multiplayer for 3DS using the timeless adventure franchise as its core, and the Blast Ball football-meets-deathmatch mode from Metroid Prime Federation Force was fun for a few minutes, but maddening for fans hoping for a full-scale Wii U installment. Yoshi's Woolly World is an excellent platformer, but really just another platformer (and one very close to release), and Yo-Kai Watch impressed WIRED's Matt Kamen enough for him to declare it "Nintendo's secret weapon". But while there was lots to like from Nintendo's stand, there wasn't much to love.
The decision by Nintendo to seemingly pull back on its Wii U titles is upsetting for fans, and also investors; with massive cash reserves and incredibly valuable characters, the importance of its financial ups-and-downs can be overstated, but is significant. But it's not inexplicable. The company has already said that it is working on a new generation of consoles, codenamed NX (though whether that is a home machine, a handheld device, a combination of both or something even more unexpected remains to be seen), as well as its plans for mobile games, and though it won't say anything more about the former until 2016 clearly it's an internal focus. It's not giving up on the Wii U: the already-announced open-worldLegend of Zelda game will come to the under-performing machine, Nintendo has said. But it won't necessarily be exclusive to that console, and nothing more on that game was revealed at E3.
The overall feeling is of a company with split focus, and with no clear answer on how to make its current home machine a commercial success or maintain the momentum of its wildly popular but aging handheld machine. One thing it does know how to do is announce new variants of its sell-out Amiibo NFC toys -- but that too is a sore point for fans given the company's at-best incompetent manufacturing strategy.
Even so, Nintendo's bright and bounding presence at E3 is still welcome amid the general death and destruction seen at the stands of publishers like Ubisoft and Bethesda. The recent boom in toys-to-life games like Skylanders, Disney Infinity and the upcoming Lego Dimensions means it doesn't have a monopoly on family gaming by any stretch, but the continued support for the Wii U by those games is testament to its continued presence in many family homes.
Indeed, Nintendo's online 'Direct' press conferences are always refreshing and amusingly produced, and there is no reason that it can't come back and have a storming E3 in 2016 with a new Zelda, a new console, and a new lease of life. But 2015 was a down year, typified by average gameplay demos and disappointed fans. E3 still loves Nintendo — the vast number of costumed fans queueing to play three minutes of Mario Tennis is testament to its power. But Nintendo needs to give some love back to keep those fans, and customers, engaged.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
