Think I gathered my thoughts and yeah: if you've been following recent Nintendo news and learned about their future plans, you could have expected this being slightly underwhelming E3 showing. Personally though, I didn't expect it to be this lackluster. It was such a bizarre presentation.
Don't get me wrong: people complaining about the Digital Event format have no clue what they are talking about; the presentation and pacing are faster than every other show. The production is very good without taking too much time.
The huge issue this year was content, and damn it showed.
I have no idea why they chose to show another long Yoshi's Wolly World segment after having done a good one last year. This one was like 5-10 minutes long and was really scratching the bottom when it comes to this game. Then there is Xenoblade which they have spent so much time on as well. The Skylanders segment was pure boredom, and while I understand the economic background of why they do this it was way too long and should have been explained in a separate video. Then there was so much stuff we already knew about, be it through international media or through leaks like Yokai Watch or Hyrule Warriors 3DS - and honestly, that game is not a E3-tier game to me.
The other stuff didn't look so great either. I want to see the appeal of that Fire Emblem x SMT game but man this looks as cringeworthy as 90% of the Vita library and didn't fill me with any confidence. I expect the game to be good considering who is working on it, but the style might put me off. I have no fucking clue who greenlit that Animal Crossing Party game, for fucks sake sometimes it's better to do the obvious thing like an actual console AC instead of something different. The YouTube like-stats say it all really, and same goes for that disgrace of a Metroid game that doesn't even feature Samus Aran. Like are you for real? One of your most requested franchises and this is how you present it to your fans? By including the most generic robots available and add tacky stuff like wannabe-E3-BlastBall that will probably be boring after 3 rounds? For fucks sake. This was a premier franchise once.
And the conference ending was underwhelming as well and damn I saw those Nintendoland fireworks comparisons all over Twitter and agree completely; you can't close your big E3 show with a community project.
The Mario Tennis, Mario RPG and Zelda games looked good, but again: those are Mario and Zelda games, of course they do. And these weren't enough to undo the negative impression I had.
StarFox was the highlight of the event, and the way they included Mario Maker into the event by showing off Mario's costumes was pretty smart. The Mario Maker segment itself was utterly brilliant and mindblowing; seeing them talk about the original games and how they were designed and seeing those original design documents with corrections and edits - amazing. But I understand that not everybody can appreciate this.
I still believe that the format itself is fantastic and the puppets skits were entertaining, but damn this was embarrassing in terms of content. I didn't expect Shenmue 4 and a Super Mario 64 remake since I always knew that their E3 2016 stuff will be way more important, but damn, I was still letdown. NX, QoL and their mobile stuff; the Wii U sales and the 3DS' age; they all overshadow everything that they are doing right now and today it was painfully obvious. It's not bad like it was in early Wii U days, but yeah, still pretty bad and compared to the the majority of the other conferences easily the weakest.
2015 is more or less done when it comes to huge announcements I feel. Nintendo, you better bring it in 2016. They are standing in front of the biggest challenges they ever had and I hope they will master them.