Prediction season for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (now even more electronic!) is upon us, and rumors are already flying from sources both reputable and not about the kinds of things we might hear at the various presentations this year. Now most years here on Adventure Rules I have done some kind of reaction post for various conferences or otherwise shared my hopes and dreams for the next year of gaming. This year, I find myself fascinated with a different sort of question: what could Nintendo announce at E3 that would make me shut off my computer and think about my life choices? As a Nintendo fan, my entire sense of self is validated by whether or not people think their Nintendo Directs are good. Liking them is my whole personality, so it is very important that they don’t screw this up so I can still feel good about myself when E3 is over. With that in mind, I address this next bit to Nintendo, who I know read my blog religiously: whatever you do, do NOT do any of the following things or I personally will have an existential crisis.
ANNOUNCING FIGHTER’S PASS THREE: ECHO PASS!
Do you love to speculate about what characters could come to Super Smash Brothers Ultimate? Do you have a short list of completely unrealistic dream characters who you try to cram into every online discussion? Then do we have good news for you! After releasing the final two characters of fighter pass two, development will immediately begin on a third fighter pass. This is a special one though, as every single character on the list will be an echo fighter of someone who exists already! Similar to the previous two passes, we won’t be releasing which characters are involved beforehand so you have plenty of time to think really hard about how your dream character could work pretty okay as an echo fighter of the Ice Climbers or something. Echo Pass will be our biggest DLC ever with eight new characters joining the roster, so please be patient with us as we expect to be releasing a drip feed of information well into 2024.
As a special treat to say thank you for everything, shadow dropping TODAY we have another echo character that we think you’ll be really excited about: Kana from Fire Emblem Fates! Kana is the son or daughter of Corrin, the main character of the game, and has the exact same powers, so (s)he makes a perfect echo fighter to start off our third fighter pass! There’s a good chance that any presentation featuring game announcements for the foreseeable future could include a Smash Bros character announcement at the end, so be sure to both expect that and to loudly complain about it when it doesn’t happen! Thank you again for your support all these years, and remember: Sakurai’s company is called SORA Ltd. for a reason. *wink*
IT’S HERE: THE NEW NINTENDO SWITCH!
We are very excited to announce the latest addition to the Nintendo Switch family of systems: the New Nintendo Switch! We heard you: you need a more powerful device to run the most exciting games from third parties as well as our own first party titles that for whatever reason still drop to four frames per second when there is more than one blade of grass on the screen. The New Nintendo Switch offers greater power by serving as a dedicated home console – no more compromises due to the need to function as a handheld. We’ve also added twice the number of semiconductors to our hardware! Of course, because cryptomining is both destroying our planet and the one hobby that brings a slight modicum of joy to our otherwise meaningless lives, the New Nintendo Switch will be available in very limited quanities. Please understand.
We’ll also be using this opportunity to roll out an update to our online services. The New Nintendo Switch will always be online and require a connection to the internet in order to provide a better experience to our players. Alongside this change, we’ve made some improvements to our online infrastructure that now require us to increase the price of the service to twice the current amount. We know this may be frustrating to some consumers, but rest assured that there will be a barely noticeable improvement in quality of your connection. As a way to say both thank you and sorry, we’re also going to be including a brand new free game for Nintendo Switch Online members: Spanky’s Quest 99, a battle royale game where you compete with 98 other players in the celebrated SNES title Spanky’s Quest. This game is a limited experience set to end service on December 31st, 2021, so please appreciate it while it is available.
METROID PRIME 4 STILL IN DEVELOPMENT AND A NEW METROID TITLE!
The last time you heard from us on Metroid Prime 4, we confirmed that the game had restarted development with Retro Studios. While we don’t have more information to share with you today, please rest assured that development is going absolutely fine. Everything is great. There have definitely been no additional complications. That said, we are not yet able to give a release window for this game at this time. Please understand, and thank you for your patience. The team at Retro, or wherever this game might end up in the neat future, is very excited to deliver you a solid experience that captures the spirit of the original Metroid Prime Trilogy…wait, I am being told I was not supposed to use those words in that order. Why not? Sorry folks, just a minute…
While Metroid Prime 4 continues to definitely make progress, we will also be releasing a new game in the series to tide you over. Our next Metroid title is one we are very excited about, a followup to a celebrated entry in the series which if we’re being honest practically demanded a sequel the moment the credits rolled. I’m talking of course about Metroid: Other M, and I am excited to announce that we will be releasing a sequel this fall. Metroid: Working Title will be focused on an as-yet-unexamined time in Samus’s life when she lived as a housewife, but that doesn’t mean you can’t experience the gameplay the series is known for. Jump over unpacked moving boxes in the attic as you find lost pieces of the Varia Suit to revisit old parts of your house to overcome new challenges. Blast meals with your heat beam to cook them or cool off your sweaty husband with the ice blast. Clean hard to reach spaces in the house using morph ball mode and use missiles to do yard work. We’re excited to explore this new interpretation of Samus while everyone waits on Metroid Prime 4 to finish its own time in the oven, which I am sure will be any day now.
AN EXCITING REIMAGINING OF A CLASSIC FIRE EMBLEM STORY!
Last year the Fire Emblem series celebrated a milestone anniversary, and here at Nintendo we chose to honor that exciting achievement by temporarily charging money for a ROM of the oldest game in the series, Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light! We understand that there is a high demand among fans for games that never made their way officially to western audiences and many fans have expressed their frustration at having such limited access to a title with such historical significance to the series. But worry not – our decision to remove the game from digital storefronts was not in fact a ploy to create artificial scarcity so we could take your money. In actuality, we were opening the way for our next entry in the Echoes series: Fire Emblem Echoes – Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light!
This game will be a reimagining of the very first entry in the Fire Emblem series, bringing 30 year old mechanics to a modern audience! To preserve the integrity of the gameplay we won’t be changing anything about how the combat works or adding any quality of life touches to the turn-based tactical battles. However, we know many fans of this series are passionate about pairing together characters in meaningful relationships, so we will be adding support conversations, marriage, and raising child soldiers to these versions of the game for the first time. Did I just say “versions?” That’s right, Shadow Dragon and The Blade of Light are actually two separate games, each one featuring a different path for Marth to take that result in different endings for the game. You’ll need to play both to experience the full story and unlock all the marriage options for your characters. We hope you enjoy this inventive new way to play this incredibly old game you’ve probably revisited already one of the other times we made it available.
NEW DETAILS CONCERNING THE SEQUEL TO THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD!
We know you’ve been waiting quite some time to hear more information about the followup to the successful 2017 Zelda title, Breath of the Wild. Today, we are finally ready to share key details about the story and gameplay of this title. Breath of the Wild 2 takes place immediately after the events of Breath of the Wild. Link and Zelda go together to explore a mysterious chamber beneath Hyrule Castle where they encounter Ganondorf, the man who once housed the spirit of Calamity Ganon within himself. The story of the epic battle against Ganondorf is a heart-gripping tale of friendship, love, and betrayal. You’ll get to experience this story through a series of memories unlocked by Link, who once again has been trapped in a hundred-year sleep and must relearn everything that has already happened as a passive observer before then defeating Ganondorf and saving Zelda, who will have less screen time in this entry because her new short hair is so much harder to render.
Many have expressed concern about the release date of this game. I am here to assure you that Breath of the Wild 2 will be releasing holiday 2021. Of course, to make this happen, some compromises had to be made. The map in Breath of the Wild 2 is the same map from the original game, with shrines in the same locations and puzzle solutions remaining the same as well. However, 100 years have passed since the original game, so no familiar characters will be around to talk to and some of the towns which were once occupied have now been left empty by Ganondorf’s reign. We really wanted to drive home the survival aspect of Breath of the Wild which we believe contributed so much to the game’s success, so new mechanics such as armor durability and a food meter that both requires Link to eat to live but also limits the amount of food he can consume at once help to emphasize that aspect of the game. We hope you enjoy this new adventure in Hyrule when the game releases in limited quantities this holiday.
Well there you have it adventurers, just a few of my worst nightmares for the upcoming Nintendo E3 presentation. What do you hope doesn’t get announced regarding your favorite series? Were there any announcements in my list that you’d actually enjoy for some godforsaken reason?
Adventure Rules 
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