NintendObs Thinks: Nintendo's game plan from the Direct to the start of this summer.
In other words, what is scheduled without a doubt until the next Nintendo Direct.
With this month’s Nintendo Direct now far behind us, the time is ripe to recap all of Nintendo’s first-party retail games which came out of the broadcast with definitive release dates. These are the titles whose anticipation is no longer grounded in hypotheticals in fact, out of these six titles, three were revealed in the Direct simultaneously with the announcements of the days they launch. Knowing and establishing these dates clearly defines the road ahead for Nintendo Switch in the immediate future, from the beginning of March to end of June 2022, lifting the veil on what used to stand as the unknown.
This lineup does not include updates and DLCs, which I’ll mention right now. Right after the Nintendo Direct, Metroid Dread introduced its Dread and Rookie difficulty modes, respectively for the most hardcore and the more novice players, with a Boss Rush mode set to arrive in April promising to be a lot of dramatic fun and a chance to trigger every single grab sequence. Then Mario Kart 8 Deluxe brought about its Booster Course Pass DLC, adding two cups of eight courses total per wave through six waves releasing from March 18 to the end of 2023 at a time when the original Mario Kart 8 game will soon become a decade old. Also not included from the Direct are titles without specific release dates, namely Splatoon 3 scheduled from Summer 2022 and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 arriving September 2022. So let’s get right into it.
Triangle Strategy. March 4. I honestly encourage anyone, especially people who have never played this kind of title, to play the new Prologue Demo. Triangle Strategy really is a showcase for how the Final Fantasy Tactics games of the past ought to be made in this day and age, and giving it a try even if that isn’t really your thing will at the very least be rather instructory. For that same reason it is a must-play for lovers of the genre, and I truly hope the game’s developers were ambitious enough to provide it with more routes than necessary, even surpassing Fire Emblem Three Houses in that aspect by its infusing decision-making recurrently into the narrative and not just at one or two turning points that will decide the fate of our entire experiences. Being in HD-2D instead of a full-blown “HD 3D” experience ought to give Triangle Strategy that flexibility, and I want to believe the title has achieved that ambition which is so far implied by both of its demos.