Finishing off the E3 Press Conferences was the Nintendo Spotlight, a 25 minute pre-recorded video full of announcements and updated looks at games. Despite the short length, Nintendo managed to put a whole lot of great stuff in there, including a couple announcements that fans have been waiting forever to hear. This was probably my favorite E3 presentation, but it still wasn’t perfect.

The presentation started with a montage of the competitive games coming soon to the Switch. These, of course, included Arms, Splatoon 2, Pokken Tournament DX, and one surprise. Turns out Rocket League is coming to the Nintendo Switch. Later in the show, they’d go into more details about it, like how there’s exclusive cars and the ability to play against players on Xbox One and PC. This is a pretty cool surprise and a perfect fit for the console.

Next up, a new trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Long time readers of this blog will know that I love Xenoblade Chronicles X, but believe it or not, didn’t really get to far in the original game. I probably should go back to it, I bought it twice after all. But anyway, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 looks like it’s combining the greater focus on story from the first game with the greater focus on exploration from X. If they can pull it off, it could be cool, and they’re still saying that we’ll find out this holiday.

A new Kirby game is in development, currently just called Kirby. There’s also a new Yoshi game coming, currently just called Yoshi. Both games are classic 2D side-scrollers and both have cooperative modes. From what I could tell, Kirby seemed like just another classic Kirby, which is cool, I like Kirby. Yoshi on the other hand, is doing some new stuff by having multi-layered levels. So you’ll be able to do things on one side of the level, and then swap over to the other. Could be neat, and it looks like the classic Yoshi’s Island gameplay is intact.

The biggest announcements were also the two biggest failings for this Spotlight video. First, the Pokemon Company briefly talked about Pokken Tournament DX, and then dropped a bomb in the form of a core Pokemon RPG in development for the Switch. Then, Nintendo cut to a short video that ended with a logo for Metorid Prime 4. These were both amazing moments, and are both games that I’ve been waiting so long to finally hear about. But wouldn’t it have been cooler if they had waited until they had something to show? At the end of the deal, it’s not that big of a deal. These are still the announcements that I can’t stop thinking about. But in a perfect world, it could have been so much more.

The show ended with a new trailer for Super Mario Odyssey. The big new thing shown here was Mario’s ability to possess enemies and objects and whatever else. He can take over a frog, one of those normal looking people from the first trailer, or even turn into electricity to travel through wires.  This opens up so many possibilities. I absolutely can not wait to get my hands on this game.

The Nintendo Spotlight was not perfect, but it was really close. If they had just shown a little bit of Pokemon and Metorid, this would have been the best E3 press conference in years. Or if they had just given us Animal Crossing. One can still dream.

Speaking of Animal Crossing, I got none of my predictions correct in this show. Which means that my final total is 2/18 correct. Not a great year for me on that front, but as I said in an earlier post, sometimes that’s a good thing. Who wants to watch an easily predictable E3? Anyway, I hope you guys are having fun watching the show. Let me know what your favorite parts were.