Ever since 2020, when E3 took a year off, Summer Game Fest has been around to pick up the slack. The early days were fairly underwhelming, basically the kinds of announcements you could expect from The Game Awards but without the awards attached to them. But the longer E3 is absent, the better the show has gotten. That’s still true this year.

Partially due to the success of Nintendo Directs over the years and the pandemic, the live press conferences of old E3 has largely been replaced by prerecorded videos of announcements. Personally, I really miss the press conferences, even if I understand that the newer way of doing things is more efficient. This year, Summer Game Fest was a live event, bringing back the charm of the old presentations, mistakes and all. The downside to this format is that they tend to run long. This one definitely did, but I enjoyed it the whole way through.

Like usual with these posts, I’m really going to focus on the announcements and trailers that really stood out to me. The first one that comes to mind is Sonic Superstars, a brand new 2D Sonic game. Unlike the previous one, Sonic Mania, this game has polygonal graphics, giving it a more modern look despite the more classic gameplay. I really liked the Genesis inspired graphics of Sonic Mania, but I think this looks good too. Everything looks sharp and moves fast, which is obviously pretty important in a Sonic game. The trailer didn’t show off too much, but it did show us four playable characters, Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy. There was also a hint that Fang the Sniper was involved somehow, which is weird. Are there any big Fang the Sniper fans out there? But whatever, this was a cool trailer and I look forward to seeing how it turns out.

A really big surprise was the announcement of a new Prince of Persia game, The Lost Crown. Ubisoft announced a remake of fan favorite The Sands of Time a while back, which has been delayed multiple times. I didn’t think we’d see anything else from the franchise until that finally got off the ground. But we’re getting a new 2D Prince of Persia game. It looks to have a pretty big focus on combat, the trailer showed the prince pulling off some cool combos and special moves against enemies and a large boss. This was very exciting and unexpected.

New IPs are always unexpected, obviously, but are also always welcome to see. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is an over the top first person shooter where you fight against hordes of zombies and other creatures. It looks fun and silly, which sounds good to me. I’m hoping that there’s a co-op mode, it looks like it’d be a blast to play with a friend. Hopefully we find out more soon.

One that really took me by surprise was Sand Land. It’s based on a manga by Dragon Ball creator, Akira Toriyama. I actually read the manga while in high school in the pages of Shonen Jump magazine, and I haven’t thought about it since. I honestly don’t even remember if it was good or not. I just know that the main character was a demon and he journeyed with a human or something. I might have to read it again. But either way, the game looks slick and it’s cool to see one of Toriyama’s other stories make the transition to video games.

We knew going into the show that there would be the world premiere of gameplay for Mortal Kombat 1. Gameplay-wise, it doesn’t look that different from the last three Mortal Kombat games. The biggest addition seems to be the Kameo characters. Basically, when you pick your character, you also pick a second character that you can call in to perform special moves with the push of a button. These include some of the characters from the main roster, but also a bunch that only appear as Kameos. Hopefully the attacks of the Kameos are significantly different from one another, as that could make for some pretty interesting combinations. The story takes place after the end of Mortal Kombat 11, where Liu Kang had become a god and recreated the world. This results in a lot of familiar faces, but in very different circumstances. The one that stood out the most to me was Raiden, who was no longer the wise god of the old games, but rather an inexperienced young man. This looks to be another really good game in the long running franchise.

And speaking of long running franchises, the show ended with a new trailer for Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. The follow-up to Remake, Rebirth looks to be continuing where that game left off, both in its story and gameplay. They’re already hinting at crazy story changes from the original game. For example, towards the end of the trailer, Sephiroth mentions that he killed Tifa five years ago, so who is this Tifa now? In the original game, Tifa had survived his attack, so very curious to see what this means for the overall story they’re telling. Also, the game is on two discs, which is honestly pretty fun. I know it’s dumb, but I miss the old days of multi-disc Final Fantasy games.

And those were my thoughts on Summer Game Fest. I enjoyed it much more than the PlayStation Showcase, and raises my general feelings on this year’s E3, or whatever we’re calling it now. I didn’t get any predictions right, but I did have a new trailer for Rebirth in my predictions for the Sony show, so I kind of got one right? I won’t count it though, so I’m now at 1/6 predictions correct. What did you think of the show? Let me know in the comments below.