Nobody does it like Nintendo. This mantra doesn’t just apply to the quality of its exclusives or the uniqueness of its hardware, but the way in which it seems to break all the rules when it comes to announcing, promoting, and releasing its products. And yet it doesn’t seem to care.
Last week, on a random Tuesday afternoon, Nintendo sent out a press release confirming to consumers that Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition will be coming to Switch in March 2025. This is one of the final Wii U titles fans have been hoping to see ported, not to mention a classic Monolith Soft RPG in its own right that has been stuck on the worst performing Nintendo console in history for almost a decade now. Now it’s on the way, but why reveal it with such derision?
There Will Never Be Another Company Like Nintendo
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition could have headlined a Nintendo Direct, and it’d steal the show, especially with an extended trailer that dove into exactly what the remaster will offer. This is a vast, uncompromising game that a vast majority of the Switch audience hasn’t seen or heard of before, and now it’s only months away. But instead of revealing the definitive edition in style or turning it into a celebratory event, it was rolled out with a strange corporate apathy that is dichotomous to the whimsy Nintendo is otherwise known for.
There is a chance that Nintendo knows that, no matter how it reveals a product like this, fans will form a line and hand over their cash regardless. Why make a big song dance about most of its announcements – especially a remaster – when the end result will sell millions of copies anyway? But the spectacle of a Nintendo Direct is part of the fun, and I have to picture the creators of these games also getting a kick of seeing their hard work on a big stage.
Alarmo was revealed and released in a similar fashion, and discussion around a quirky new product was underwhelming because, by the time it was in our hands, nobody really cared. It is one of the most unique devices we’ve seen Nintendo come up with since Labo, and while it was a bit pricey, the idea of a video game-themed alarm clock that reacts to our individual actions with the potential to be updated over time is so fun. Yet it was revealed in a random video, released a few days later, and will go down in history as a weird outlier when it could have been so much more.
Over the years, it has revealed Ring Fit Adventure, Switch Lite, Switch OLED, and plenty of other big announcements that should have been framed as sweeping showcases, but were instead rolled out with an aura of quiet confidence.
Surprise, The Switch 2 Is Backwards Compatible!
In the same vein, Nintendo quietly confirmed earlier this week that the Nintendo Switch 2 will be backward compatible, and this was before the hardware had even been formally revealed. It did so during a corporate management policy briefing (what fun!) in which it confirmed briefly that existing Nintendo Switch software will be playable on the console successor, while your Nintendo Switch Online membership and playable games contained therein will also carry on over. Great albeit predictable news, but did you really need to break it in a random tweet?
It would have been a brilliant needle drop during the console reveal itself – which I have to imagine is coming up pretty soon – as Nintendo could have shown existing games running side by side to emphasise graphical and performance differences. Those are the things we want to see, and they would have been excellent marketing for Switch 2. Now, when a friend who isn’t as tuned into the gaming world asks me if the new Switch will play their old games, I’ll be ‘yeah, Nintendo said so on Twitter’ and that just feels like a weird thing to point to over a Direct presentation or a fancy trailer. You know, like how every other game company does it.
Nintendo isn’t going to change, especially considering its obscene levels of success in recent years, but I wish it approached revealing and marketing its consoles and games with the same level of creativity and imagination that goes into them. It’s so corporate and dry, but could be so much more.
