My hot take.
Ea:
Ubisoft: Some cool games. Super Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Starlink, Just Dance 2019, DK x Rabbids and an amazing looking new pirates game which I don't recall seeing before. I'd say they did pretty well for themselves.
Bethesda: They also did well, but I'm tired of this meme of "Let's announce this game which isn't coming out for several years" (Elder Scrolls VI in this case). Are they trying to be Square-Enix now? Speaking of which...
Square-Enix:
. They had such a low bar, and they couldn't even reach it. KH3 got spread out among all the other conferences for some reason, which kinda hurt Square-Enix here. But Square-Enix also had to show something about the FF7 remake and failed to do so. They're hurting their brand significantly with their overly long development times. They didn't really show anything new either. I really expected more from them.
Microsoft: Wow. I honestly think they won this year. Knowing my personal background, this is actually amazing. I've never been an MS fan at all. Here they showed tons and tons of games, including some real surprises like Battletoads. In some ways they had the highest stakes because they've kinda been falling behind the PS4 and Switch. I think they really made their case this time.
Sony: This was a mixed bag, with some real gems and some real
.
Let's start with the
. Kojima's game is
to the 10th degree. I've never seen anything hyped up so much with so much letdown. His game looked absolutely horrible, and made The Last of Us 2 look like a heavily gameplay focused game by contrast.
I can't get into games like The Last of Us 2, so I won't evaluate that as
because I know some people like it. But I think we can all agree that the long stretch of talking after that trailer was
. Sony also had some questionable presentation decisions, like having that white guy put on one of those rice hats and play that horrible flute music for several minutes before the Mongol Invasion game trailer.
Justin Roiland's game looked pretty lame as well.
The Good: The Japan vs. Mongol game looks like it has potential. I'm still a little bit unsure about the gameplay. It kinda reminds me of Way of the Samurai, but with more of a budget behind it. Spider-Man game looks fantastic. Ni-Oh 2 looks fantastic. Everything else looks at least decent.
Overall, Sony did pretty well, but I feel that Microsoft edged them out this year. Microsoft did have an advantage in going first. This gave them a little bit more punch, even with games that were otherwise multi-plat.
PC Game Show: This wasn't bad at all. We got confirmation of several neat games like Yakuza 0 and Tales of Vesparia.
Nintendo: Like Sony, this was a real mixed bag. There was no trash, but there also wasn't as much good stuff as in Sony's conference. Also, the presentation was not done very well. They should have spent less time on the minute details of Smash and more time showcasing some of the many games that are coming to Switch. The presentation left me scratching my head at the end, because it had a lot of content which just wasn't delivered well. They could have spent at least 5 minutes showcasing some of the bigger reveals like Paladins, DBZ FighterZ and Ninjala.
For me the real win in this conference was the Fire Emblem trailer. I know that this conference was supposed to be focused on Smash, but I think Fire Emblem stole the show. The trailer they showed looked absolutely gorgeous and showed off some really interesting new features in a concise but effective way. Their Fire Emblem trailer was an example of what I consider to be a trailer done right. They managed to find the perfect mixture of cinematics and actual gameplay to present. We now know that there will be troops, formations and a little bit of open third person exploration. We know the "Three Houses" and the main characters in each one and we know what the game looks like. We even know some little things like how weapon durability is going to be a thing.
At the start, they also showed a mech game which looked like it had potential. I'll need to know more.
The Smash Bros. part of the presentation was done well...at first. But then it dragged on way too long. They should have shortened it to two major points. A.) We're bringing everybody from the series back. EVERYBODY. B.) We're adding Daisy, Ridley and Inkling. They really did not need to get into the nitty gritty of specific character changes. They could have maybe covered the major changes like the visual change to Zelda or the gameplay and visual changes to Link.
Nintendo's conference had a lot of omissions which probably pissed people off, but it wasn't bad. It just did not use its time well. It spent too long talking about Smash and not enough time talking about 20 or so games that were shown off for only a few seconds. I think it was maybe equal to Sony's this year, but I'm very biased in favor of Fire Emblem.
Overall: This was a better E3 than usual with no losers among the big 3. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all did surprisingly well this year. The market seems more competitive than it has ever been, which is great for the industry. EA was the biggest loser and Kojima is confirmed to be an Inafune tier hack.
