Nintendo at Gamescom and QuakeCon, 2017
This is the first year I’ve paid serious attention to Gamescom, which basically amounts to Europe’s E3. Perhaps it’s because I’ve even less chance of getting to go it than I do to E3, but it’s kind of a blank spot in my games journalism career, if you want to call it that. But with a suite of teases at this year’s E3, not a lot of solid details and a whole slew of games all coming out in the next 2-4 months I’m actually interested in, I figured it was time to give the big game show on the other side of the Atlantic a try. With Bethesda saving most of its content for QuakeCon, which ran at the same time last week (which I’ll get to later on), and me not being terribly happy with Sony and Microsoft it was naturally only Nintendo I cared about, so here’s a rundown of what they did at Gamescom this year.
I’m not sure if companies do the big press conferences at Gamescom like they do at E3-If they did I didn’t see anywhere to stream them, and either way Nintendo seemed to once again go the route of releasing information directly to its fans through its own social media profiles. So strap in, it’s time once again to overanalyse some trailers.
Fire Emblem Warriors is a game that I’ve gotten progressively more interested in as the months have gone by. I don’t know much at all about Fire Emblem as a franchise: The earlier games’ permadeath turned me away from what basically amounts to Medieval Fantasy Advance Wars, but the corner it seems to have turned as of Fire Emblem Awakening on the 3DS, making the permadeath optional and adding in a visual novel/dating sim style relationship mechanic (clunkily implemented as it is) seems to have made it into something that seems marginally more up my alley. I was all ready to put down cash for Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE on the WiiU in spite of my total disinterest in Persona, Shin Megami Tensei, Fire Emblem and JRPGs in general simply because that game looked and sounded freaking awesome, but the collector’s edition turned out to be *way* more money than I wanted to spend at that time, especially with the WiiU at death’s door in 2016 and other releases causing me to have an existential crisis about the video game medium. I do still kind of want to at least add that to my collection given its critical acclaim, possibly if I can get it at a budget price, but it’s definitely not a priority anymore.
In the end, it took Omega Force releasing a musō game based on the franchise to get me to really pay attention to Fire Emblem for the first time. My hunger for any and all things musō cannot be satiated, and I’ve been desperate for another game like this I can take on the go with me and play without an Internet connection since grinding Hyrule Warriors Legends into dust last year, and in lieu of a proper Dynasty Warriors Empires or Samurai Warriors Empires release on the Switch I initially thought I’d have to settle for this.
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