Since it first debuted in October 2001, Nintendo Direct has been used for many things, from detailing Miiverse to delivering some of the most important details about Wii U (namely, its price and release date). Despite being only just over half an hour in length, the Direct event broadcast this morning offered up a more exciting glimpse of Wii U’s future than any previous attempt at doing so, including last year’s E3.
I found it difficult not to walk away from Nintendo’s 2013 E3 press briefing feeling disappointed. Nintendo chose to focus almost entirely on launch games, and while there were many solid games to be shown — New Super Mario Bros. U, Batman: Arkham City, Mass Effect 3, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and so on — there wasn’t much in the way of innovative uses of the GamePad, or exciting new, original games. One of the few games that at least partially fit that bill, The Wonderful 101, was largely snubbed during the briefing, which instead at one point had a painfully scripted conversation with Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. It wasn’t until the Nintendo Direct event in September that we learned Bayonetta 2 would be a Wii U exclusive, which is precisely the sort of announcement the company needed to be making if it wanted to win over hardcore gamers wary of the notoriously meager third-party support its systems have touted in the post-SNES era.
