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Kai_Mao on 12 August 2018
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NightlyPoe said:
Kai_Mao said:

I think Smash's presence at E3 is to each its own. Personally, I think it did a good job setting the tone for the game, even if it took half of the Direct's time. The reason why I felt it did a good job is because "Everyone is Here" laid the groundwork for the title of Ultimate. I think of Smash Ultimate as Justice League Unlimited. In Ultimate, there are no cuts and everyone, including Snake, Pichu, and Young Link, characters we thought had little chance of coming back, are back. To show that after about 1.5 years (since finalizing the roster was done around December 2015), is impressive, considering that Sakurai and Nintendo may have had to renew some of the licensing deals with the third parties and first party characters like Pichu, Young Link, and Wolf had to be remodeled after being cut from the previous games. Of course, a good amount of characters have been remodeled, some obvious (i.e., Zelda, Ganondorf, and Ike) and some more subtle (i.e., Shulk, Cloud, and Marth). Then you had favorites finally make their debut with the Inklings, Daisy, and Ridley, a long-time request. And Bill Trinen even mentioned that E3 wouldn't show everything and announcements would be made the closer we get to launch, which is what we got on the 8th of August.

I'm afraid you missed my point.  They hyped the wrong thing at the wrong time and got bogged down in minutia.  The "Everyone is Here" was indeed a good foundation.  But then they immediately spent 10 minutes rambling about generally small changes they made in fighters.  It literally went from "Everyone is Here" to "Mario's got a new hat".  It bored the audience and there were many complaints about the presentation dragging.  Meanwhile, just speaking for myself, I was never bored for a moment during this week's Direct despite it actually being longer than the E3 Smash presentation.  Why?  Because they consistently made the game feel massive and that they were giving it all the loving care one could ask for in trying to craft the greatest Smash ever above and beyond merely including all the previous characters and shut down the idea that it was just a port.

You could cut that entire character changes segment out, paste in the 10 minutes I suggested from the most recent Direct, and you instantly have a better, more coherent, presentation that would have been the talk of E3.  Instead the talk was of Nintendo's poor E3 showing and lingering speculation on whether the game was a port or not.

I get the presentation went a little too long, but I think the changes being noted weren't that boring to me and I didn't see that boredom from video reactions. People wanted to know what changed anyway. It's cool seeing Ganondorf finally use a sword, its cool seeing the various costumes from certain characters, its cool seeing Pokemon Trainer able to switch between Pokemon seemlessly. I think the new techniques and such would have likely affected people more negatively than the character changes because those are more for hardcore fans, not the casual fans that care very little about directional air dodging and the difference between 1-on-1 damage and free-for-all damage.

And apparently, it didn't affect the game or the Switch that much negatively anyway, as Switch sales doubled according to Game Stop post-E3 thanks to Smash Bros. and Pokemon; and Ultimate immediately shot up the COMG charts, even though first party Switch games have tended to do more than what COMG provides on the preorder charts.

So maybe the negative talk about Smash at E3 here is a bit more anecdotal as the sales and preorder results have shown otherwise.