My thoughts on this direct are weirdly complex. In a lot of ways, it's basically the inverse of 2019's February direct, which is tied for my favorite direct Nintendo has ever done (the other being E3 2019's). It just kind of goes to show that the context of what is happening around a direct is important. During the 2019 February direct, we got new games like Super Mario Maker 2, The Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening Remake, and Astral Chain, as well as smaller new announcements like Rune Factory 5, the Dragon Quest XI S port finally happening, etc. This is on top of already knowing that Luigi's Mansion 3 and Animal Crossing: New Horizons were slated for this year, and that while technically not announced yet Pokemon's 8th gen would surely come out this year. Because of this, it not only made the impact of these "smaller" games (because most things are just inherently smaller than Animal Crossing and Pokemon and LM3, these were still huge announcements) much greater since they were filling out the year with high-quality productions, but it also highlighted those announcements in a weird way. There wasn't any pressure on say, Link's Awakening being the big holiday title for 2019, which would have been massively disappointing. Even without showing Luigi's Mansion 3 or Animal Crossing, the direct was still an amazing success. And even with Animal Crossing slipping out of the 2019 lineup, there was still by far enough content for the year to still be backed to the brim.
Yet, 2019's first 6 months were actually fairly quiet. It took forever for the first big original game to come out, Yoshi's Crafted World, and it just wasn't a game that received much publicity or critical praise. Mario Maker 2 is amazing, I love it, but it came out very late in that first 6 months and after NSMBUDX and Yoshi it arguably wasn't what Nintendo needed. So we were in a weird situation where the direct gave a lot of security and assurance that the rest of the year would be great, but it didn't mean anything for about the next 4 months arguably until Mario Maker 2 came out (in particular because Yoshi's release date was already announced).
This is why I say this direct was the exact opposite. It didn't really give much assurance that this year would be good, but there's a lot of upcoming releases really soon that are exciting, so it's hard to take it too harshly. Still, it was far, far from a great direct.
Now to be clear, what surprises me is that I don't really care that much. I don't feel angry or offended at this direct. Usually even when something is just passable or mediocre, it kind of sparks an extremity in me of "why is this just so meh?". But this time, I don't care. I think a lot of the reason for that is that this direct was so weird about basically ensuring that it wasn't actually that important in the grand scheme of things. I mean you can just tell by the way Nintendo talked about things during this direct: They opened the direct basically ensuring that directs would stay as a staple (putting less overall significance on this one), and they didn't even mention the Zelda anniversary at all despite revealing Skyward Sword HD, even teasing a BOTW2 announcement soon.
I kind of think that, initially when planning for this direct Nintendo did start out mostly wanting to showcase first half 2021 games, stuff like Miitopia, Skyward Sword HD, and Mario Golf, but by the time they ended up including just one special announcement (Splatoon 3) and all their third party development partners (NMH3, Project Triangle) it ended up looking very future-focused despite their own disclaimer. Which I honestly think was kind of misguided, because it makes it look like they might as well have revealed the rest of the years lineup, as it stands that second half has very little and I wonder if the direct would have just been better being about 25 minutes with announcements just concerning everything up to Skyward Sword.
What IS unacceptable and what does make me mad is the pricing. GIVE. ME. A. FUCKING. BREAK. $60 for an HD Wii Port with a few QoL changes. Ok, look, it's Zelda, we all knew that would happen. It still sucks, but it's Zelda so it's not too surprising. But $50 for Miitopia? Probably the worst one of all: $35 FOR EACH FAMICOM DETECTIVE CLUB GAME? $70 FOR TWO VISUAL NOVELS THAT ARE REMAKES OF FAMICOM GAMES? That is fucking ridiculous. No way to slice it. If you're going to try and feed me regurgitated crap, at least don't make me pay a shit ton for it. That's honestly insulting.
It's a 5/10 direct. It might be higher if NMH3 had a better trailer (I don't know why, but their trailers after the cool E.T. rip-off have just been pretty meh despite me being somewhat excited for the game). In retrospect, while it was harder to process live, Monster Hunter Rise's new trailer revealed a lot of cool stuff. So I guess that's a point for the direct. Overall though, just eh. Not offensive, except for the fucking awful pricing, but not good either.
