I'm actually thinking we'll see Pokemon in the Spring or Summer (given the history of the franchise) and Animal Crossing for the holiday season (again, given the history of the franchise).
I'd be a little surprised if Pokemon wasn't on the first Direct of the year.
As for the so-called "leaks" - they're mostly saying that Nintendo is going to be revealing games they've already shown before. The same sort of predictions happened for last year's January Direct, and they were ALL WRONG!!!
My guess is that it's not going to be a Direct focusing on a bunch of crap we've already seen, but mostly on new reveals, and probably not all the big games people are hoping for, but rather the titles they want to highlight for the next 4 months or so, perhaps one big one for the Summer.
But seriously, I don't fucking know what Nintendo is doing, they've been changing things up a lot over the past two and a half years.
I mean, I'd LOVE to see more Final Fantasy footage (FF7 on a Nintendo console is monumental! Particularly for those of us old-time fans who went on adventures to get Squaresoft games back when they were practically a branch of Nintendo), but it's been done, and I don't know if they'll show it again except if it is a brief "Here are some release dates" thing.
Last edited by Jumpin - on 03 January 2019