Earlier today, at the usual 10:00 am eastern, Nintendo shadow dropped their last Partner Direct of 2020 and wow was it a good one! They showcased Bravely Default II, Story of Seasons, Immortals Fenyx Rising, No More Heroes III, as well as porting NMH 1+2 to the Switch available today, Part Time UFO, Hitman 3 and Control which will both be played on cloud streaming, and capped it off with releasing the Age of Calamity demo. If you haven’t watched it yet, you can view it here!

Here’s what I’m looking forward to:

Bravely Default II: I absolutely love JRPGs—I love team building, I love a good story, and I love the grind. When they released the demo back in March, I was happy overall with the gameplay, the story, the visuals, and the music, but I thought a few things needed to be tweaked. Well, SquareEnix asked for players’ feedback and they received 20,000 responses which in turn helped them make adjustments for the final game. In the clip they mentioned that they would change the controls and the difficulty. Playing the demo I did think they needed to tighten the controls because it felt like my main character was on ice and it got frustrating chasing monsters or running away from them. I didn’t have much of an issue with the difficulty level, but I love the idea of having difficult settings to make the game more approachable for everyone. Between the wonderful landscapes, the deep battle system, and the story, I think Bravely Default has a lot of potential and I’m very excited to dive in! Bravely Default II releases 2/26/21.

Here’s what you’re looking forward to:

Legend of Zelda: Age of Calamity—what more can I say about this game? Breath of the Wild is the game that has made a lasting impression on everyone that has played it, yet we don’t know the full story of the Calamity War so what better way to make a war game than a Warriors style game? This may be the first and only time that people are going to play a Warriors game for the storyline, so now you get great gameplay and Zelda canon! The demo is available today and the full game releases 11/20/20.

Here’s what everyone is looking to:

Hitman 3 and Control: Hear me out, even if you’re not interested in these games (how could you not want to play Control though?!), you should be very interested in Cloud Gaming for Switch! Cloud Gaming is where games are stored and executed remotely on a provider’s hardware (Control will be handled by Ubitus) and streamed to the player’s Switch, so you do need a strong WiFi connection to be able to play these games. These will be the first cloud games to come to the Switch in the West, whereas Assassin’s Creed and Resident Evil 7 were released on cloud in Japan and have come back with excellent reception from players. Cloud gaming opens so many doors for Nintendo Switch and opportunities for more high powered games down the road and could even lead to a new generation of gaming when it comes to their next generation system.

A few final notes:

• Story of Seasons is actually a Harvest Moon game but because of mergers in publishing companies Marvelous stopped licensing NA distribution through Natsume so now it’s distributed by Xseed games. However, Natsume still owns the title “Harvest Moon”. So now the Bokujou Monogatari series, which used to be Harvest Moon, is Story of Seasons and any game being released currently as Harvest Moon is a Natsume spin-off game. So if you loved the old Harvest Moon this is for you!
• Fenyx Rising will be released on PS4, Xbox, and Steam on 12/2/2020 and looks like it could be a comparable successor to the Breath of the Wild gameplay but might lack in the characters and story department.
• Part Time UFO was released on iOS and Android in 2018 but Nintendo has updated it with two new modes “How High Can You Go?” where you stack items as high as possible, and “Treasure Island” which is described as a puzzle solvers paradise. This game was developed by Hal Laboratories who created Kirby so maybe we see a cameo from our favorite pink puff ball!
• I’ve never played the No More Heroes series but I’m really looking forward to playing the
  releases of 1 + 2 on Switch!
  
  What did you enjoy the most about this Partner Direct and what are you looking forward to? Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter!