10 Ways Nintendo Dropped The Ball At E3 2018

6. Animal Crossing Is Nowhere To Be Seen

Metroid Prime 4
Nintendo

Did you manage to count how many times the livestream chats for Nintendo's E3 shows have been filled with pleas, requests and shoutouts for Animal Crossing? It got pretty difficult to keep track after the seven-hundredth request.

In fact, the three most common phrases involved one or all of the following:

1) Waluigi for Smash!

2) Where is Animal Crossing?

3) Not more Smash!

Nintendo have promised to grow the audience of the Switch in year two, and Animal Crossing is the perfect game to do that. It's social, slow-paced and is actually quite relaxing. A game series that has sold almost 12 million on 3DS, nigh-on the same on DS, 4 million on Wii and 2 million way back on GameCube.

Clearly, portable Animal Crossing is a license to print money.

But questions remain. Will Nintendo attempt to make a sequel to the ill-fated and badly designed Amiibo Festival? If Pokemon has been tweaked to align with Pokemon Go. Does that mean Animal Crossing will look more like mobile title Pocket Camp? If so, oh dear. Welcome to collect-a-thon hell!

The point really is this: the Nintendo faithful need a great core Animal Crossing title and they need it sooner rather than later.

Contributor

Bryan Langley’s first console was the Super Nintendo and he hasn’t stopped using his opposable thumbs since. He is based in Bristol, UK and is still searchin' for them glory days he never had.