Nintendo cute overkills E3 with Yoshi’s Wooly World

I guarantee you won’t see anything out of E3 as adorable as Nintendo’s presentation for Yoshi’s Wooly World, in which the developer Emi Watanabe sits in front of a table of goddamn adorable plushy yarn Yoshis, cheerfully explaining the inspiration for the game, intercut with gameplay footage. Unless someone is developing Puppies Snuggling Kittens 2015, that’s it for the cute factor at E3. Yoshi’s Wooly World will be out on October 16th.

A new Starfox, co-developed with Platinum Games’ Bayonetta 2 director, relies on a gimmick in which the TV shows you the cinematic view and the gamepad shows you the cockpit view. Along with Splatoon, Nintendo is counting on us to aim with our gamepads. The universal gesture for this control scheme is to clutch both hands in front of you and pivot your torso around at awkward angles as if you were a malfunctioning robot. But to be fair, those of us who’ve played Splatoon can attest that it kinda sorta works.

Skylanders and amiibos have formed an unholy toy alliance by offering Skylanders for the WiiU version of the upcoming Skylanders that will work as Skylanders and as amiibos. This holiday season might be remembered as toymaggedon among the parents of Wii-aged children.

The rest of the presentation was a lot of trailers without comment, and sometimes even without coherence. I still have no idea what that Atlus game was. It looked very Japanese. It might have been called Mirage, or Mirage Master, or even just FE. I’m not sure. All I know is that it’s a tale of youth and heroes guided by destiny. That’s a direct quote, by the way. Never mind that it applies to, like, every single JRPG ever. Also shown were trailers for a co-op Zelda game about standing on top of your friends for the 3DS, a Hyrule Warriors for the 3DS, a Metroid co-op game for the 3DS, a Fire Emblem game for the 3DS, something from Level 5 called Yo-Kai Watch about gesture gimmicks on the 3DS, and a Mario and Luigi Paper Jam thing for the 3DS. Hey, Sony, why can’t you support your Vita the way Nintendo supports their 3DS?

Finally, Xenoblade Chronicles X will be out on December 4th. Boom.