3 Biggest Surprises From the Nintendo E3 Direct

Nintendo had a ton of news for us during their E3 Direct as always, and while most of them were games that we already knew of, there were still some surprise announcements, too. With that said, here are the three biggest surprises from the Nintendo E3 Direct this year.

Kazuya Is the New Smash Character

We all knew that a new Smash character was likely going to be announced during the Direct, but it’s always so hard to predict who’s going to get added next and that’s part of the fun. Nintendo certainly didn’t disappoint, as they opened the show with a fantastic teaser of various existing Smash characters getting thrown into a chasm.

Kazuya Mishima was revealed as the edgy new Smash character, and he’s got a lot of moves if that trailer’s anything to go by. Sure, we already have a few fighting game characters in Smash, but it’ll be interesting to see how Tekken’s 3D fighting style is adapted into a largely 2D game.

Guardians of the Galaxy Is Coming to Switch

We barely got any time to process this announcement as everything was moving so fast, but just in case you missed it, the new Guardians of the Galaxy game from Eidos Montreal and Square Enix is coming to the Nintendo Switch as well.

This came as a bit of a surprise, as we saw some footage of the game at Square Enix’s presentation just a couple of days ago, and it definitely comes across as a game with pretty high graphical fidelity, not to mention its scope and size. It’s unclear whether it’ll be available on the Switch via cloud streaming, but either way, this is a huge one to look forward to.

Metroid Dread

Finally, while there still isn’t any news about the elusive Metroid Prime 4, Nintendo made up for it by making a surprise announcement that there was a new 2D Metroid game coming out this year. Titled Metroid Dread, players will once again take control of Samus Aran and battle a new robot enemy called E.M.M.I.

We got to see tons of gameplay footage during the Direct, and while it definitely sucks that we still don’t know how Metroid Prime 4’s coming along, this should help to tide fans over at least for the time being.