Nintendo ends pandemic-driven Nintendo Direct hiatus with a remaster-filled showcase

It's no secret that Nintendo has struggled to adapt its marketing strategies to a COVID-19 world, and due to those difficulties it's been a good while since the company has hosted one of its flagship Nintendo Direct showcases.

Today's broadcast, a 50-minute long pre-recorded Direct highlighting releases planned for 2021 and beyond, marked the first bonafide Nintendo Direct since September 2019 and brought with it news about both fresh franchises and established Nintendo IP.

As it seems to be a trend with the Nintendo Switch, today's Nintendo Direct introduced a number of Switch remasters and ports for games first launched on other Nintendo platforms. Among those were two Famicom Detective Club games never released in the West, a Legend of Mana remaster, SaGa Frontier Remastered, an updated Switch port of the 3DS' Miitopia, and a handful of other titles.

This also includes a remaster of the 2011 Wii game The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword which, interestingly, includes a controller scheme that binds sword movement to the Switch's right joystick to adapt the standard motion controls of the original game for players not willing or able to use that feature on the Switch.

It was a quieter show for new entries in Nintendo's big franchises, but not a silent one by any means. Metroid Prime 4, announced back in 2017, was one noticeable omission; the show came and went without so much as a comment about the long-awaited revival.

On the Legend of Zelda front, Nintendo opted to share only a small development update for its lightly-teased The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2, noting ahead of the Skyward Sword announcement that development is underway and it'll have more to reveal at a later date.

However, Mario got his time in the spotlight thanks to the announcement of a new game in the Mario Golf franchise, and Nintendo closed out the show with the announcement that a new game in the ever-stylish Splatoon series is in development and that Splatoon 3 is headed to the Switch in 2022.

Find out about those announcements and more in the full Nintendo Direct presentation, embedded just above.