I touched upon it earlier in this thread and went in depth a bit in the SB, but I get the distinct impression that this Direct was incredibly rushed.
Some evidence supporting my theory being:
-Pokemon DLC was not only in the Direct as opposed to its own separate Pokemon Presents like it usually is, but given the opening trailer. This is doubly weird seeing as how we already knew about a decent chunk of what was shown.
-In a similar vein, the only Splatoon news that we got was the next Splatfest, something that’s usually only announced through other means like twitter.
-The new Princess Peach game and Dark Moon port didn’t even get a trailer of any kind, despite being pretty massive bombshells. Only a few seconds of gameplay followed by a “yeah it’s coming.” The Peach game didn’t even get a name.
-Even the Mario RPG trailer felt kinda cheap, though that could just be me.
-They spent a lot of time on Pikmin 4, and yet none of it really felt like it was direct worthy by itself, at least not enough to warrant marketing the Direct as being “Pikmin focused.” They also released a trailer for the game just days earlier, stuff that probably could have been in the Direct itself had they planned on it.
-Even the third party stuff felt somewhat lacking. The only real “new” major announcement on that front was Dragon Quest Monsters I think.
Now I’m not saying anything definitively, but I think what happened is that they looked at the lack of an E3 event this year as an opportunity to not be obligated to make a presentation, thinking that the rest of the industry would follow suit. Once they saw that everyone else had their presentation out, they started to panic and slap together as much filler content as they could find so they could support the one or two trailers that they could actually finish.
Now, predicting Nintendo’s actions is something everyone should stay away from, but if I’m right, that means that they were planning on holding off on their really big announcements until later, perhaps during a September Direct.
