Starting off with the indie showcase. Disclaimer: I'm very disconnected from a lot of these sorts of games so this part will probably sound really dismissive.
Balatro: Friends of Jimbo: CARDS! Now with crossovers! No real interest in the crossovers but now I want to play Balatro again which means several hours will inexplicably disappear sometime in the near future.
Neva: Probably not my thing but I dig the way they're stylizing those sprites.
Moth Kubit: Genuinely no clue what to think about this. The trailer they used makes it look like it's trying to cram a lot of stuff into it, though, and I can at least respect that even if it probably won't be my thing.
Coffee Talk Tokyo: Coffee Talk occupies an unfortunate space in my mind where I just remember the time someone (can't remember who) who worked on it acting really disgusted on Twitter about having to share a genre with Nekopara and Saya no Uta. I'm probably being unreasonable about this grudge but it's hard to get past that.
Sea of Stars DLC: Still made by the guys who hid a quote from Jordan fucking Peterson in one of their other games, still a pass from me. Also making one of their main characters constantly handstand just makes me think of Lunar Dragon Song which is not an association you want.
Powerwash Simulator Shrek DLC: What's this doing in the indie section? I thought we already went over this with Keighley and Dave the Diver last year! Gets a generic "probably good for fans" from me because the game isn't my thing.
Morsels: Seems reasonably neat even if I'm really not into most non-conventional roguelikes, but the best part of the trailer for me was the devs talking about their game about a heroic mouse fighting evil cats with their own cat in the background being cute.
Date Everything: Fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off FUUUUUUUUUUCK OFF. This "we've never played a VN but we watched five minutes of Okosan's route in Hatoful Boyfriend so we can totally make a good ironic satire of the whole genre, right?" bullshit should've died ten goddamn years ago. Fuckers probably think they've got a unique fucking premise too.
Peglin: Another of those non-conventional roguelikes I generally don't like when they're not named Hades or Balatro, but I've been thinking about RPGs with really bizarre combat systems lately and I'm pretty sure "your abilities are all used via pachinko" is pretty high up there.
Wobbly Life: Not interested.
Pico Park 2: Congrats to the indie showcase hosts for having more convincing fake gameplay dialogue than that one Anthem trailer. This looks like it'd be pretty fun if you got a bunch of people together, but perhaps a bit punishing—most of what I saw in that trailer looks like it might need everyone to pull off, which would mean any one player fucking up ruins things for everyone else no matter how well they played.
Sizzle reel: Not much to say about most of these. I do think having more access to Shovel Knight is good, though, even if I'm not particularly fond of how overdone it eventually became. Also, putting Metal Slug Tactics in an indie section is probably even sillier than trying to pass Dave the Diver or Powerwash Simulator as indie games—it is backed by the biggest money mark in the world, after all, and I'd hardly call DotEmu an indie company either.
Pizza Tower: Maybe I'll actually play this now that I don't have to deal with Steam to get it!
All told, the indie showcase was exactly what I expected it to be: a lot of stuff that's mostly for other people, with a couple of things I'm personally interested in. And that's fine, honestly, even if I'm pretty caustic about some of this stuff.
And for the partner showcase:
Tetris Forever: Blocks! Good to see TetComp actually acknowledging non-guideline Tetris for once. If they let Digital Eclipse bring up some of the wilder shit about the rights battle with Robert Maxwell (yes, that Robert Maxwell) in their documentary part that'll just be gold.
Star Overdrive: Totally radical, man! ...I don't have enough knowledge to say anything more serious about this one.
Goat Simulator 3: I appreciate the footage lagging in the trailer, nice of Coffee Stain to not forget what Goat Simulator is all about.
Sizzle reel: Literally all anyone's gonna talk about is the like ten seconds of Trails in the Sky remake footage here, and just by virtue of that it's a success.
Spongebob Squarepants: The Patrick Star Game: If Paramount wants me to care about anything Spongebob they're doing these days they'll need to stop pissing on Stephen Hillenburg's grave, and I don't think they have the capacity to do that.
Fitness Boxing 3: I love that Fitness Boxing is a thing that exists, just a nice continuation of the Wii-era "look at all the neat stuff we can do with motion controls" spirit. Sadly my own Switch setup doesn't physically have room to play these kinds of games.
Capcom Fighting Collection 2: Lots of interesting stuff here. A quick Wikipedia check shows that a lot of the games here just don't have releases on current systems period—hell, Plasma Sword and Project Justice haven't been seen since the Dreamcast. Also, just pretend I included basically any quote whatsoever from the Alpha 3 announcer.
Marvel vs Capcom collection: We already knew about this one, but now we have a release date!
Atelier Yumia: I'm not sure what to think of this. Taking a turn-based RPG series and making it into what appears to be a one-member action RPG doesn't sit right with me, and I still remember the last time Gust tried to turn a turn-based game into an action RPG for trend-chasing reasons, so I'm very cautious here. Though I'm sure they're smart enough to not make shaking the controller a mandatory part of the battle system this time.
Suikoden I+II: Yay, we have a release date! The footage seems to have a mix of unsmoothed and smoothed sprites, which is an odd choice, but just having versions of the first two Suikoden games on current systems is nice at least. Time will tell what the localizations look like, but you'd probably have to do an unedited MTL to be worse than Suiko2's old loc so I'm reasonably optimistic on that front.
Dragon Quest III HD-2D: Looks nice, which I'm sure everyone expected but confirmation is good to have. It'll be interesting to see just how remixed the final game is—obviously they're adding plenty of new stuff, though. I'm sure they'll make Toriyama proud.
Castlevania Dominus Collection: JONATHAN! CHARLOTTE! JONATHAN! CHARLOTTE! More seriously, these are all great games and people should play them.
Civilization 7: It's been a long time since I last played a Civilization game, and I'm not sure I'll play this one. It's there, though.
Tales of Graces f Remastered: TOMODACHIIIIII! This is one of the more unique Tales games mechanically, and that should be interesting for people who started with more recent games to see.
MySims Cozy Bundle: Regular Sims aren't my thing, and this probably isn't either. Using "cozy" as an obvious cynical marketing ploy to play on current trends in indie games won't work on me, either, but presumably it'll work on someone.
FNAF Help Wanted 2: FNAF wasn't especially interesting to me at the start, and the gradual transformation of the series into ARG nonsense didn't help. Nor did the guy who owns it turning out to be a fucking fascist. So yeah, this isn't my thing.
Sizzle reel #2: Nothing I'm interested in here. Epic Mickey these days is just a depressing reminder of when Disney actually alleged itself to have a soul, Tales of the Shire is more corporate gravedancing that'll probably sell more than it deserves to, Just Dance...exists I guess, as do EA Sports FC 25 (I'd feel sorry for them having to use that mouthful of a title if it wasn't, y'know, EA) and Lego Horizon Adventures. Funko Fusion, meanwhile, is objectively an abomination by virtue of being a Funko Pop game. And would the typical Funko Pop demographic even be interested in a video game? You can't slot a plastic section from another box that you've scammed someone into signing at AX into a video game!
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma: Another chance at making this stick in 3D, hopefully with some lessons learned about putting too many polygons on your dropped item models.
Yakuza Kiwami: I'm sure having this on Switch will be good for someone, even if I personally don't need it.
This was worth it just for the ten seconds of FC remake footage, but the undercard was mostly nice too. Aside from another goddamn LOL IRONIC DATING SIM and the Funko Pop game, they had some good announcements
