The star of last night’s Nintendo Direct? A tiny new Square Enix game, shown only in Japan

Last night’s Nintendo Direct was pretty good, wasn’t it? I didn’t get the new main series Fire Emblem game I was hoping for (soon, I still believe…), but we did get a second FE musou, Xenoblade, a Wii Sports successor, and more. If you’d told me a direct would skip the likes of Zelda, Metroid, and Bayonetta and still be completely satisfying, I’d have doubted you – but Nintendo works in mysterious ways, as ever. They nailed it.

One of the biggest contributors to the Direct was Square Enix, the Japanese RPG powerhouse that appears to be getting ever closer to Nintendo as the Switch continues to dominate Japan. Sure, their big-budget, triple-A games still go to PlayStation – but Square Enix seems to be putting more games on Switch or leading with Switch overall, flooding the machine with more modest-budget games and remakes of classics.

So, yeah – I’m excited for a whole new generation to play, completely misunderstand, and then hate Chrono Cross for being so unlike Chrono Trigger. I’m especially excited for Live A Live, a truly excellent SNES-era JRPG that never came West, and therefore has only been played by Japanese players and insufferable genre nerds like me. The SNES was a true golden age of Square’s output, and Live A Live is truly one of the best of the bunch, up there with Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. So that’s a big deal.

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