Nintendo Direct June 2023: all the news and trailers

Detective Pikachu is getting a sequel. In October, you’ll be able to once again solve mysteries with Tim Goodman and his coffee-loving Pikachu with a voice that sounds suspiciously like Will Arnett.

The first Detective Pikachu game launched on the DS in 2018. In it, Tim Goodman and a strangely verbose Pikachu in a funny hat worked together to solve various mysteries around Ryme City while investigating the disappearance of Tim’s missing father. Despite it being a Pokémon game, Detective Pikachu had some oddly dark themes with a plot that’s basically a Nintendo-ified version of a James Bond movie. (I’m not kidding — there’s a conspiracy by a media exec to engineer pokémon-related disasters so he can report on them and increase the power of his news company. That’s basically Tomorrow Never Dies.)

It would have been nice to get a proper release date for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s upcoming DLC during today’s Nintendo Direct. But at the very least, the new trailer for The Teal Mask and The Indigo Disk expansions does deliver on something players have been jonesing for since launch: more fashion.

Along with new trainers Carmine and Kieran, The Teal Mask and The Indigo Disk’s latest trailer provides a bit more detail about Kitakami, the new locale Pokémon Scarlet and Violet players will travel to as they participate in the town’s traditional Festival of Masks. In addition to a variety of new hairstyles and outfits that weren’t available in the games previously, the DLC will also feature a storyline revolving around new pokémon Okidogi, Munkidori, and Fezandipiti — a seemingly legendary trio known as the “Loyal Three” — and Ogerpon, the “evil ogre” they protect Kitakami from.

Nintendo is releasing a new WarioWare game for Switch, and the gimmick for this one is moving. In WarioWare: Move It!, you’ll move and shake your way through more than 200 microgames while holding onto Joy-Con controllers.

Nintendo’s trailer for the game showed off a whole bunch of silly microgames, which will force you to do things like shake paws with a dog, ski down a mountain, flail your arms in the air, and even slide down a slide you might be familiar with if you’ve played Super Mario 64. The game isn’t just a solo endeavor: you’ll also be able to play local co-op with a friend for what’s sure to be some very silly shenanigans, or you can play special minigames in a party mode with up to three other people.

Mario’s big year continues. Following the debut of a theme park and an animated movie, 2023 will also be getting the next Super Mario Bros. game. It’s called Super Mario Bros. Wonder and is a return to the 2D side-scrolling action of the original games and the New Super Mario Bros. series. It has some weird new abilities, including the ability to turn into an elephant. It launches on October 20th.

The last mainline Super Mario game was Odyssey, which hit the Switch back in 2017. Since then, we’ve had spinoffs like Super Mario Maker 2, the retro collection Super Mario 3D All-Stars, and the 3D World expansion Bowser’s Fury.

Nintendo is remaking one of the most beloved RPGs of all time: Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. The new version of the game for Nintendo Switch, titled only Super Mario RPG, was revealed during the June Nintendo Direct presentation on Wednesday.

Super Mario RPG looks like a faithful reimagining of the original, though with a modern art style. I saw a bunch of iconic characters and moments from the Super NES classic: Mallow and Geno are back, for example, as are baddies like Birdo and Booster (!). It appears the battle system will be largely similar as well. And the game’s reveal trailer was filled with remixes of songs from the original game. To my ears, they were awesome adaptations of the tracks from Legend of the Seven Stars.

Nintendo is holding its second Direct showcase event of the year, and it sounds like it’ll be a big one. Back in February, the company showed off Tears of the Kingdom, released a remastered Metroid Prime, added Game Boy games to Switch Online, and gave us a release date for Pikmin 4. This time around, the focus will be on Switch games coming out through the rest of 2023.

That includes the next Pikmin, which launches in July, but it’s also likely we’ll see what big game or games Nintendo has in store for the always-important holiday season. Right now, the only major release on the calendar is the first expansion for Pokémon Violet and Scarlet, which is due out in the fall. The Nintendo Direct showcase is expected to last around 40 minutes, which is plenty of time to pack in some big reveals.