Nintendo offers new Super Mario Odyssey details and demo of Square’s intriguing ‘Project Octopath Traveler’
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Nintendo announced a few items today to hold gamers over until the holiday season — and to appease would-be SNES Classic buyers. It announced a few details of its most anticipated upcoming games and even a demo (remember those?) of a throwback title from Square Enix that caught everyone’s eye way back at the Switch launch event.
After a warm-up with some bones thrown to the hungry 3DS crowd (some Pokémon updates and a new orange and white variant of the handheld), Nintendo moved on to the main event.
After a few other small announcements and a lengthy overview of the new Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which looks great, if rather involved, the Nintendo Direct video moved on to the still awkwardly named “Working Title: ‘Project Octopath Traveler.'”
As a pleasant surprise, the game has a demo now available on the Switch eShop, which I’m downloading as I type this. It seems like kind of a beta test, as players will be polled on various aspects of the game. Hopefully this means they just want people to get involved, and not that there’s some kind of conceptual directionlessness.
After the RPG section came the much-awaited new info on Super Mario Odyssey. We know the game is coming out next month on the 27th, so right now everyone is just hungry for details. And details we got: Nintendo showed off new snowy, beachy and tropical worlds, as well as the unusual capability in the game for players to customize Mario with new clothes.
A really nice-looking photo mode to capture the many insane moments you’ll encounter in this game was icing on the cake. There’s even a vertical composition mode for sharing on smartphones.