Nintendo Covers Up Violence With Hilariously Bad Gameplay

Usually, trailers for upcoming games tend to show good gameplay. You know, things like attacks that land and shots that actually hit their targets—stuff that might get players excited about the idea of being good at a game. But when promoting two of the biggest third-party games coming to Switch, Nintendo has thrown that idea out the window, presumably to avoid sullying its family-friendly image with gory violence. 

During Thursday’s Nintendo Partner Direct, Nintendo showed off Resident Evil Requiem and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, two games headed to its new portable console in the next few months. What stood out most about these segments wasn’t the visual quality of the two blockbusters running on less powerful hardware, however, but how terrible whoever was capturing the footage was at playing the games.

The Direct’s trailers for both games were full of missed shots and poorly-timed attacks, as pointed out by former Kotaku EIC Stephen Totilo and others. One shot from the Requiem trailer showed Leon Kennedy picking up a zombie’s chainsaw to fight off enemies only to miss and hit the railing on a bed, causing sparks to fly. Another shot from the Great Circle trailer showed Indiana Jones missing a boat full of Nazis and hitting the water below them instead.

The Requiem trailer is especially funny to watch—the narrator raves about Leon’s “physical prowess” and how “he can fire from a distance using handguns and rifles” over clips of him missing shots by literal feet. Compared to a recent Capcom trailer for Requiem, which has no problem showing some pretty graphic stuff, it seems clear Nintendo went out of its way to hide the violence in its latest showcase. 

Nintendo hasn’t been very keen on showing violence in previous Directs, either. When it announced a Switch port of The Witcher 3 during its Direct at E3 2019, it edited out a clip of the game’s notorious hanging tree that was shown in online uploads of the trailer in some regions.

Other trailers for more violent games that have been ported onto Nintendo systems, like Cyberpunk 2077, have received more atmospheric trailers that avoid showing gameplay. Some trailers haven’t been shown at all. The 2017 Direct announcement for Wolfenstein 2, a shooter about murdering tons of Nazis, lacked a trailer entirely and was revealed only with a still image of key art. And, during the same Direct, gameplay for Doom featured more apparently intentionally bad gameplay, clips in which the player fires off to the side of enemies without landing any hits alongside one shot where the player is about to be attacked and…does nothing at all.

Contrast that with how the developers themselves sometimes show their games being played on Nintendo’s consoles. Here’s a CD Projekt Red trailer for Cyberpunk 2: Ultimate Edition showing off Joy-Con motion controls. It shows a woman mimicking the real-life hand gesture to throw a grenade whose explosion proceeds to decapitate the enemy on screen. Later she frantically slashes the air to slice through enemies with a katana. No one in the video misses a single kill and they’re all smiling while they do it. 

Putting smiles on players’ faces is Nintendo’s corporate mission, but not with bullets and blood, apparently, at least when the Nintendo Direct cameras are rolling. We don’t have confirmation from Nintendo that it’s an intentional policy, but it’s certainly a recurring theme. However, it’s clear that Nintendo at least has a complicated relationship with the trailers for M-rated games, more of which are getting ported to Switch 2 every day. 

While today was certainly an embarrassing day for poor Leon Kennedy, as a big gamer who could definitely be a better gamer myself, I at least felt a little represented by the horrible gameplay shown off.