Man this got hidden from me fast.
The X-Com trailer showed some really nice aesthetics and mood, but they were just so hard up on trying to say "Hey, Bioshock creators, Bioshock elements!" and really undermined it. For a game that actually sounds pretty promising, I've no idea why it took such a limited look and paced it so terribly.
I've always loved Xcom, but I'm just not offended by it moving away from the old isometric tactical play. If they can really do something with it, and it sounds like they can, so be it. But that trailer was just lousy.
For E3, I was pretty crushed at the lack of Xenoblade. I've never liked Takahashi, and I always used to enjoy ganging up at that series and it's fans back when it was relevant, but Xenoblade sounded so interesting to me. He went on this big spiel about wanting to reform and move away as much as possible from the dying cinematic driven style, and it did show.
If you aren't aware of the changes to it, they basically took it out of hallways and cutscenes and turned it into an open world loot hack. Kind of a mixture of the FFXII element, but with less half baking and more classical WRPG elements fused with JRPG elements. Such as the combat engine having non-cutaway design, positional work, psuedo turn-based elements but with JRPG combing and speed.
Character progression done through just utter scores of loot, apparently very well itemized, talent trees, etc. Game progression handled through questing and exploration, it looked so nice. What a waste, of all of the horrible Japanese RPGs that get dumped on our shores, this one is left behind. Especially when Camelot's Beyond the Beyond 4 is given presence at the conference. I am not amused.
I think we'll get Zettai Hero, I'm not really overly fond of NIS, but I mean they localized Disgaea Infinite, I have to imagine Zettai Hero will come over if they can do that. Honestly never heard of Classic Dungeon before. I'll have to look it up.
Ultimately I didn't get much out of this E3 for me personally. 3DS is in it's launching "spam the remakes" period, and there were a lot of 2d platformers, but I think everything else I really wanted this year was announced already. I mean Kirby and Donkey Kong look OK, but I'm not really thrilled for them or anything. Honestly, Ubisoft's 2D Rayman reboot looked far more inspired to me and I don't even like that franchise.
Still want to see more of Civ 5, hoping for a Monster Hunter Freedom 3 release date, but I'm out of ooh an ah mode already.
Oh, but I was kind of amused/annoyed at Valve outright trolling it's fans. Delaying Portal 2, announcing some awesome surprise, then that surprise is a PS3 port of Portal 2? What the hell? It's kind of fun though to see people speculating on Half Life 3, Episode 3, Counter Strike updates then wind up with a third platform for an existing game, and one that the company constantly berates as well.