The more impressions I pick up and the more I watch, both about the game itself and people's reactions to its reveal, the more convinced I become that Nintendo did a poor job of initially communicating ARMS and its potential. At the very least they did a bit of a disservice in trying to pick up the Western audience. I've written in here before that I thought the trailer and Yabuki's demonstration felt a little redundant, but its placement within the conference didn't do it any favors in that manner either. I get why they did it, but I think for ARMS's sake having it immediately follow up 1 2 Switch was not a good idea. The fact that its trailer even starts up in largely the same way as 1 2's with the fake serious "showdown" and the big focus on people doing motion controls instead of what the game itself has to offer, I think, colored a lot of people's early opinions into dismissing ARMS out-of-hand (heh) as a slightly more stylish attempt at waggle-boxing rather than a more "legitimate" fighting game. The novelty of slowly explaining "when you punch, your character punches," wore out a long time ago and the game's real strategy and depth were barely touched on. I liked that they showed a demo match to give people an idea of the actual game screen, but if that's the idea they really shouldn't have completely glossed over the fact that the characters maneuver differently, and definitely shouldn't have blown right by the switchable fists aspect. The result is that aside from some extremely brief and uninformative clips at the very end of the trailer, all most viewers saw of ARMS without looking at more in-depth coverage later would have been two people flailing springy-arms at each other and that's it. No wonder there's so much concern about content!
I definitely don't think it's some huge irreversible problem, as it apparently changed a lot of minds already on the show floors, but Nintendo needs to do a better job in the future with messaging this. It's probably still a good 5 months away from launching anyway, plenty of time to drop more information about characters and modes and such, but they could have started this off from a more advantageous position, for the game's sake.
Also, having seen footage of the Japanese version of the game and realizing that the character names are all literally translated from how they're written in katakana, the names being so generic-sounding suddenly made a lot more sense to me. They're essentially using English names for the Japanese release but in that sense they come off sounding more like superhero or pro wrestler names that you'd normally expect to see in an anime or such. English names in Japanese makes that point a lot better than English names in English, where it just sounds kind of meh.
Then again people in America love Batman and that's no less direct, so. ¯\_(ツ_/¯
I definitely don't think it's some huge irreversible problem, as it apparently changed a lot of minds already on the show floors, but Nintendo needs to do a better job in the future with messaging this. It's probably still a good 5 months away from launching anyway, plenty of time to drop more information about characters and modes and such, but they could have started this off from a more advantageous position, for the game's sake.
Also, having seen footage of the Japanese version of the game and realizing that the character names are all literally translated from how they're written in katakana, the names being so generic-sounding suddenly made a lot more sense to me. They're essentially using English names for the Japanese release but in that sense they come off sounding more like superhero or pro wrestler names that you'd normally expect to see in an anime or such. English names in Japanese makes that point a lot better than English names in English, where it just sounds kind of meh.
Then again people in America love Batman and that's no less direct, so. ¯\_(ツ_/¯