Another E3 has come and gone. Once upon a time I would take vacation time to watch all the coverage as it happened, but now I'm content to just catch what info I can and then watch a bunch of trailers and gameplay at the end of the week. So maybe it's because of my lessened interest in it, but overall I really enjoyed what was presented this year. Moreso than a lot of previous years really. Anyway here's a few rambling impressions of what I saw, good, bad and ugly (like playing Monster Hunter with an insect glaive or hammer kind of ugly).

1.  The Trials of Mana remake was my happiest surprise of the show. I've played through the translated SFC rom almost half a dozen times, and I can tell you that everyone is in for a treat if the gameplay turns out even halfway decent. It was a fun story, with a lot of replay due to multiple characters and class changes that unlock different unique abilities.  The Mana Collection on the other hand was kind of a disappointment. Just the first three games??  Even with a fully translated copy of Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana, that was a hugely missed opportunity. That's not even half the games in the series. Granted most of the others were kind of crap, but they still would have been nice to see.

2. The new Contra game.... who the hell is that for? An overhead shooter? With a Panda? Yeah I don't get that at all.

3. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake is finally within a year's time (if there are no other delays and I wouldn't put money on that). It looks great, and I do look forward to playing it, but I will likely wait until the full collection is released.

4. Link's Awakening looks even better than the last time I saw it. I'm a little disappointed that the new content seems to be multiplayer related instead of expanding the main story. Still it's probably been 20 years since I've played it so I'm sure most of it will feel pretty fresh all the same.

5. On a related Zelda note, Breath of the Wild 2? Wow. Guess I should get around to playing the first. Probably should get around to playing Skyward Sword too.

6. Persona 5 Royale and DQ 11 are definitely looking like the definitive versions with tons of new content, but dammit I don't know if I'm going to pick them up. I loved both of them, but fuck man they were both 90+ hours in length. I'm not sure I want to play through all of that with another 10 to 20 hours of content. A man only got so much time.

7. Panzer Dragoon was another left field surprise. Can't wait to play that. I spent serious time with very few Saturn games, so this would be cool.

8. Romancing SaGa 3 might be good. Romancing SaGa 2 was pretty dull, but from what I remember from the few times I tried a fan translation of RS3, it wasn't half bad.  Scarlet Grace is a fairly unknown quantity for me though, so I'm going to have to do a little research on that one.

9. What the hell happened to No More Heroes 3? The first game was fun. The second was less fun. This looks just stupid as hell. Sure it was only a trailer, but it was a stupid trailer.

10. The new footage of The Sinking City looks great. That's a game I keep forgetting I'm looking foward too. Damn thing comes out in about 2 weeks. Looks good enough that I might not even wait until it hits hobo pricing. Going to have to wait for a couple reviews, but it could be my game of the summer.

11. The new multiplayer BurgerTimeParty! is going to make me shoot someone. It looks so bad.

12. Etherborn??? Well that might be interesting. Then again it's made by FromSoftware so that pretty much means it will be too hard for me. Pity too since George RR Martin helped develop the story or world or whatever it is. He got a credit so he did something.

13. Ghostwire Tokyo!!! When I saw that Tango Gameworks was making this I kind of peed my little bit. Those are the same guys who've been making the Evil Within games, so there's little doubt that there will be some fucked up chaos going on in the game. Very curious to find out more about this one.