Reggie Talks Last Story, Xenoblade, Secretly Thinking About PS Vita

Reggie Fils-Aime, the president and COO of Nintendo of America, starred in an awkwardly shot promo video for a bunch of the company’s offerings for 2012—on the exact same day of the United States launch of their biggest competition, the PlayStation Vita.

But despite the auspicious day Nintendo chose for the announcement video broadcast, there wasn’t much in the way of big, earth-shattering announcements…mostly just some info about upcoming game releases, and lots of awkward talking from game-making people. While I didn’t expect them to call out Sony outright, I did kind of think they might offer some bigger news…

Well, anyway.

Shortly after his introduction, Reggie turned things over to Bill Trinen, Nintendo of America’s director of product marketing, who talked about a new game called Dillon’s Rolling Western, a strategy-action game that looks like it has a lot in common with Rango, that weird, acid-fueled kids’ movie with Johnny Depp starring as a chameleon. The controls make use of the touch screen and circle pad, and from what I saw in the video, it actually looks pretty good, with a blend between action-combat and strategy-bits, where you earn and buy defenses to keep the town safe. Trinen said that the game was available on the eShop today, and he’s right—it costs $9.99. He also noted that it would take gamers about 20 hours to complete, so for ten bucks, that ain’t bad.

He also said this:  “Just one more reason to jump on the eShop steam train”

Veiled hints at some kind of secret partnership with Valve? Or just awkward phrasing? YOU decide!

Trinen then sat down with a couple of localization guys to discuss the upcoming releases of Kid Icarus: Uprising and Mario Tennis Open, the latter of which is scheduled to release in the US on May 20.

It was also confirmed (if it wasn’t already) that the US version of Kid Icarus would also be packed with the system-stand to aid in playing the game’s pad/touch-screen controls. During both interviews there’s some pretty good gameplay footage, so be sure to check that out.

Towards the end of the video, Reggie took over the proceedings again and started talking about the April 6 US release of Xenoblade Chronicles and announced the 2012 release of The Last Story in the States. If the latter of those two titles sounds somewhat familiar, it should: it was made by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, who announced the other day that he’s now working on a surfing game for the iPhone. And also, you know, “Last Story” sounds a shit-ton like “Final Fantasy.” But I can’t have been the first person to notice that.

And that was about it! The whole video is available right here. Take a look and let me know whether or not you’re a little disappointed there wasn’t something more major announced…