At Nintendo’s Switch event on Thursday night, there were a ton of games that looked amazing. Super Mario Odyssey creeped me out, in a good way, with little-person Mario in the real world and Zelda: Breath Of the Wild still knocks me off my feet every time I see a new trailer. Still, there was only one game that really caught my interest and had me begging for more: ARMS.
ARMS Is The Spiritual Successor To Wii Sports, Mixed With Street Fighter
ARMS is a fighting game unlike anything seen before. You play as a hero with spring-loaded boxing gloves for hands. You hold the joycons, the Switch’s controllers, in your hands and jab to punch. You can maneuver your hero around the screen by moving the joycons side to side or jump, dodge or unleash ultimate attacks with a push of a button. It’s a fighting game that seems easy to learn but hard to master.
The five available heroes we saw in the demo, including Spring Man and Ninjara, all have unique playstyles. Master Mummy is a tank that can take a few extra hits, Spring Girl jumps higher than the rest and Mechanica can float with booster jets. It’s like someone took the joy from Wii Boxing and mixed it in with the depth of Street Fighter. I think Nintendo read my childhood journal.
Wii Boxing was my life when the original Wii first came out. I spent hours upon hours slamming my fists into the air in front of my television, hoping the snap on the Wiimote wouldn’t break and I’d get a stern scolding from my parents. The golden gloves on my Mii were a sign of dominance, so when friends came over to play they know I meant business. It was the first game that ever got me off of the couch and into the game, giving a fat, lazy, introverted kid access to some indoor exercise.
Nintendo hasn’t released a game that’s captured my sense of physical curiosity since Wii Sports , with Wii Sports Resort being boring as hell and nothing on the Wii U even coming close. ARMS feels like the first game that could capture fat baby Steve’s wonder again.
ARMS As An ESport
I believe ARMS could be an extremely popular eSports game, one that everyone would love to watch even if you don’t understand what’s happening on-screen. A casual parent watching League of Legends with their kid has no idea what’s going on, but after watching five minutes of ARMS they’ll get it. Wii Sports might have been easy for everyone to understand, but it also lacked strategic depth. There weren’t many Wii Bowling tournaments because a good player could get a strike on nearly every throw. ARMS seems to be different, which is why I’m so excited about it’s release.
Nintendo has tried to break into the competitive gaming racket before, with mixed success. Super Smash Bros. in nearly every incarnation is one of the most popular fighting games of all time. Games like Super Smash Bros. Melee still have a fanatical cult following, with little to no actual interaction with Nintendo. Pokken Tournament was the Japanese game company’s attempt at creating their own fighting game and fan base, which hasn’t turned out too well. With poor balancing, laggy online matches and generic gameplay, PT never caught on like Smash. Could ARMS be the fighting game scene Nintendo so desperately wants to create?
AS I’ve grown from fat baby Steve into lanky, older Steve, I’ve learned to curb my excitement about games before they are released. I may not have been as hyped for No Man’s Sky as the rest of the world, but I’m still waiting for Kingdom Hearts 3 to come out. ARMS could be a complete disappointment, with unresponsive controllers and terrible balancing issues. Even with that caveat, I still have hope Nintendo can help me relive my childhood memories of making punching motions in front of my TV.
