Our 4 biggest predictions for the June Nintendo Direct Mini

digitaltrends.com:

A new Nintendo Direct is upon us, but it’s positioned differently than the last few major showcases that Nintendo held. The June 28 presentation is a Nintendo Direct Mini Partner Showcase, calling back to a type of show Nintendo held frequently throughout 2020. It’s shorter in length — Nintendo says this show is 25 minutes — and it will be focused on third-party games not developed by Nintendo.While this means that we shouldn’t expect the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or something on the level of Metroid Dread to show up here, we suspect that some big announcements are still in store. It’s always a lot of fun to speculate about what might show up at gaming events like this, so here are four things we want to see at this Nintendo Direct Mini Partner Showcase this year.

This Ubisoft-published Mario spinoff was announced a year ago, but we haven’t seen it since. As Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is a major third-party Switch exclusive featuring a Nintendo icon, we suspect it’ll be one of the main games featured during this Nintendo Direct Mini Partner Showcase. We hope to see more gameplay, learn what’s different from the first game, and get a release date for this game whenever it finally re-emerges.

2017’s Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle was a nice surprise as those Nintendo and Ubisoft franchises meshed surprisingly well and the game had solid XCOM-like strategy gameplay. Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope will have a bigger scope as Mario, his friends, and Rabbids new and old based on those friends explore the universe in order to save cute star-like creatures with Rabbid ears called Sparks. We’ve only gotten a cinematic trailer and a little bit of gameplay so far though, so there’s still a lot about