It’s a shame Arms didn’t have legs. This is not the first time nor the last time that joke will be said.
A little more than eight years ago, Nintendo revealed Arms, a quirky motion-controlled fighting game with interesting concepts and unique mechanics. The core Mario Kart team was behind it and as the game hurtled towards a June 2017 release date, it seemed like Arms might have some legs (sorry). Years later, maybe it didn’t. But either way, Arms will go down as an interesting entry in the mid-tier Nintendo franchise milieu. Our original review from Neal Ronaghan (who is writing the words you’re reading now and also contributed to this Review Revisit) was positive, saying that “Arms is a fantastic start to a new franchise.” Years later, that franchise is crickets. Daan Koopman did a second opinion review and liked it even more than Neal. And…wait wait. How many ****ing times did we make the “arms has legs” joke? Does anybody edit this ****?
Neal Ronaghan: I believed in Arms. The wild motion control combat. The surprisingly deep meta. The tremendous amount of character built into every fighter. And then Arms did a weird thing: it just never really engaged with that character, letting it exist far away on the fringes and not as a meaningful part of the main game. It didn’t have Splatoon’s level of lore care inside of the game. The gameplay is still fun and the online multiplayer has some juice. It’s not quite a raucous party game, but get people of a similar skill level together and it’s a good time.
I can only speculate as to what happened (because Nintendo seemed fully onboard with this game in 2017), but aside from a Smash Bros. DLC character, Arms has more or less faded away. That’s a shame, because it’s a cool game and an Arms 2 that expanded on the best parts of the original (similar to Splatoon 2) has the potential to be revelatory. Instead, this might just be a game that gets trotted out in 30 years when the game’s producer Kosuke Yabuki has his Sakamoto moment and gets to revive the series with an M-rated sequel.
Syrenne McNulty:Arms is a game for which I love the world and I love the character designs. In fact, for the first couple of weeks that Arms came out, I went and played it online and with friends and enjoyed a lot of the meta fighting experience that it has. It does bring a lot of fighting game psychology into it. Where I think that it really stumbles is there wasn’t another layer of depth underneath once the community had really kind of scratched the surface. So it never became more of a mainstay than just pop it in every now and then when they had a new character. I would love an Arms 2 that could expand on that.
I don’t think they’ll ever do it. I would also love a spin-off where these characters could interact in another context. I think that there are a lot of different contexts where the core mechanics of Arms could be reinterpreted in interesting ways.
