New Zelda Delayed Until the NX Console Comes Out in 2017

Nintendo's new Zelda game will indeed appear on the company's new NX game machine---but neither will arrive this year.

Announcing its year-end financial results on Wednesday, Nintendo finally gave some long-awaited updates on the status of its promised, open-world The Legend of Zelda game as well as NX, the new game machine it announced over a year ago. They just weren't the sort of updates fans were hoping to hear. Zelda, planned for release on the current Wii U console, has been developed "in tandem" with a version for NX, Nintendo said. Both versions are currently planned to launch alongside NX in March 2017.

Zelda will be playable at this year's E3 Expo in June, Nintendo said. And it'll get a lot of attention since it will be the only game for any platform playable at Nintendo's booth. NX won't even be discussed at E3, Nintendo said, although it will be shown before 2016 is out.

Legend of Zelda wasn't just Nintendo's tentpole release for Christmas, it was the whole damn tent.

You might think this is a pretty big kick in the pants for Wii U's holiday season, and you'd be right. Legend of Zelda wasn't just Nintendo's tentpole release for Christmas, it was the whole damn tent. As of now, the only Wii U game scheduled for the latter half of the year is Paper Mario: Color Splash.

Nintendo's Wii U outlook is gloomy indeed: Although it sold over 3 million of the consoles in the past year, it's only forecasting barely-more-than-nothing sales of 800,000 units for this fiscal year (which includes the launch of Zelda).

Then again, 3 million consoles was also a fairly low number to begin with. So what we're probably looking at here is a willingness from Nintendo to suffer through an annus maximus horribilis with a lame-duck console in hopes of a stronger launch for NX in 2017.

Nintendo did announce two more games today, both of them mobile apps. It's bringing the anthropomorphic small-town livin' series Animal Crossing to your phone this autumn, alongside the hardcore strategy RPG series Fire Emblem.

Both, Nintendo stressed in a statement, will be "pure game applications," in contrast to its first app Miitomo. "Compared to Miitomo, they have more prominent game elements, and the game content will tie closely into Nintendo’s dedicated games business," Nintendo wrote.

While the Fire Emblem game will be "more accessible" than the 3DS versions, it will still be a strategy role-playing title. Animal Crossing, meanwhile, will be "connected," somehow, to the versions for Wii U and 3DS.

Whether more mobile apps will make up for a year almost devoid of console games remains to be seen. (That NX unveiling, whenever it does come, had better be pretty impressive.)