There was a Nintendo Partner Direct this morning, full of Switch ports and Bethesda games and starting with an intensely soothing preroll of puzzle pieces slotting into grooves that I could have watched for hours. There were also trailers for some fairly violent games, Resident Evil Requiem and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, that looked a lot less violent in the hands of whoever was controlling them for their Switch trailers.
Viewers on social media were swift to point out that in the gameplay for Requiem, protagonist Leon Kennedy misses all of his gunshots against the game’s enemies, even though the enemies are close enough to be basically impossible to miss. In a scene where Leon wields a sniper rifle, even accounting for enemy movement, his shot isn’t remotely close. (As someone who is shit at sniper rifles in games, I have sympathy here, but come on.) In potentially gory moments of close combat, Leon swings a chainsaw basically into thin air; in others, the trailer cuts away before an axe can connect with an enemy’s head.
Usually, video game trailers that show gameplay show successful gameplay, because presumably that's what sells But, I guess to tamp down on depictions of gory violence, the Resident Evil Requiem footage in today's Nintendo Direct showed some missed attacks. Frankly, it made it feel more authentic
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T15:01:43.867Z
Similarly, in an Indiana Jones trailer, Indy notably fires a gun nowhere near some other boats as he races by them:
Some viewers suggest this is due to Nintendo trying to avoid too much violence in its Directs, with Game File’s Stephen Totilo highlighting a different version of the Resident Evil trailer that shows Leon having a much better go of things. We’ve reached out to Nintendo for more information and will update this piece if we receive a reply.
It’s a funny thing, something I didn’t notice until it was pointed out, and it’s led me down a rabbithole about whether other Switch trailers are like this. There are plenty of regular Switch trailers, not part of presentations, that don’t seem to have this issue. For instance, a Switch 2 trailer for the game Squirrel With A Gun very much features a squirrel shooting a human with a gun, and there is a predictably gory Doom trailer for Switch in 2018.
But other Doom trailers go differently: In Bethesda’s 2021 trailer for Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods Part One on Switch, there’s a moment early on where Doomguy shoots an enemy:
But in the same trailer for Nintendo’s 2021 E3 presentation, he misses:
Likewise, there's a later violent moment in the Bethesda trailer--
--which is replaced with non-violent navigation and a much tamer fight in the Nintendo version:
I don’t think I’ve uncovered some huge revelation here, just something I’ve never noticed about trailers in Nintendo presentations. These tweaks certainly makes sense for Nintendo’s image, especially in a presentation with multiple games that would invite a broad age range of audiences. Still, it feels a little bit like Nintendo trying to have its cake and eat it too. If you’re putting a violent game on the Switch, there’s not really any getting around that it’s violent, and dealing with it by just having someone be really bad at shooting feels like a half-measure.
In the case of today’s Resident Evil Requiem, the whole thing was so laughably obvious that it drew attention to the ostensible strategy, which is now going to gnaw at me in every subsequent Direct. If you are the person tasked with missing all your shots in Nintendo trailers, please get in touch.
Update, 2/5/26, 5:24pm– Kotaku has some more examples, including The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Wolfenstein 2.
