The Best E3 Trailers of 2021

E3 is fundamentally weird. Every year the trade show packs tens of thousands of people into two wings of a convention center full of unnecessarily elaborate booths displaying the hopeful videogame hits of the next 18 months. If that sounds like a recipe for multimedia chaos, well, it is: it’s a full-scale sensory assault amid non-stop shoulder-to-shoulder contact with absolute strangers. It can be miserable, sure, but also kind of exhilarating at first, before inevitably becoming just another thing you have to slog through for your day job. You get so used to that weirdness it doesn’t even register anymore.

This year’s E3 was weird in a different way. Everything above describes the actual E3 show itself, which always begins on a Tuesday and runs through Thursday. The two or three days before the show starts are usually full of press conferences where the major videogame publishers make new announcements or release new trailers for upcoming games. E3 is effectively two halves, this preshow period of press events, and then the official show where journalists actually get to play many of these upcoming games and talk to the people who make and market them. Obviously, the pandemic isn’t fully over yet, so that second half of E3—the actual, official E3—didn’t happen this year. Every year Nintendo holds its E3 press conference on Tuesday morning, and immediately afterward the show floor opens up for the first time; this year Nintendo’s press conference was basically the end of E3, and not the beginning it usually is.

The lack of hands-on opportunities and in-person interactions with developers strips E3 of what makes it useful from a journalistic perspective, and reduces it to what it’s basically always wanted to be, anyway: a big ol’ ad festival. Just like a carnival of commercials. All anybody can do with this E3 is talk about the trailers we were shown, the carefully constructed ads custom-built to show each game in what is considered its most marketable light. Paste always runs a list of the best E3 trailers every year, but we supplement it with our hands-on impressions of whatever we played at the show—opinions and information that I’d like to think are far more useful for our audience than a paragraph about an ad.

That won’t be the case this year. We didn’t get our hands on anything, because there was nothing to lay those hands upon. We’re just passive viewers of the ads that flashed across our computer monitor, willing consumers of the word as written by marketing execs and copywriters. Come, let us be the vehicle through which you experience your game ads—we’re here to serve.

Here are eight trailers that debuted during E3 this year that I thought looked kind of swell. They’re in alphabetical order, so don’t think of this as a contest or ranking, or anything. After all, all ads are beautiful and perfect in their own way.

Last Stop

Last Stop looks like a twisty sci-fi mystery that grounds its genre ambitions with characters that resemble real life. You’ve got parallel dimensions, portals, and a mysterious man with glowing eyes, but then you also have people falling in love, a couple having an argument, and an apparently joyful piano duet. It’ll be fascinating to see how the game unites these two sides. Variable States’ last game, Virginia, similarly tried to wed the prosaic with the fantastic, and although the result was a little too scattered and kaleidoscopic in its storytelling, it was still a very unique, interesting, and memorable game. I can’t wait to see how they follow that one up.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2

That might not be the official name of this one—Nintendo refers to it as “the sequel to Breath of the Wild”—but we’ll keep using it as shorthand until we’re given something else to call it. This cryptic clip reveals that the follow-up to our game of the decade will be set at least partially in the sky, and also that something’s wrong with Link’s right arm. The story’s still a mystery, and we don’t really see any heroes other than Link; it’s basically a short collage of impressions and brief glimpses of Hyrule, just enough to keep everybody excited for a game that has no official release window yet.

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

Ubisoft had the honor of debuting the trailer for their next collaboration with Nintendo, a sequel to the 2017 comic strategy hit Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. The roster of Rabbid-ized Mario characters will grow with this installment, as the trailer gives us our first glimpse at the Rabbid versions of Super Mario Galaxy characters. The comic tone of the Rabbid games was an awkward fit with the world of Mario back in 2017, but the actual game itself was a lot of fun, so we’ve got some hope for the sequel.