Nintendo 3DS Exclusive From Fire Emblem Developer Looks to Be Making a Comeback

A Nintendo 3DS exclusive from 2015 released by Intelligent Systems -- the team best known for the Fire Emblem series -- is seemingly making a comeback. If you were gaming in 2015, there is a good chance you were playing the likes of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Bloodborne, Rcoket League, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Dying Light, Cities: Skylines, Splatoon, Until Dawn, Fallout 4, Super Mario Maker, Undertale, Halo 5, SOMA, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Kerbal Space Program, Ori and the Blind Forest, Rise of the Tomb Raider, or a few other notable games that dropped that dropped that year. If you were on 3DS though, you didn't have much to choose from by the time 2015 rolled around. One game that did come out though was Stretchmo. 

Developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo itself, as a 3DS exclusive, Stretchmo is a sequel to 2011's Pushmo, 2012's Crashmo, and 2014's Pushmo World. The fourth game in the series, you'd assume it was a bigger deal than it was. The game did not get a retail release, only a digital release on the Nintendo eShop, highlighting the smaller nature of its release. While commercially the game was smalltime for Nintendo, it did post decent reviews, earning an 83 on Metacritic. Still, it would be a surprise to see it return on Nintendo Switch or the rumored Nintendo Switch 2 supposedly coming out next year.

Rumblings about the return of Stretchmo is because Nintendo has a new trademark for the game in Australia. This doesn't necessarily mean anything is happening with it though. This is different than a rating board leak, however, to renew or file new trademarks you have to prove you're making use of the IP. So, this begs the question: what is Nintendo doing, or planning to do, with Stretchmo?

Unfortunately, right now all we have are rumblings and speculation, with no clear indication or idea what could, let alone will, come from this. At the moment of publishing, Nintendo has not commented on any of this in any capacity and we don't expect this to change for a handful of reasons that. The chief of these reasons is Nintendo has never commented on trademark speculation in the past. That said, if expectations are bucked and Nintendo does speak up about the matter, we will be sure to update the story accordingly.