Insider Sabi, who has made a name thanks to multiple E3 2019 leaks including Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, Final Fantasy VIII Remastered, and the entire Bethesda media briefing, has provided two more rumors about incoming Nintendo games.
According to Sabi, Nintendo is working on and about to reveal a brand new Paper Mario title, as well as a new Metroid game that’s not to be confused with the already officially announced Metroid Prime 4.
“Paper Mario [is] going back to how it was, in 2020,” Sabi posted on Twitter, which means that the new game could be launching as early as this year, despite not yet having been announced.
The fifth and latest entry in the franchise, Paper Mario: Color Splash, was developed by Intelligent System and was released for Wii U in 2016. The Nintendo Switch has not received any game from the series yet.
The Metroid game mentioned in the leaks is said to be a “2D Metroid game,” is “related to Fusion,”—referring to the 2002 Gameboy Advance title—and it “also sounds as though it’s set for this year.” It would be “a sequel” of some sort, Sabi said in another post, but we don’t have more details on that.
The latest Metroid title was MercurySteam’s Metroid: Samus Returns, released in 2017 for Nintendo 3DS as a remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus. Since then, a Metroid Prime 4 game has been announced, but its development was fully rebooted and reassigned to the sub-series creator Retro Studios.
While we can’t confirm any of this at the time, it’s worth noting that, according to Sabi, “a major informant in one specific game community has received a c&d from a major Japanese game company.” Should this be Nintendo, which sent a cease and desist to Sabi over the E3 2019 leaks and is known to aggressively defend its IPs, we’d have our confirm.
