Gru's Plan - THEY PICK ILLUMINATION

I'm taking a big wait and see approach because it's not like this is the first time Nintendo's made a decision that sounded odd at first but it actually turned out well in the end. Letting an unproven American studio handle the Metroid franchise without the head director of the 2D games being involved, and it's a first person game? People thought it'd likely suck compared to Fusion, a game from the same people who made Super Metroid, but in the end it seems Prime was actually the more loved game (though Fusion is highly loved too, at the time Prime got a lot more praise). Mario and the Rabbids crossover game made by Ubisoft that's basically an X-Com clone? Sounded like a really dumb crossover idea at first but hot damn did it prove to be not only really fun but probably one of the better uses of the rabbids in a long time (and now Nintendo is letting Ubi use Star Fox characters and ships in the Switch port of Starlink, and they have their own storyline to boot rather than being simple cameo characters).

Plus Miyamoto is going to be supervising production, I doubt he'd let anyone potentially screw up one of his biggest creations.

He said when it comes to Mario platformers he wants gameplay to be the most important element and everything else comes next, with story usually being what gets less of a focus as Miyamoto's usual deal is "good gameplay idea first, then build levels around the gameplay, and most everything should help act as a way to drive said gameplay forward."

Contrary to popular belief, Miyamoto wasn't the one who told the Paper Mario devs at Intelligent Systems to focus less on story for Sticker Star, hell he wasn't even the one who said to ditch RPG mechanics like leveling and partners, all he told the devs was "just come up with an interesting idea for how to play the game and continue from there." Most of the creative decisions people disliked about the game were the result of the head producer Kensuke Tanabe, who typically doesn't work on RPGs, his forte is more in the realm of platformers like Mario 2 and 3 plus the recent DKC games and action-adventure games like Metroid Prime.