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Where the Wii was one of Nintendo’s biggest, money-printing successes of the modern era, the Wii U was something of an ugly duckling. I’ve heard various reasons for its less-than-stellar performance; casual gamers didn’t see the point of the expensive game pad, and hardcore gamers had been alienated by the Wii’s family-friendly vibe. I also heard that some people didn’t even realize it was an entirely new console, believing it was just a peripheral for the Wii they didn’t need.
Whatever the reason, the Wii U didn’t do great, and that’s a shame because, despite itself, it had some pretty solid games. It was a Nintendo console after all. Even if the Wii U was exactly bursting at the seams with killer apps, it had its fair share of quality titles with high replayability that warranted a consistent boot-up. Hey, you had to get your money’s worth out of this thing somehow, right?
10 NES Remix
Play Fast, Play Weird
Even if it doesn’t always do the best job of showing it, Nintendo knows that, in this industry, you have to respect your roots. Nintendo wouldn’t be even half the juggernaut it is today without those classic NES games. One particularly fun and novel way it paid its respects to its roots was through NES Remix, a Wii U game exclusive to the eShop.
NES Remix takes a handful of big-name NES games like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Wrecking Crew, and The Legend of Zelda, and turns them into a series of timed, rapid-pace challenges. For example, you’d be challenged to collect 6 coins in a particular Super Mario Bros. level, and you’d only get 15 seconds to do it. Clear the challenge in the fastest time, and you’ll get the highest ratings, which in turn unlock newer and weirder challenges.
NES Remix is almost like a training tool for speedrunners, encouraging you to truly learn a game or level’s ins and outs to optimize your speed and gameplay. Because the challenges are so fast-paced, you always feel like you can clear them a little bit faster, and you always want to try one more time.
9 Splatoon
Our First Kid/Squid Adventure
During the Wii’s reign, Nintendo didn’t do much in the way of new IP development. It didn’t really need to, after all, with all the money that thing was printing. To help get people interested in its new Wii U, though, Nintendo created its first new IP in a hot minute, one that would go on to become a mainstay: Splatoon. All it had to do was sing “you’re a kid, you’re a squid,” and just like that, our attention was grabbed.
The original Splatoon, much like its sequels, was a competitive multiplayer third-person shooter. What differentiated it from contemporaries is that, rather than killing opponents, the goal of the basic game mode was to cover as much of the stage as possible in your color of ink. Even if you splatted every single opponent, if they had the color edge when time ran out, they won. It’s a very simple framework, but it required long-time shooter players to reconsider their frame of reference a bit.
There were other, more competitive game modes as well, all available on a rotating schedule alongside the major Splatfest events. Add regular releases of new weapons and clothes to the mix, and you had a live-service game that knew how to keep you coming back, no matter how sweaty your online matches got.
8 Game & Wario
There’s Always Time For Some WarioWare
I’m of the opinion that every Nintendo console, especially those with some manner of gimmick, should have a patron WarioWare game. It’s both a great way to show off said console gimmick, and they’re great games solo or with friends in general. For the Wii U, that WarioWare game technically didn’t have “WarioWare” in the title. Instead, they called it Game & Wario, a reference to Game & Watch.
Rather than the usual microgame collection, Game & Wario features 16 different, more robust minigames, each designed to utilize the Wii U GamePad in a different way. Wario’s game has you launching arrows at targets, Mona’s game has you searching a town to take pictures, Dr. Crygor’s game has you drawing on the touchscreen, and so on.
The most well-known of these minigames, and the most fun to replay, is 9-Volt’s, wherein you have to play old-school microgames on the GamePad while hiding from his mom and pretending to be asleep. All of these minigames are highly replayable, and since it’s all GamePad focused, you can easily enjoy them yourself instead of needing to get a whole group together.
7 Hyrule Warriors
Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together
By 2014, the Dynasty Warriors series had already made a firmly-established habit of crossing over with major IPs like One Piece or Mobile Suit Gundam. Generally, though, it was all anime stuff, nothing particularly out of the ordinary. That changed when the original Hyrule Warriors was released for the Wii U, the first crossover between the Warriors franchise and a Nintendo IP, and one of its power-player IPs at that.
In broad strokes, Hyrule Warriors is just a Dynasty Warriors with a Zelda-themed coat of paint. You have a variety of characters to choose from to battle large hordes of monsters, some new versions of established Zelda characters updated for this game, others plucked directly from their home games like Midna or Darunia. Just getting to play as these characters in a much more action-oriented setting is a fun departure from the slower, more pitched pace and setting of Zelda games released by that time.
In addition to the main story, which is a pretty good time, there are also replayable adventure and challenge modes for leveling up your heroes and just pummeling lots of dudes. Really, that’s what makes Dynasty Warriors fun, pummeling lots of dudes, and it’s just as continuously fun here.
6 Mario Party 10
Gimmicky, But Still Mario Party
Mario Party went through a bit of an awkward phase in the mid-2010s. Starting with Mario Party 9, the series ditched its long-established board game formula and opted for a new four-players-moving-at-once kind of dealie. It was… interesting, but I think the concept worked a little bit better with Mario Party 10 on the Wii U.
Like its predecessor, Mario Party 10 has all four players moving simultaneously on a big car thing across its maps, competing for Mini Stars and generally screwing each other over. In addition to the main party mode, though, the game also adds Bowser Party, wherein one player armed with the GamePad plays as Bowser, whose job is to chase down the main party and crush them beneath his scaly feet. It’s a surprisingly fun way to add some hectic energy to what may normally be a bit of a slow-going affair.
Mario Party 10 is not the best game in the series by a longshot, but it still serves the purpose any other game in the series is meant to: a fun little activity you can do with your friends, who may or may not still be your friends when all is said and done.
5 Super Smash Bros. For Wii U
Really Should’ve Workshopped That Title
The release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii was successful, though its much more casual gameplay drew the ire of the hardcore Melee day fans. For the next Smash game, Sakurai and his stalwart team were looking to hit a bit more of a magic middle between Melee and Brawl. The result was Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, a game which really needed a better title, but we won’t hold that against it.
Building off of the established Smash core loop of “punch a dude until he falls off the edge of the stage,” Smash 4 focused a lot of its efforts onto presentation and accessibility. Online play was improved and streamlined over Brawl, with players divvied up into “For Fun” and “For Glory” for casual and competitive play, respectively, and much more care went into making the characters look, sound, and play in more fun and cinematic ways.
The Wii U version in particular added eight-player simultaneous multiplayer on supersized maps, a great way to get some proper chaos going with the buds. Add good ol’ Classic mode to mix with Sakurai’s proprietary intensity slider, and you have a game that’s always good for a romp solo or with friends.
4 New Super Mario Bros. U
Four-Player Madness
New Super Mario Bros. Wii was a major hot ticket for its namesake console, one that Nintendo wouldn’t be interested in letting go of any time soon. Naturally, with the Wii U, Nintendo sought to make that particular lightning bolt strike twice with New Super Mario Bros. U. It didn’t set things ablaze like Bros. Wii did, but Bros. U was no pushover either.
New Super Mario Bros. U followed most of the gameplay norms established in its predecessor, including four-player co-op, all of the same power-ups plus the new Super Acorn for flight and wall-climbing, and a large, map-based hub world to pick levels from. Everything that worked in the previous game works here, and it’s still a lot of fun to playthrough once, twice, or even three times.
The game also added a few miscellaneous nifty features centered around the GamePad and Miiverse. In the former case, a GamePad player could tap on platforms and enemies to help the main players. In the latter, you could leave little posts on Miiverse, which helped create a quiet, yet tight-knit community of players while the game was in its prime.
3 Super Mario 3D World
Four-Player Madness In 3D
While Nintendo was cornering the market on sidescrollers with New Super Mario Bros. U, it decided to go for a two-pronged attack with 3D platformers in its arsenal as well. Its weapon of choice in this pursuit was a follow-up to Super Mario 3D Land on the 3DS, incorporating the drop-in multiplayer and larger levels of New Super Mario Bros. to create Super Mario 3D World.
While Nintendo had a good grip on sidescrolling multiplayer by this point, Super Mario 3D World was the first 3D Mario game to have drop-in co-op, and it worked surprisingly well. It uses the same timed, level-based structure of 3D Land, but with levels of a much larger scale and higher production value, not to mention more power-ups to engineer that lovely multiplayer chaos. The GamePad brought some more incidental perks, like revealing secrets with the microphone or tapping blocks on the screen, but the game was just fine without them.
Super Mario 3D World is fun solo or with friends in much the same way as its 2D counterpart, and equally as replayable just for the fun of it. If you wanted more incentive, you could try to complete a level perfectly in order to make a ghost that online players could compete against.
2 Mario Kart 8
The Bedrock Of Modern Mario Kart
Of course, we can’t talk about any Nintendo console without highlighting a Mario Kart game. It’s one of Nintendo’s definitive cash cows, after all, the games that sell consoles on their merits alone. Of course, Mario Kart 8 didn’t exactly sell Wii Us, but considering its subsequent success as a Switch port, I don’t think we can lay the blame for that on the game itself.
Mario Kart 8 was the first console Mario Kart game released since Mario Kart Wii six years prior, and it was quite the return to form. The broad strokes of the gameplay were the same as it ever was: hop in a kart as your favorite Mario character, race from point A to point B, and harass everyone else with items.
Mario Kart 8’s appeal, and this is what helps it remain one of the definitive kart racing games to this day, is mostly just in its solid gameplay and breadth of content. It had a whopping 48 courses if you include all the DLC, and was the first game in the series to add crossover characters like Link and the Animal Crossing Villager. It was just… good. It was a good Mario Kart game, and everyone’s always down for a good Mario Kart game.
1 Super Mario Maker
Mario Into Infinity
For decades, Mario platformers have gone hand-in-hand with homebrewing. I still remember all the ridiculously difficult ROMHacks of Super Mario World that appeared in the early 2000s. Good times. Of course, ROMHacking happens outside of Nintendo’s notice or permission. The first time Nintendo really embraced the homebrew Mario scene full-on was with the release of Super Mario Maker.
Super Mario Maker is a comprehensive tool with which players can create, play, and share their own custom sidescrolling Mario levels. Using tilesets from previous Mario games and the interface on the GamePad, you can easily place and program environments, enemies, power-ups, and stage hazards. With a little bit of creativity, you can create all manner of challenging stages and wacky contraptions. The only hard requirement is that you have to be able to clear a stage you create, so it can’t be literally impossible.
Once you’ve made a stage, you can share it online for the rest of the world to enjoy. While you’re at it, you can also download and play stages from the rest of the game’s community. Or, you know, you could, when the Wii U servers were still up. That aside, Super Mario Maker was one of the hottest tickets on the Wii U, infinitely replayable and great for making video content.
