Because I’m absolutely loving it now! When compared alongside the other consoles in Nintendo’s lineup, I’ve noticed a lot of fans tend to gravitate towards the GameCube. And I can understand why; its library is filled with so many one-of-a-kind experiences, many of which haven’t really been replicated in subsequent console efforts. But there was a reason why it came in dead last during that console generation, right? Despite its strong library in retrospect, the PS2 and Xbox crushed it and that’s just a plain fact. If you’re gonna treat the GameCube’s lineup with this much relish and nostalgia, why aren’t people doing the same for the Wii? I mean isn’t that the true mark of a good console’s worth?
The narrative around the Wii these days is that it was a gimmicky casualtastic shovelware sonata. And after watching something like Nintendo’s infamous E3 2008 press conference, I can definitely see why many would think that. But obviously, I wholeheartedly disagree. The Wii gave us so many quality first party games that people tend to dismiss when generalizing the console’s legacy like this. We got the Mario Galaxy games, two new Zeldas, a bunch of Kirby games, awesome Mario Kart and Smash entries, the Virtual Console, the New Play Control line which gave us excellent ports of Pikmin 1 and 2, revivals of dormant franchises like Wario Land and DKC, and Nintendo actually gave a shit about Metroid that generation! Heck the Wii was the console that gave us Xenoblade Chronicles, for crying out loud. Oh and about the whole “shovelware” thing? News flash: every successful console had shovelware. The PS2 had it, the PS4 had it, and even the Switch has it; just take one cursory glance at the “coming soon” section on the Nintendo Switch eShop.
And yes third parties didn’t sleep on the Wii either; the quality stuff was always there, you just had to search for them. We got excellent ports of Resident Evil 4 and Okami, a hidden gem of a fighting game in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, an actually great Sonic game in Sonic Colors, an exhilarating sword combat game in Red Steel 2, revivals of Klonoa, Samba De Amigo, A Boy and His Blob, NiGHTS and more! Over the past several months give or take, I’ve been digging deeper and deeper into the treasure trove of quality exclusives that the Wii had in store. At this point in time I’ve acquired over a dozen Wii titles physically from both first and third party publishers, plus a few others through the Wii U eShop. [Here’s my current stack of physical games so far for those curious](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/799008375131340860/1066155879877066793/IMG_5655.jpg). And now I’m just gonna go through a couple of the ones I own and have put a decent amount of time into:
**Punch Out Wii:** A phenomenal reboot that beautifully translates what made the NES game so special into the modern age. The arcade-style gameplay and gorgeous cartoony animations are amazing to behold. It’s a tough game to master, but boy is it ever addictive to watch my opponent finally go down every single time. This might just be my favorite game on the entire console, and I’m itching to go back and clear more of the extra challenges the game has to offer.
**Zack & Wiki:** A delightful point and click puzzle adventure game and a brand new IP from Capcom of all things. The Wii controls are used to great effect here and it even went on to win several awards when it first came out. It’s a damn shame we never got more out of this IP; I would’ve loved to see where Capcom would’ve went with it given the advancements in motion control since 2007. At least it got acknowledged in that one Wii golf game Capcom also published, which I also own.
**MadWorld:** You may have heard of a little company called PlatinumGames. Y’know, the folks who made Bayonetta, Astral Chain, and Metal Gear Rising? Well this was where they made their debut and what a way to make a name for oneself. This was a gory, over-the-top beatemup depicted in a striking black and white artstyle, akin to the graphic novel Sin City. The ways you can impale a dude to a wall or saw their arms off are ridiculous, and the boss fights ramp things up in typical Platinum fashion. If nothing else the soundtrack is an absolute bop if you’ve got an ear for hip hop, so give it a listen when you’ve got the free time!
**The Last Story:** If you know about Xenoblade, chances are you’ve least heard about The Last Story to some degree. This was one of three big JRPGs that avid fans famously campaigned for a North American localization, alongside Xenoblade and Pandora’s Tower (which I also own in the latter’s case), but this one shouldn’t be slept on if you consider yourself a fan of the genre. It’s an action RPG produced by Mistwalker, the studio created by Final Fantasy’s original creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, and with music done by legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu. They previously worked together on the Xbox 360 exclusives Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, and this stands right alongside them as some of their finest work. Characters are grounded and endearing with wonderful British voice acting, the real time combat system is tactical and never gets boring, and the soundtrack is sublime as expected of Uematsu. And it all wraps up in about 20-25 hours or so, making it a fantastic fit for more time-conscious RPG players who just can’t get down with playtimes the length of Xenoblade or Persona these days.
by Asad_Farooqui
23 Comments
Great write up. Most of those games are rare and pricey by this point! Wii’s shift to the causal market lost some of the GameCube fans .. although clearly the existence of these gems means anyone who hasn’t played them is missing out!
The Wii did end up with some gems. However at that time, the Wii was the first Nintendo console I skipped. With that console generation moving ahead in terms of graphics, I viewed the Wii as a side grade to the GameCube. I really wasn’t feeling the motion controls at the time either. I thought every game was going to have me standing up like the commercials and my room was not set up for that
I wouldn’t pick up another Nintendo console until the Wii U which let me catch up on what I missed. Looking back, there was nothing really out with the launch of the Wii U so I think I got it to catch up on the backlog of Wii games. Plus I had my own place by then so any hang ups on motion controls were sorted.
Had Twilight Princess been an exclusive I would have gotten a Wii. I also regret missing Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 on release.
I personally struggled with a lot of the motion control schemes and never felt like it worked as well as it should or I wanted them to. So because of that I had a hard time really connecting with a lot of first party titles.
Skyward Sword is a lot of fun but it felt awkward and I had difficulty controlling Link and fighting and sometimes felt like I was going in the wrong direction. Trying to even get into levels in Super Mario Galaxy seemed weirdly inefficient. I even used the classic controller to play Mario Kart. The novelty for something like Wii Sports wore off super quickly for me cause it was so focused on movement and I didn’t feel like it had a lot of depth.
Loved Twilight Princess but that to me is actually a GameCube game and Super Paper Mario and New Super Mario Bros. Wii are solid but aren’t pinnacle games in their series for me. Brawl probably had the most replay value of any of the games for me.
It’s not terrible but I enjoyed GameCube and the Wii U much more and to me feels kind of like a cheapened Nintendo experience.
In Retrospect, it does look a lot better and there was some truly great games on it. However, it did get somewhat of a reputation for a couple of reasons. First, obviously the graphics aren’t as powerful as the PS3/Xbox, which is fine, but it did limit the kinds of games that could be made on it. Those consoles by far got more third party support and bigger games in general. Skyrim for example pretty clearly outshined Skyward Sword in the popularity and marketing.
The shovelware and lack of exposure of some games was a problem too. You mention it yourself: “…quality stuff was always there, you just had to search for them”. It’s much much easier to find the good games now. There was so much garbage on the Wii, and poor marketing for many actually good games, that they barely got any sort of attention. MadWorld and Xenoblade could barely be considered on the radar at the time.
Last, the motion control did grate on a lot of the hardcore fans, often because they would be implemented poorly. Well most of the good games used them fairly well but I imagine people got tired of them by a certain point, constantly wagging and moving.
This isn’t to say the Wii is a bad console, it had some of the greatest games ever made. The Virtual Console, especially compared to what we had today, was fantastic. The controls were (sometimes) used fantastically. But it did have a reputation for a reason, and the console did have and has some very noticeable flaws
Because it was a gimmicky controller that got really uncomfortable to use after extended play. The Wii has some great games, but most are only fun to play in short bursts.
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Problem with the wii is that for every really enjoyable and quality game, there were at least five pieces of shovelware to balance it. There’s a ton of amazing games exclusive to the wii as well as games like Metroid Prime Trilogy which enhanced and improved on the previous instalments BUT… there’s also shit like Ninjabread Man acting like digital cancer on it.
The Wii has a lot of people’s respect. I’ve anticipated every Nintendo major console release since we had the NES in 80’s and the Wii was a great comeback for Nintendo in my eyes and, honestly, I’ve never had so much fun with a console release. I was in my late teens and I took it to everyone’s house I could think of and we just had parties playing the game. It was literally just like the Wii commercials.
I don’t hear people hate on it too much but the general populous probably places the Gamecube on a higher pedestal. I personally think the Gamecube was the point where Nintendo first fell but I’ve never seen so much shovelware as on the Wii. It had laughably bad games and, while a good system, the amount of shovelware and janky games kept it from being the best system. It was a good comeback system for a while there. I remember playing Mortal Kombat: Armageddon and struggling with the controls and thinking “why I am not playing this on PS3?” Then I got a PS3 and didn’t play Nintendo again until the Switch so, yeah, I blame the Wii for that.
It was the generation where they really got left behind as far as multi platform games, it was already happening with the GameCube but you at least got some stuff whereas the Wii either didn’t get the games or got vastly inferior versions. I also think even some of the best games occasionally suffered from kind of gimmicky forced motion control stuff
There were two main things:
1. Tons of casual shovelware, and many big AAA releases skipping the Wii (or ending up severely compromised) due to the weaker hardware
2. Excessive waggle and motion-control gimmicks
There’s still a lot of really great stuff for Wii if you’re willing to dig through the shovelware and find games that either didn’t use motion controls, or the ones that handled it well.
I did not and do not like motion controls. I didn’t mind that it was a weaker console, but not having HD output was awful. The library was good overall, but it also had an absurd amount of shovelware and gimmicky motion control games. The online was terrible. And compared to the 360 and PS3, it didn’t have any games that felt revolutionary at the time like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect, BioShock, and GTAIV & V. With the benefit of hindsight, I’d rather go back and play the best Wii games than the best 360/PS3 games, but at the time, it felt like Nintendo had abandoned hardcore gamers.
It just didn’t have the spark that the N64 and Gamecube had. Many games felt cheap, or simplified compared to what came before. Super Paper Mario is a good example. It’s a great game, but it also feels like a flash game. It’s not at the same level of TTYD. The controllers also felt really cheap.
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I think it’s because they actually played it and realized the motion control thing wasn’t just a gimmick, it was a gimmick that didn’t even work properly. Even now, after playing Skyward Sword, I’m ready to walk away from motion controls permanently. Thanks but no thanks guys.
When it came to power, the power of the Wii was basically, the GameCube.
It was an entire console revolving around a motion gimmick. The fact of the matter is that motion controls and VR will never replace good old controller in hand gaming. People were worried it was the death of Nintendo as we knew it at the time, and a lot of people were resentful that the world was talking about Nintendo, but it was about wii sports bowling.
Also if they had kept going in the same direction, it would have been known as the death of console Zelda. Also the gen that killed Paper Mario. The Animal Crossing of that gen was the definition of underwhelming. Luigi’s Mansion went portable. Yoshi and Kirby both turned into… craft supplies.
Dark times.
the wii its a great console , you can play even gamecube games, i think the controls was a great innovation too. Some people only see the graphics .
I loved the wii. It was my first “modern” console. I didn’t get a Xbox of PlayStation. Me and my best friend spent hours on the wii
The mainstream has considered Nintendo “kiddie” and “gimmicky” since the GameCube. The console wars were much more heated back then, and people wanted something to troll others with.
Most casual gamers only want “regular” or “normal” controls, overlooking the fact that, at one point, consoles had controls better matching arcade cabinets than what they use today.
The GameCube was the second Nintendo system to not use the SNES-founded button layout, while the PS1, PS2, and later Xbox all used more or less the same button layout.
This made certain multiplats kind of annoying on GameCube, for some players. I never had trouble, but I’ve also tended to enjoy the innovations in gaming.
By the time the Wii hit, people were huge on HD graphics and weren’t down for a remote. It got called ‘waggle’ early on, because the MotionPlus hadn’t come out yet and it was indeed kind of early gyro tech.
The Wii didn’t get a whole lot of solid third party titles. Nintendo more or less carried the system on quality motion games, and it wasn’t until the very end of the system’s life that we got GOOD motion controls in stuff like Wii Sports Resort, Zelda: Skyward Sword, and Metroid Prime 3. There was Project Rainfall, which brought Pandora’s Tower, Xenoblade Chronicles, and The Last Story to the American Wii market, but that was at the very end of the console’s life, and by then the Wii was mostly in retirement homes or used for Mario Kart or Just Dance in bars or something. The mainstream had moved on.
So, long story short, mainstream gamers just wanted Nintendo to be another option to support multiplatform games. I can’t think of another reason to bitch so much about the system. Motion controls improved immensely by the time the Switch came around, but I guess most people just didn’t want to learn something new. The DS got similar complaints from conservative gamers, despite featuring some of the best games ever.
Back in the early to mid 00s, expectations among fans was high that the Revolution would be a powerful console to compete with Sony and Microsoft. Even the name Revolution signified great change and curiosity, implying that Nintendo would do something drastic (to be fair thats what happened but in a different way!)
At the time there were many who were disappointed with the Gamecube (a litte unfair, it’s a great console and point of difference) in comparison to the PS2, Xbox and Dreamcast which offered multimedia support (Playing CDs, DVDs) along with the power those consoles had, stronger third party support and online play. Having those features in those days was a major drawing card, if you were around to experience it you’ll know that DVD players were still expensive and there was a lot of hype, interest around realism within games going hand in hand with the modern improvements in technology and the world wide web at the time.
In light of the above and other factors, expectations among fans were high that Nintendo would right the ship so to speak. And people wern’t expecting what we got with the Wii at all, so the backlash was fierce. It was very much a quantity over quality, finnicky console geared more towards families and casual gamers as many know, it is absolutely not a bad console – there are some brilliant titles and some which use the motion controls well among a sea of shovelware. But long story short the Wii didnt line up with peoples expectations and visions for what they envisioned to be a “proper gaming console” coming out of the GC/PS2/Xbox/Dreamcast era, rightly or wrongly.
THE CONTROLLER. Listen, it was cool with some games like Metroid prime 3, but it was annoying having to use it for most games. Yes they had a Wii Classic controller but the majority of games didn’t support it. I don’t “hate” the Wii but I definitely wasn’t a fan of it.
– Outside of the 20 or so first party titles, there was a sea of shovelware with a few rare gems.
– Motion controls didn’t appeal as much to hardcore gamers, and they felt tacked on in a lot of games that could have just had standard controls instead.
– Gamecube level hardware limited games to be much smaller scale than stuff you saw on 360/PS3. This was during a time when shooters and open worlds were becoming more popular.
– Around 2009 when the casual audience started to flake out, the hardcore audience was only left with the one or two first party games released a year.
Just like N64 which some still judge harshly to this day, the downsides don’t erase the fact that these systems also had some of the best games ever made. Mario Galaxy is still my favorite of the 3D Mario games.
When the Wii launched, I was a diehard Nintendo fanboy… to a ridiculously embarrassing extent.
I stuck with my Wii for a few years but… there was something wrong. The games didn’t look good. They felt gimmicky. They felt smaller scale, and lacking in production value. Don’t get me wrong, the games were good, but even the best the Wii had to offer felt lacking in comparison to the other consoles.
I went over to a friends place and tried their Xbox 360. I popped in Mass Effect and was floored. This is what I had been missing all along? Everytime I turned on that game, it was so detailed… and so immersive that it felt like i was being sucked into another living breathing world.
And that changed me. Suddenly, I was less interested in fighting with waggle controls in skyward sword, and no longer interested in holding the remote up to my face to pretend I was an elephant in smooth moves. Mass effect really opened my eyes to the direction that games were heading, and I didn’t think the Wii could keep up.
I had a blast with my 360, and I don’t regret dropping the Wii. But I am firmly back on the switch now, playing everything I can.
Yeah the Wii is pretty underrated with a lot of hidden gems. People have already mentioned the shovelware drowning them out.
The other reason is developers didn’t take the system seriously. They already committed to the HD twins. So they just sent experimental or smaller titles to the Wii hoping for a breakout success. If it didn’t pan out they could just blame the wii audience.
It was commonly held wisdom then that wii owners didn’t buy games. Which turned out to not be true. Wii attach rate is almost 8 and is fairly normal.
Sad games like excite truck or Sin and punishment likely won’t see another release.