Do I Actually Like Wii U?
Nintendo has been one of the most influential companies throughout the history of video games. They revitalized the deeply troubled video game console market in the 80s with the NES and pioneered a new age of games with titles like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.
But being influential has by no means guaranteed Nintendo continual market dominance. In fact, for a good while, their home consoles were getting crushed in sales by the competition. Sonyâs PlayStation outsold Nintendo 64 by a vast margin, and the GameCube not only lost to the insanely successful PlayStation 2, it lost to Microsoftâs first entry into the console market, the Xbox.
After these disappointing results, Nintendo, seeing a future of diminishing returns from building consoles with cutting-edge hardware, shifted strategies and released a console with far lower specs than the competition. This product was called Wii, and it quckly became one of the best-selling consoles ever.
The Wii Sensation
I remember the first time I tried Wii Sports. It must have been a bit after Christmas 2006, and I was at a neighbor kidâs house. The moment I swung that controller to play tennis, heard the sound effect from the little speaker, and felt the ball connect (simulated by the controller rumble), I knew I wanted to own this console.
Motion controls truly did seem revolutionary when I first got a Wii. I was so interested in seeing how they would be used that I remember being taken aback when reading on the official Super Smash Bros. Brawl blog that the best way to play the game would be with a GameCube controller. For Mario Kart Wii, I really thought the Wii Wheel was essential to enjoying the game. Itâs literally just a plastic shell for the remote. But isnât it more immersive if you feel like youâre holding a wheel? Keep in mind, I was in middle school at the time.
Really though, one of the most brilliant aspects of Wii was that it was able to convince millions of people who, for whatever reason, previously had no interest in video games to pick up a controller. It told them, âYou already know how to play this. Just pretend the controller is a golf club.â This is how Wii was able to became the hottest thing around for a couple years. Unfortunately for Nintendo, that momentum didnât carry them as far as they might have hoped.
The End of Wii
For years, I was rooting for Wii. I loved the creativity behind it, and I knew that both Super Mario Galaxy games, were some of the greatest games Iâd ever played. Also it was the only console I owned, so obviously I wanted to root for the âteamâ I was on. However, by 2011, even I saw the Wii brand as a burden to Nintendoâat least when it came to the companyâs reputation among gamers.
I mean, to the average person, at this point the Wii was probably something just sitting unused in their house somewhere, not receiving a second thoughtâthough thereâs also a good chance the device had become a Netflix streaming device (Netflix came to Wii in 2010; I donât know if we realized at the time how significant this would be). The console had sold incredibly well, but the worldâs feverish excitement for it had faded, and sales were slowing.
And as for the so-called âcore gamer,â it seemed like your average Xbox 360 or PS3 fan saw Wii as nothing but a toy for kids at this point.
I was in high school then, and do you know what was overwhelmingly popular among high school boys? Call of Duty. Yeah, Wii did get versions of Call of Duty, but come on. I knew that wasnât the same. World at War on Wii didnât even get zombie mode (kinda weird, to be honest, I mean they made a version of that for iPhone).
The vast majority of the titles gamers were excited about this console generation didnât come to Wii in any form. No Bioshock, GTA, Fallout, or Mass Effect. Now at the end of the day, gamers still donât understand that Mario Galaxy is probably better than most if not all of those games anyway, but even so, you donât want to miss out on a variety of good games! And if you wanted to experience games that were pushing technical boundaries, you really needed an Xbox 360, PS3, or powerful PC.
Of course, Wii did outsell Xbox 360 and PS3 by a pretty healthy margin, so from a purely business standpoint, it was hard to argue against Nintendoâs strategy. Even so, as HD televisions started to become more widely adopted, analysts predicted Nintendo would release an HD version of Wii. This didnât happen. Nintendo passed on a âmid-generationâ upgrade (which might have been analogous to future devices PS4 Pro or Xbox One X) and instead focused on developing the console that would be Wiiâs successor.
The Reveal of Wii U
The first solid info on this successor console came out in the first half of 2011. Now, most people at this time were calling it Wii 2. I, however, had convinced myself Nintendo would not call the system anything to do with Wii. I wanted to leave that brand behind altogether, and I assumed Nintendo felt the same. This was pure cope.
Reports claimed that the console would be more powerful than PS3 and Xbox 360. To me, that was exciting. But in my excitement, I wasnât really thinking about the fact that those consoles were already around five years old and were sure to be succeeded by PS4 and Xbox 720 within a couple years. In my mind, just being in the same league as those consoles would solve all the problems Wii had. Nintendo seemed to think as much, too.
More interesting, there were reports stating that the new consoleâs controller would have a screen on it. Sure, that sounds cool, I thought. Obviously Nintendo was going to do something interesting, right? Theyâre not going to go back to just straightforward non-gimmicky consoles. And a controller with a screen in it definitely isnât a Wii Remote, at least.
So I eagerly awaited the upcoming E3, where Nintendo was set to reveal this new console.
June 2011 arrives, and I tune in to watch Nintendoâs press conference. Reggie is on stage talking about how Wii sounds like âWe,â but with the new console they want to make it for you. Yeah, you specifically. I'm watching youâŚ. Here, take a look at Wii U.
Obviously, my wish that they would ditch the Wii name is not being granted. I feel a certain amount of dread.
But obviously, the conference continues, and we get our first look at the new controller, which would later be named Wii U GamePad. Itâs wide, like a tablet, with a touch screen in the middle and typical video game buttons on the ends. I cared much more about those buttons than the touch screen, because in my mind, Wiiâs lack of buttons was one of the factors limiting what games could come to the system.
Based off that single image, itâs a neat controller, I guess. What else they got? How about we see some fancy HD graphics?
They show a trailer. A dude is playing New Super Mario Bros. The game doesnât really look any different from the Wii version (Uh oh). Then the dudeâs dad walks in and says âItâs time to watch some baseball.â The TV changes to baseball, but the dude continues to play the game on the handheld screen.
Then we see some other stuff. Like you can now put the new controller on the ground to see a golf ball there as you take a swing in Wii Sports. Or you can put the controller on the Wii Zapper to play some sort of game where you aim at a building trying to find the correct Mii. You can draw on the controller with a stylus. And you can put it on a table and use it to play a board game.
If none of this sounds very excitingâbelieve me, it wasnât. The stuff I was seeing was cute, but it didnât hype me up.
Luckily, they ended the trailer with some Zelda graphics. It looked like Twilight Princess but a lot fancier. âOk, there we go!â I thought. This was the first thing they showed that actually looked HD. Everything else seemed more like âWii, but with this new controller too.â
By the way, did anyone actually see the console itself in that trailer? No?
The rest of the conference basically went like this: they showed a graphics demo of a bird (which I found impressive), there was a video where devs talked about how cool the controller was, they showed some third-party games planned to come over from other consoles, and an EA exec hyped the console up onstage.
You canât deny Nintendo knew where some of the biggest areas of concern were. All the third-party talk was an effort to demonstrate that Wii U would not see a repeat of Wiiâs third-party woes. This time, third-parties were on board all the way! So they wanted us to believe. But when you put the speeches aside, the titles they actually showed (using footage from other consoles) werenât the most convincing. Darksiders? Isnât that like a scarier version of Zelda? Dirt? Well, car graphics tend to look nice, I will say.
The third-party announcement that I remember getting the biggest reaction was the soon-to-be-released Batman Arkham City. This was a highly anticipated game, so much so that the audience forgot in that moment that they were probably all going to play the game on 360 or PS3 a year before the Wii U console came out. Well, Nintendo was making an effort with third-party support, at least.
What about Nintendo-published games? You know, exclusives to convince people to buy the new console? Well, Nintendo announced they were publishing an exclusive new game in the LEGO series. Uh. Sure.
Also, Iwata said they were gonna make a Super Smash Bros. game. This was the loudest the crowd got the whole conference, and it was for a game Nintendo hadnât even started making yet.
But hey, the console was launching 2012, not 2011. Not everything needed to be figured out just yet, right?
Nintendo had presented their new idea and some potential use cases for it. The use cases didnât seem super compelling, to be honest⌠except for the whole off-TV play thing. Playing a full console game on a handheld? Thatâs pretty cool. They just needed to get the public to understand this.
The Re-Reveal of Wii U
Jump ahead a year to E3 2012. This is game time⌠metaphorically speaking. But also literally, I guess it is time for them to show some games, huh? Anyway, the point is that Wii U is going to launch ahead of this holiday season, so Nintendo really has to sell this thing. And they need to make sure everyone understands that itâs not a tablet for the Wii and is actually a new console, because that seemed like kind of an issue last time.
Prior to E3, Nintendo announced that not only would they hold the usual E3 press conference, they would also stream a Nintendo Direct the day before to explain Wii U in-depth so that they could focus more on games during the main show. I watched this, of course, and the main thing I learned is that Wii U was going to have a social network called Miiverse. Itâs a place where Wii U owners can make posts in individual communities that are each created for specific games. There was this whole goofy sketch where a guy is struggling in a game and he posts to Miiverse for help. Then an old gentleman tells him how to win over a video call (Wii U does have video call, but Iâm pretty sure itâs only allowed between friends, so this part seems inaccurate). The corny humor in this sketch was probably not going to win Nintendo any new fans, but I enjoyed it! People even made Impact font memes featuring the instant classic character Non-Specific Action Figure.
I found the information in this presentation interesting, but not exciting. I was ready to see some games on that Tuesday event!
And Nintendo did indeed bring some games to this show. Pikmin 3, to start. Thatâs a good game.
Considering a version of New Super Mario Bros. was one of the Wii U tech demos last year, it wasnât surprising that Nintendo also had a new New Super Mario Bros. game. New Super Mario Bros. U. The Wii version did absolutely crazy numbers, so this seemed like a strategically wise move.
Ubisoft had a zombie horror game called ZombiU. I remember thinking this game had the most interesting use of the new controller out of everything shown, because it had a mechanic where you have to look down at the GamePad to figure out the code to a door, but the game isnât paused while youâre doing that, so zombies can still advance towards you, which should create a unique kind of tension.
Did Nintendo have a game of their own to really showcase new gameplay possibilities unlocked by the GamePad? Yes, and it was called Nintendo Land. Nintendo Land was a collection of mini games themed after various Nintendo games. There was a Luigiâs Mansion themed game where one player is a ghost and the others try to catch them. Itâs a little something called asymmetrical multiplayer, and it looked like a lot of fun.
Nintendo also had a new Wii Fit in development, but I donât know if anyone really cared. Wii Fit was another one of Wiiâs huge hits, so it made sense to make another one. But I doubt many Nintendo diehards leapt to pre-order it. And people still using Wii Fit almost certainly werenât going to buy a whole new console just for a new version.
What about that Lego thing they talked about last year? Yeah, they showed a trailer for that. The game was called Lego City: Undercover, and the trailer had a good sense of humor to it. A Wii U exclusive, but for most peopleâprobably 99% of people, reallyâitâs not a system-seller on its own.
And Batman Arkham City was there too. Since this game had been out on the other consoles for half a year, they made sure to show some new Wii U GamePad features. Fundamentally, it seemed to be the exact same game, and trying to convince gamers who already played it to play it again seemed futile. But hey, I hadnât played it yet!
On that note, Mass Effect 3 was also coming to Wii U. I thought that was cool. I wasnât gonna actually play it. Who wants to start with the third one in a story-heavy RPG series? But to me, the announcement of any big, critically acclaimed Xbox 360/PS3 game coming to Wii U was encouraging.
As the conference began to roll towards its end, I still was kinda hoping for a âone more thingâ moment. Show a trailer for Zelda, or 3D Mario, or Mario Kart, or the Smash Bros you said you were making last year. It doesnât necessarily matter, in the moment, how far away those games actually are; sometimes you just have to get the hype machine going. But that didnât happen, and instead the show ended with Nintendo Landâs fireworks on the screen. Something felt off, thoughâwas something bigger supposed to happen? Was there supposed to be confetti?
Overall, I donât think this conference gave people much more confidence in Wii U compared to the previous year. They didnât even announce pricing.
But what did I personally think? I suppose I thought everything looked⌠good enough. I was⌠looking forward to Wii U. Then again, I had been looking forward to it since the initial rumors, and I certainly wasnât gonna jump ship now. The fact that the controller had two clickable sticks and all the buttons youâd expect from a modern controller already made it an upgrade from Wii in my eyes. I thought Nintendo Land looked fun and I figured Iâd end up getting New Super Mario Bros. U even though it didnât excite me that much.
In retrospect, maybe I should have been more alarmed by my lack of hype. But I was a Nintendo fan, and I knew I would need the console when 3D Mario and Zelda showed up on it anyway!
The console was going to launch ahead of the holiday season in 2012, but questions remained. So Nintendo held an additional event in the fall. I remember I was in one of my high school elective classes when it was happening, and so I watched what I could of it while on the computer.
The big announcement was the price, of course. Nintendo was going with two SKUs: a basic set for $299 with 8 GB of storage, and a deluxe set for $349 with 32 GB of storage, a copy of Nintendo Land, and some extra accessories. The basic set was kind of a bad deal compared to the deluxe, but I guess it was a way for Nintendo to advertise a lower price and appeal to more people without cutting into their profit margins too much. Also, the basic set was white and the deluxe was black.
You know what else was at this event? CoD. Black Ops II was shown. You could play multiplayer with one person on the GamePad screen and another on the TV. So that was exciting to me.
And they announced a feature called TVii. Explaining TVii isnât really important for this, but basically it was a neat service that could help you find shows to watch both on live TV and on streaming services, and could give you info about what youâre watching.
Nothing from this event was a big game-changer, but the important thing was we finally knew a price. More expensive than the Wii, but it didnât seem too bad.
So after all this, how was I feeling about Wii U just ahead of its launch? Well, I wanted one. Did I think a lot of other people were gonna want one? Ehh, it didnât seem like it. But hey, you never know. Right?
Getting a Wii U
Nintendoâs most devoted fans certainly showed up for the Wii Uâs launch. I wasnât going to be able to get one until Christmas because I didnât have a job and was thus relying on my mom (alongside whatever amount of allowance money I had saved up). I was concerned for a moment that there may be enough demand to make the systems hard to find, but that didnât end up being the case, and I was happy to see the Deluxe Set under the tree on Christmas.
I remember setting the Wii U up for the first time. I guess the first thing that happened upon turning it on and connecting it to the Internet was a system update, but I donât even remember that.
When it came to the physical design of Wii U, as someone who still had never gotten his own Xbox or PlayStation, when I looked at the console, I was like, âOoooh, itâs longer than the Wii. Because itâs more powerful!â
My family still didnât have any TVs new enough to have HDMI ports, but I had made sure beforehand to have Wii to Component cables readyâWii U was compatible with the same exact cables from Wii, conveniently.
Wii U has fun âbeep boopâ sound effects playing from the GamePad when it turns on. Then eventually you get to the main menu/WaraWara plaza and a more exciting âbeep poopâ sound plays on the TV to welcome you. Thereâs actually a mix of sounds from both the TV and the GamePad when youâre in the menus. Like Wii before it, these menu sounds are permanently etched into my mind.
When you go to the System Settings, the TV just tells you to look at the GamePad. I thought this was⌠cool? I donât know, it was novel, I guess.
Before jumping into Nintendo Land, I of course went to Mii Maker. Which was more similar to the 3DS Mii Maker than Mii Channel from Wii. The most interesting part of Mii Maker has to be the way the music on the TV and GamePad are different but complementary. Other than that, it lets you make Miis and thereâs not much else to say about it. I guess it would be funner if it had a plaza like the Wii version.
But there is one place Miis go to gather, and itâs called the WaraWara Plaza. Itâs part of the systemâs main menuâby default, the WaraWara Plaza is on the TV and your apps are on the GamePad. The WaraWara Plaza is an online feature. You see a circle of different game icons, with Miis gathered around each one. The games appearing and the Miis gathered around them are based on what other users are playing, and occasionally usersâ posts from Miiverse will appear, floating above the crowd gathered around a game. This is a really unique idea and gave Wii U a distinct sense of community throughout its life.
The clunky thing about navigating Wii U main screen is how you canât interact with whatâs on the TV with the GamePad. If you want to mess with the Miis, you either switch the WaraWara plaza to the GamePad, or connect another controller.
But enough about menus, because before long, I was able to play Nintendo Land. My family and I grabbed some Wii Remotes we still had sitting around, and we were able to play several games themed around chasing each other. And it was an absolute blast.
This is the first time in a video game where we could be in the same physical room, yet our roles in the game had us on unequal ground. The person with the GamePad, in a game like Mario Chase, has to hide. The other players with Wii Remotes will work together to find them. Because the GamePad is its own screen, thereâs no easy opportunity for the other players to cheat.
As a bonus, the camera in the GamePad is used to put a view of that playerâs face on the TV, which adds even more fun to these competitive moments.
The chase-style games in Nintendo Land created such a unique dynamic and Iâve never seen anything quite like it in local multiplayer since then.
The other games in it were OK too I guess.
In the Metroid-themed game, Metroid Blast, the player with the GamePad controls Samusâ ship while the other players run on the ground. I remember specifically being pleased by the mere fact the clickable control sticks were utilized. It wasnât that I was impressed by this decade-old input method, but rather, to me it represented Nintendoâs willingness to move away from the Wii philosophy of having a simplified controller. Even though it was just a minigame, I was inclined to see Metroid Blastâs existence as a good sign for Nintendo fans who wanted more âcoreâ experiences.
The other game we played the most was the Zelda one. GamePad user gets a bow, the Wii Remote users get a swordâI think you actually have to use Wii Motion Plus, though I might be wrong. Point is, you run through levels fighting enemies. Itâs pretty cool.
There were single-player games too, but I barely touched those. One of them had first appeared in 2011: the game where you use the touchscreen to throw shuriken while looking at the TV. I guess this game is kinda fun? But not that fun. Itâs a cute idea, at least.
The competitive multiplayer games of Nintendo Land were so much fun. They showcased a unique way to play together that truly couldnât be done anywhere else. Asymmetric multiplayer games would become popular in coming years, but those are online multiplayer games. Nintendo Land is pretty much the only local asymmetric multiplayer game.
Nintendo Land Couldnât Carry Wii U
So is Nintendo Land the Wii Sports of Wii U? Well, if you have three to four friends or family members available as well as some Wii Remotes, then I suppose you could consider it that. It does showcase the unique appeal of the system.
But I see some problems here. Like how you need to have controllers from a previous console to get the most out of this one. Because there sure arenât any Wii Remotes in the box. Sure, itâs a safe bet that someone interested in buying Wii U had a Wii at some point, but youâre just creating extra steps for them before they can enjoy the new game.
And that wasnât the case with Wii Sports. Right out of the box, you could enjoy golf and bowling, two games where multiplayer can be done by passing a single controller around. The package overall was fun enough that before long, you were probably going to want to get another Wii Remote.
Now, you can enjoy the singleplayer games of Nintendo Land right out of the box, but these just arenât that exciting. They use the second screen, but they simply donât feel unique or interesting. If you were trying to convince someone to get a Wii U, there was no way handing them the GamePad to play one of these games would do that.
Once I got my hands on it, Nintendo Land quickly made me glad I had a Wii U. But the game was never going to be the killer app Wii Sports was.
The multiplayer was where the real fun was. But when you have to get a few people together to demonstrate why itâs so fun, itâs still a more difficult sell than Wii Sports ever was. Do you wait in malls for groups of people to pass by and see if you can get them to come play Luigiâs Ghost Mansion together? Itâs certainly a massive challenge to communicate the appeal via a TV commercial.
I remember probably in January or February 2013, I saw a video on Smoshâs gaming channel where they were playing Nintendo Land, and I thought, âYes! Now more people will see how fun this game is and theyâll buy Wii Us!â I guess it wasnât enough to save the console, huh?
Wii U Launch Commercials
As you can imagine, Wii U had TV commercials at its launch. I wouldnât call them bad. But they werenât great, either.
Remember the Wii commercials? If youâre an American who watched TV in 2007 then you probably do. These two Japanese guys would go to peopleâs houses and say âWe would like to playâ and then everyone was suddenly having a party playing Wii games.
The early Wii U commercials seemed to be going for a similar vibe of âEveryone is having fun playing together!â and targeting that wide audience Wii found. But itâs just not as convincing this time.
One of the Wii U launch titles was a karaoke game, Sing Party. The lyrics are displayed on the GamePad, so youâre supposed to hold it with one hand and hold a microphone with the other and sing while facing your friends. This was one of the games featured in the commercials. But really, at the end of the day, this isnât very different from any other way to do karaoke. Would you buy a $300 console for this?
On the bright side, I did find on YouTube one of these commercials that did specifically explain the fact that you could play Mario on the GamePad while letting someone else use the TV. It was one bullet point in a thirty second commercial, alongside others such as âPlace blocks with the GamePad.â And fair enough; I mean, who doesnât want to place blocks?
In retrospect, I really think off-TV play needed like 500% more time in Wii Uâs advertising than it got.
The other issue I have with this rare mention of Wii Uâs best feature is in the storytelling. A kid wants to keep playing Mario, but his mom wants to watch TV. That is certainly one use case for the feature, but I feel like itâs a big mistake to forget that plenty of adults would find off-TV play useful, not just parents who donât want their kids to hog the TV all the time. Focusing first and foremost on the âkids and familyâ crowd was a strategy that would continue throughout the Wii Uâs life, for some reason.
The biggest compliment I can pay to these commercials is that they had a visual concept I found memorable. You see this tower of all these little box-shaped rooms wherein people are playing different Wii U games. When you zoom out, it turns out to be a giant U! So I liked that, at least.
Watching these today, I find the music cringeworthy. Itâs like someone said âI hear the kids are into something called âdubstepâ these days. Put some of that in there.â Itâs not necessarily bad music, but it comes off like thoughtlessly chasing trends. I donât think I had any strong feelings about it at the timeâI might have thought, âAh, theyâre trying to sound modern. Good choice.â
The marketing slogan for the console at launch, which you can hear in the commercials, was âHow U will play next.â And I mean⌠sure. Itâs not memorable at all, but I guess it explains the U in Wii U. I donât know how important slogans really are for video game consoles, but I would have to guess that this one didnât really make a difference either way.
There was one commercial that attempted to explain asymmetric multiplayer: âOne player against four!â it said (like the off-TV play one, it was just one of several bullet points). That is accurate, but it doesnât really get across why one versus four would be fun. In fairness, I donât know how I would demonstrate this concept in an ad either. The best idea I have is to just show people playing the game and reacting for thirty seconds. And even then, I donât know if that would be convincing when itâs hard to explain how exactly the GamePad is creating a unique type of fun in this scene.
These commercials gave a good effort, but the task of explaining why you should want a Wii U was a difficult one. Showing kids playing Mario and Nintendo Land, a couple using the TVii app, a father and son playing LEGO City Undercover, and young adults playing Sing Partyâas a whole, it seems like a reasonable angle to take, given the success the Wii had from focusing on people having fun with their friends and families.
I did not see, however, much of an effort to appeal to âcoreâ gamers through advertising. Even though Wii U had a few games for that audience, Nintendo wasnât going out of their way to let them know. I doubt it would have made a difference if they had. If ZombiU had been an absolute banger of a game, then that mightâve sold some people on Wii U. But other than that, the only âcoreâ games are slightly modified versions of games available on other consoles, and I donât think those games were ever going to convince many gamers to buy a $300 console.
The Wii U advertising we did get took pages from Wiiâs playbook, but I donât think it was as effective. You can show people having fun, but does the audience understand why theyâre having fun? Do they understand what Wii U actually is offering? With Wii, you could understand it very quickly. Wii U? Not so much. I mean what do we need a tablet for the Wii for? Wait, itâs not just a tablet for Wii? Now I understand even less why we need it.
How do you market this thing?
There must have been an expectation that the Wii name would do some of the heavy lifting on getting people to take notice of the product. The ideal scenario is that millions of people say, âGasp! A NEW Wii called Wii U?â Unfortunately, we had already gotten Wii Balance Board, Wii Zapper, Wii Wheel, and THQâs UDraw Tablet. You show the average person a picture of a weird tablet controller and say itâs the controller for Wii U, and most likely theyâll think itâs another accessory for Wii.
The name of the console was undeniably a problem. You end up having to spend time explaining that itâs not an accessory for Wii that you couldâve spent explaining what the product actually does.
Still, even if it was called Wii 2 or something entirely different, the concept remains difficult to explain, unlike Wii, which doesnât even need to be explained. You show someone playing Wii for two seconds and people get it.
You know what Wii U feature isnât actually difficult to understand? Off-TV play! In fact, it was the first thing Nintendo ever showed for the console. But off-TV play is for gamers who like video games. And maybe Nintendo was thinking, why bother advertising to them?
But I thought the point of Wii U was that it had something for, I donât know, both non-gamers and gamers alike?
There are definitely some problems here. Wii U is supposed to be the successor to Wii and appeal to that huge crowd of casuals. But its most appealing feature is something that only gamers will get excited about. In theory, the non-gamer crowd is probably supposed to be interested in the touch screen. In reality, they didnât care.
Which is probably due in part to the fact that tablets had gotten super popular in the two years prior to Wii Uâs launch. Consumers see a tablet-like device from Nintendo and unsurprisingly arenât enthused about it; itâs not new and exciting, and besides, compared to the sleek tablets on the market, the Wii U GamePad looks like a toy.
That aside, I do think just about anyone would have fun if they got to try Nintendo Land multiplayerâexcept itâs a video game, so a lot of people wonât try it. You have to press a button or two, and that alone means some people who liked Wii Sports are already out.
So, unfortunately, even if Wii U had the best marketing in the world, I donât see it coming close to repeating Wiiâs success.
If Nintendo had focused their marketing on off-TV play, there still wouldâve been some concerns. A $300 console with barely any storage, with a CPU developers found inferior to Xbox 360âs, with a controller that does deliver on off-TV play but has limited range and short battery life. But it does have Nintendo games.
$300 isnât a bad price for a console, but when it performs worse than consoles from six years earlier⌠it suddenly doesnât seem like such a good deal. Clearly, the GamePad added a lot to the cost of Wii U, and Nintendo cut costs on the internal hardware to compensate. So you end up with a console thatâs troublesome for the third-party developers Nintendo hoped would bring games to it, and confusing for the non-core-gamer consumers who made Wii a smash hit.
Fans love to look back at Wii U and put all the blame for its struggles on the marketingâand yeah, the marketing wasnât helping. But the problems with this product were much deeper.
Other Wii U Experiences in 2012
But letâs get back to 2012, because I sure wasnât thinking about the problems with Wii U just yet. I was having fun with Nintendo Land, but that wasnât the only game we had. We also got New Super Mario Bros. U.
Which was a pretty fun game but not really that interesting to talk about. The GamePad feature of adding blocks to the level felt mostly pointless.
There was another game Iâd wanted for a while: NBA 2K. I remember when I watched a review online of one of these games and I couldnât believe how real the graphics seemed at the time. Now that I had a Wii U, I decided to get NBA 2K13. The graphics didnât seem as impressive as I had thought a couple years back, but they were still pretty good.
I never got good at 2K but I did enjoy it. It supported off-TV play, so you had to appreciate that.
In addition to the GamePad, Nintendo released a new wireless controller for Wii U: the Wii U Pro controller. Thereâs a bit of a lineage here. Wii had the Classic Controller, which was shaped like an SNES controller and was built mainly for old games you could download on Wiiâs Virtual Console service. But apparently there was some demand for a more modern design, so later Nintendo released the Classic Controller Pro, which had actual handles, and the shoulder buttons were in a more sensible location. Both of these controllers plugged into the Wii Remote rather than having wireless connectivity on their own. Now with the Wii U Pro controller, you get all the buttons of the Wii U GamePad on a controller shaped similarly to the Xbox 360 controller. And it has crazy long battery life.
My only complaints are: 1) I donât like the way the triggers feel, 2) No gyro (which makes the GamePad the more attractive choice for Zelda even though I kinda like playing on the more traditional controller), and 3) Mini-USB instead of Micro-USB? Bummer.
I know some people donât like that the sticks are both on the top half of the controller, but that doesnât really bother me. Overall, I would call Wii U Pro Controller pretty great.
So my first couple weeks with Wii U were pretty enjoyable. Oh, I forgot to mention something, though. THIS CONSOLE WAS SLOW. Booting it up, going from a game to the main menuâyou always had to wait more than a minute! Later updates would improve it, but the initial load times were really egregious, and it never got to a point where it felt quick and snappy. Eventually a âQuick Launchâ menu was added which would show on the GamePad a list of recently opened apps you could choose from to boot right into, allowing you to bypass the main menu entirely. I really donât know why Wii Uâs software took so long to load, but it was definitely not a good look.
Useful(?) Apps on Wii U
With DS, Wii, and then Wii U, Nintendo created not just games, but applications that were meant to be useful for everyday life.
The Wii had a service called WiiConnect24, which basically meant that Wii could stay connected to the internet even when not powered on, and the light would glow blue if something new had been sent to the console. With Wii U, Nintendo, wanting to expand on this idea, thought, âWhat if you could check an update without needing to actually turn on the TV?â This is a good idea, in theory. I think one reason it didnât really matter much in the end is that the console takes so long to turn on. Maybe there are situations where you just donât want anything on the TV, and yeah, Wii U can provide that for you, if so.
You would think that generally people would be fine with having the TV on for a moment even if itâs just to check something, but when I think back to how I used Wii U, I realize that I used the consoleâs web browser quite a lot without the TV, and it was quite nice. That was mostly because I didnât have a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, of course.
Smartphones, I think, are really what made the WiiConnect24 concept in general obsolete. So thereâs no News Channel or Forecast Channel on Wii U (also nothing on Wii U is called channel but thatâs not the point).
But yeah, Wii Uâs web browser was pretty darn good and could even be accessed without closing a game, which made it useful if you wanted to look up guides or whatever.
As far as other applications go, Wii U had a video call app, but I never once used it. Because how many people do I know with a Wii U? If you want to chat, just get a webcam for your computer, man, itâs easier.
Of course there was the eShop, with its most impressive feature being the way Nintendo would change the music over time. When I first used Wii U, it really did impress me that you could download full, $60 retail games (and I remind you again that I didnât own an Xbox 360). You wouldnât be able to download many, of course, with only 32 GB of storage built-inâand if you had the basic set, the situation was really brutal. So you really needed to get a USB hard drive if you were gonna go in heavy on the eShop.
There were indie games on there too. I know I downloaded Trine 2 at some point.
At some point, we got the Google Street View app. Basically it had a selection of locations from Google Maps Street View, and you could use the GamePad and its gyro controls to look around these locations effortlessly. I used this at least once. Any free novelty like this that came to Wii U, I was gonna download it.
Another such novelty was the Animal Crossing plaza, which must have been in 2013 or 2014. Basically, it was the WaraWara Plaza, except populated by Animal Crossing characters. Note that it wasnât a theme for the normal WaraWara Plaza; it was an app of its own. There was nothing to actually do in this app except look at the characters and the Miiverse posts that popped up. As nice as it was to see the Animal Crossing animals in HD, this was another app I probably only used a single time.
The most important app on Wii U, at the end of the day, was Miiverse. It was a unique kind of social media. If you were playing New Super Mario Bros., you could suspend the game and look at the Miiverse community for the game. You could make a post there and even include a screenshot if you wanted. Posts from Miiverse would then automatically appear back in the game itself, and other games like Nintendo Land and Wind Waker HD would do this too.
Because the Wii U GamePad featured a touchscreen and stylus, it was natural that artists would draw sketches, and these made scrolling through Miiverse a lot of fun. There were also just some pretty weird and funny posts, probably owing to the fact that much of Wii Uâs userbase were children. But Miiverse really may have been the least toxic social media platform to ever exist.
Wii U also had Netflix and other streaming apps, which was definitely a great thing. I may not have had a laptop or any kind of smart device, but I could watch Netflix on my own just on the GamePad!
The Crisis
Alright, I broke from chronological order there a bit, but letâs get back to that memorable time of New Years, 2013.
Reading video game news and forums online has been one of my favorite ways to kill time probably since I was 12. The new year is always a slow period for news, but within the first few weeks of 2013, there was some real bad news for Wii U.
Although the console had gotten off to an OK start, with the new year, sales took a nosedive. Nobody was buying this console anymore! And by nobody, I mean 57,000 people in the US in the month of January. Which is barely a step above nobody!
As a Nintendo fan, this was a crisis! We canât have Nintendo failing, people! We need them to win!
Nah but fanboyism aside, if the console doesnât sell, you canât really expect developers to invest in making games for it. And thatâs bad.
But speaking personally, I truly did get a sinking feeling the moment I read the news.
To make matters worse, after a decent number of launch games, the release calendar was looking mighty dry for 2013. Rayman Legends seemed to be the only big winter title. In March there was Lego City Undercover and new versions of Monster Hunter 3 and Need for Speed Most Wanted. The only Nintendo-developed game planned for release in the near future was Game & Wario, and that wasnât releasing in the West until June (it ended up getting mixed reviews). There simply wasnât a ton to look forward to, and combined with the poor sales numbers, you couldnât help but worry about Wii U.
Nintendo had to take action to let everyone know Wii U wasnât a sinking ship. Thatâs why company president Satoru Iwata stood before the world in a new Nintendo Direct on January 23, 2013.
And oh, this Direct gave me plenty to look forward to.
ZELDA. They didnât show the new Zelda, but Aonuma said they were trying to rethink the conventions of the series for the new game. It had barely been a year since I found myself disappointed with Skyward Sword, and to hear that they were considering radical changes was welcome news.
But in addition to that, they also showed a screenshot of a little game called The Wind Waker. HD version. OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOSH
Whatâs funny is, I first played Wind Waker in 2008. My nostalgia for it wasnât even that old. But I mean, I was a teenager still. Those years felt like an eternity.
What else they got? How about Fire Emblem? I know what that is! Fire Emblem cross⌠Shin Megami Tensei. I donât know what that is. Ugh, what a casual I was back then. But hey, other people knew what that was, so I figured it was a good thing.
They also showed a game called X. And graphically, it seemed incredibly impressive. It looked like this game would allow you to roam a vast world, and that was just the sort of thing I wanted. This footage was maybe the first time outside of those 2011 graphics demosâand Nintendo Land, because when you walk around the theme park hub in that game, itâs pretty gorgeous, honestlyâ that I felt excited about Wii Uâs graphics. I wished they couldâve showed it back at E3!
(And this game had music by Hiroyuki Sawano but I didnât know who that was at the time either)!
3D Mario was not shown at this Direct, but Iwata did promise that they would show 3D Mario at E3. So that was cool!
All in all, this presentation blew away all expectations I hadâof course, I expected basically nothing. Nintendo Direct was still a fairly new idea, and so far, Nintendo hadnât used Directs to debut lots of games. But this Direct changed that. Ever since thenâbut especially in the Switch eraâwhen they announce a Direct, people will speculate like crazy, because nothing is truly off the table. Because of my complete lack of expectations, I think this was the most excited Iâve ever felt from a Directâplus, I just really love Wind Waker.
A couple weeks later, there was another Direct, wherein another Wii U announcement was made: New Super Mario Bros. U was getting an expansion called New Super Luigi U.
Also, this was now the year of Luigi. Yes. THE YEAR OF LUIGI.
That aside, my sense of a Wii U crisis faded somewhat, and mostly because of Wind Waker, which remains one of my favorite Zelda games. The HD version looked quite lovely.
But for the time being, we were still left to face the harsh reality of a severe dry spell of Wii U releases. Ubisoftâs Rayman Legends was going to release that February as an exclusive, but at the last minute (February 7th!), they announced they were changing it to a multiplatform release and delaying the game until September. The porting I understandâyou donât want to send the game to dieâbut why the delay? Just release it on Wii U and sell the other copies later. One of lifeâs greatest mysteries.
At least they gave us a fun demo on Wii U to make up for it.
I did end up getting Lego City Undercover when that came out in March. An amusing little game with long load times. I liked the idea of âLego GTAâ but I donât remember spending much time exploring the map, to be honest, so Iâm not sure to what extent it lived up to that idea.
Wii U Puts up a Fight?
Leading up to E3 2013, there was some big news: Nintendo wasnât going to do a live show. Gasp. To video game fans, this seemed like another sign Nintendo was in trouble. It certainly didnât seem like the sort of thing a super confident company would do.
Regardless, I didnât worry too much. Nintendo was going to at least show 3D Mario this E3, and that was gonna be cool! I always imagined HD 3D Mario as like⌠being able to see the individual blades of grass⌠and itâs a Mario game.
Blades of grass is pretty much the mark of an HD game to me, I guess.
E3 2013 was the one where Xbox had messed up their reveal of Xbox One weeks earlier by angering gamers, and Sony was gonna convince a bunch of people to buy a PS4 insteadâbut we donât care about that right now! Itâs Wii U time!
Nintendoâs first all-digital E3 show didnât go so smoothly, as the site they were using to stream it couldnât keep up. Viewers, myself included, experienced a lot of lag.
Despite that, when Nintendo showed the new Mario Kart, OOOOH THAT LOOKED NICE. Mario Kart 8 looked impressive then, and ten years later, somehow weâre still playing it (just not on Wii U). It still looks great.
Mario Kart was great news. What about the promised new 3D Mario? Well, they showed that. It wasnât what I thought it was going to be.
Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel are some of my favorite games ever. That was true back then, and it remains true now. I had also played Super Mario 3D Land on my brotherâs 3DS and found it quite fun. It wasnât mind-blowing like Galaxy, but it was quite delightful as a portable game. When thinking about Mario on Wii U, I had some pretty sky-high expectations.
When they showed Mario 3D World for the first time that E3, it was a pretty deflating moment. You see Marioâs face and itâs like âHOLY COW 3D MARIO TIME!â and then they show the rest of the scene.
Super Mario 3D World was like the 3DS game 3D Land. Just bigger, and with multiplayer. This did not excite me. There seemed like such a huge difference between these imaginative worlds of Galaxy, a game that had some real atmosphere (despite being in space), and the more toy-like video game-ness of what we saw in this 3D World trailer. I was definitely going to play the game, but it wasnât really what I wanted.
Well, on the bright side, this show gave us our first look at the new Super Smash Bros. At first, they showed footage of the 3DS version, so I was like âHmm.â But then it switched to being all fancy with the Wii U version, so I was like âAhhhh!â
I almost forgot to mention that Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze was at this E3 too. I donât remember being that excited for this. I guess it was because I was kinda hoping Retro Studios would be up to something else. Still, it turned out to be a great game.
Nintendoâs E3 was a pretty decent lineup of games overall, and Mario Kart and Smash Bros are games that move consoles! Unfortunately, neither of the two were launching in 2013.
But you know, Wind Waker came to the console that fall and I really hoped people would buy Wii U for that!
Oh, but Iâm getting ahead of myself, because Pikmin 3 launched that summer and was a really good game.
I also bought Disney Infinity for Wii U that summer for some reason. Barely played it. I donât know what I was thinking. I guess I just thought exploring some Disney worlds could be fun? It didnât seem like a bad game, from what I played, but I never bought additional toys for it.
In September 2013 (August outside of America), Wii U got a game from Platinum called The Wonderful 101. In this game you could draw shapes on the touchscreen to issue commands. A very unique idea! The game got OK reviews. You can play it on modern platforms nowadays if you want.
Also this fall, there was a new Wii Party game, Wii Party U. Technically I did own this game thanks to the Mario Kart 8 promotion, but I never once played it. Reviews were kind of all over the place, too.
Oh yeah and then Wii Fit U finally came out, but that didnât save the console either. I suppose these two games must have been the last entries in the âWiiâ series until Nintendo Switch Sports, if you want to count that.
But wait. There is another I almost forgot to mention.
Wii U Holiday Season Round 2
In fall 2013, Nintendo said, âNintendo Land isnât working out as our new Wii Sports. Letâs have Wii Sports be our new Wii Sports and see if that works!â (Disclaimer: they did not actually say that).
Nintendo announced a product called Wii Sports Club. An HD version of Wii Sports with a really weird release and price structure. You couldnât just buy the game on a disc initially. You could either buy a temporary pass for a single sport or a permanent pass and uh⌠yeah I donât know, it was weird. But it added online multiplayer.
The 2013 holiday season must have felt like a make-or-break moment inside Nintendo. And here in North America, they came up with a bold strategy to sell consoles: lean even harder into the kids and family angle!
Look, everyone already thinks of Nintendo as being the company who makes games for kids. Itâs caused them trouble at times. But when the only people buying Wii U seemed to be adult nerds, I guess they must have figured that average families simply arenât aware of Wii Uâs existence.
The remedy? Make commercials featuring children being precocious and convincing their parents to get Wii Us!
Hold on. If you were a parent and your kids wanted a Wii U, you would probably hear about it directly from them. You wouldnât need a commercial showing you some fictional characters who want Wii U. Am I wrong? So why not put energy into making kids think Wii U is super cool and all the cool grown-ups are playing it? Wouldnât that be more effective?
Instead we get these cheesy family sitcom ads. I will say, itâs a new strategy for Nintendo, and thereâs something I find charming about these ads, in a cringe sort of way.
Note how with these commercials, they deliberately used a key word: âupgrade.â Wii U is not a tablet for Wii. Itâs an upgrade. You upgrade your phones, right? So upgrade your Wii to Wii U. The word also implies that you already have a Wiiâand theyâre probably right about that.
Iâll be honest, I didnât even see these ads at the time they aired, but I saw them later on YouTube and they fascinate me.
I just canât really imagine a lot of parents who would see these ads and think, âWow, our family time will be fixed if I buy this video game console!â
Actually though, these werenât the only Wii U ads around that time. Mario 3D World also got its own commercials which showed the fun of the cat power-up by having one of the actors suddenly be dressed in a cat costume. You know, I think I did see this one in 2013. And I found it slightly embarrassing.
But enough about commercials. Because Super Mario 3D World released that November, and the reviews were excellent.
I remember I played it with a couple of my siblings during Christmas break. We beat the main portion of the game but most of it didnât leave that much of an impression on me, because the levels are so quick. I didnât come to fully appreciate the game until I played it again on Switch. I also realized at that point that playing it solo was more fun for me (Iâm sure it depends on who you play it with). Iâll always be more in love with a 3D Mario like Odyssey than I am with this one, but I do think itâs an excellent game thatâs full of creativity and has a fantastic soundtrack.
The end of 2013 was also pretty much the last time Wii U saw significant third party support, with Assassins Creed 4 and Call of Duty Ghosts launching on the console. After this, almost every big publisher was out for good (Ubisoft still kept their promise and released Watch Dogs eventually though).
One other notable event happened in December 2013: a Zelda spinoff called Hyrule Warriors, developed by Koei Tecmo, was announced in a Nintendo Direct. I didnât know what to think about this. It was Zelda-related, but not really a Zelda game. So, it was cool, but I also kinda didnât care?
In 2013, Wii U sold 2.8 million units, bringing it to a total of 5.86 million. And with how dire things felt at certain points this year, itâs nice to know a couple million people bought the system, right? Now uh, just for the sake of comparison, letâs look at the sales of PlayStation 4â4.2 million at the end of 2013? Ok, so in just two months theyâve almost passed Wii Uâs lifetime numbers. And then by January 2015 theyâve sold 18.5 million units. âŚWell dang.
After just one year on the market, was it already too late to turn Wii Uâs fate around? Maybe. But you couldnât deny: Wii U now had two more incredibly solid exclusive games with Pikmin 3 and Mario 3D World. You gotta give it props for that.
2014 Was Fun
Iâm gonna be honest, I was at college starting in the fall of 2013 and I left the Wii U at home. Now that I had a laptop of my own, most of my gaming was on that. It wasnât quite a gaming laptop, but it had a somewhat low-end discrete GPU and that got the job done. I might talk about it another time. Anyway, because of this, I didnât get to play Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze when it launched in February 2014. It reviewed pretty well, though.
Beyond that game, a huge Wii U release was on the horizon: Mario Kart 8. It released in May 2014, and man. Itâs a fun, good-looking Mario Kart game with a killer soundtrack.
Finally, the game that will save the Wii U! Well, probably not, but whatever.
E3 this year was one of Nintendoâs best. They announced Super Mario Maker, an obviously great concept. They announced a game called Splatoon, which I found incredibly interesting as a multiplayer shooter where you take control of territory by painting it. And you can be a squid. And they told us that Bayonetta 2, which had actually been announced a while back, was coming out the same year. Additionally, we got more info on Smaaaash Brooooooossssssss.
And you know what else? ZELDA. ZELDA FOR WII U. GAME LOOKED INSANE. And they were saying it would come out in 2015? Ha.
That game would later be known as Breath of the Wild and it surprised me in countless ways. I love it.
Also you know what else was good about this E3? It was like Nintendo realized that it might be good for online presentations to try to be, you know, entertaining. Leading up to E3, they got Mega64 to do a video for them. It involved replacing Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-AimĂŠ with a robot version of himself. And then the E3 show itself featured skits created by the Robot Chicken people. âGive us Mother 3, Reggie!â âNot my problem!â
Anyway, let me go back to Smash Bros. for a bit. If you were around for the Ultimate hype cycle, youâre already familiar with this, but this was the beginning of all the unique movies for character announcements. Smash for Wii U/3DS had newcomers like Mega Man, Robin from Fire Emblem, Palutena, Wii Fit Trainer, and Duck Hunt. Seeing each announcement made the time leading up to the gameâs release a lot of fun.
And there was another twist with this game. This was the dawn of Amiibo. See, the Wii U GamePad launched with an NFC reader built-in. If you donât know, NFC means ânear field communicationâ and an NFC readerâs job is to tell when another NFC device is very close to it. As far as I remember, Nintendo didnât make use of this bit of tech in the GamePad at first, but then in 2014, with Super Smash Bros., Nintendo started releasing these little figurines of the characters from the game. You put one of them on the controller, and the character will show up in the game.
See, âtoys to lifeâ was a lucrative trend in gaming at the time. I would say I knew little about it because I wasnât a child, except I already confessed to buying Disney Infinity earlier, so, I guess I canât pretend. The biggest toys to life franchise was Skylanders, of course. Even though Iâm sure the toys couldâve been made to work with Wii U GamePad, that didnât happen, so if you wanted to use a Skylanders figure, you had to have the specific magic device you put the toy on that makes the figure appear in the game.
Anyway, Nintendo was basically doing its own version of toys to life as a part of Smash Bros. They released a whole 10-minute sitcom to explain it, which was cheesy in a way I honestly loved. Basically, your Amiibo character will grow stronger and adapt from your playstyle the longer you play with it. Which is cool.
Of course, the truth about Amiibo is, people just like collecting figurines of their favorite Nintendo characters. And these are pretty inexpensiveâat least, if you can find them. Amiibo became a pretty big craze among Nintendo fans. The product line continued with Nintendo Switch, but I will tell you, I never started buying them, even though I have been tempted a few times.
So that was basically 2014. There was Donkey Kong, there was Smash Bros., there was Mario Kart, there was Hyrule Warriors, and there was even Bayonetta 2. It turned out to be a pretty fun year for Nintendo fans, and it finally felt like the company was on a winning streak with this system. Sales still werenât going crazy, of course, but Wii U owners never felt more hope than in this moment.
Hereâs the thingâŚ
I would love to tell you all about 2015, but Iâve gotta be honest again. In November 2014 I left for my mission, so I wasnât playing no Wii U games anymore and wouldnât be for two years. So I could pretend like I was paying as much attention as I had been, but Iâm sure the true fans would see through me. Iâm not the right person to tell you about the dismal year of 2015. Scott the Woz is.
Did I catch up on the Wii U games I missed when I got back? To an extent. My younger brother was still getting Wii U games, so there was a decent library available to me when I got home.
But that was December 2016, and by that point, Nintendo Switch had already been announced. Its release was just a few months away, and it felt like the era of Wii U had ended already. Breath of the Wild didnât feel like it was going to be one last hurrah for Wii U; instead it felt like the game that would convince you to buy a Switchâit was the first game shown in the Switch reveal trailer, after all. And Nintendo did have a big release for the 2016 holiday season, but it wasnât a Wii U game. It was the NES Classic Edition.
The biggest thing I really wanted to play in December 2016 was Twilight Princess HD, which had come out earlier in the year. I had always really hoped Twilight Princess would get an HD version, because itâs a game with a realistic art style that never aged very gracefully. Remember the Zelda demo for Wii U at E3 2011? I figured a Twilight Princess HD version could look more like that. But that didnât end up being the case. For Twilight Princess to truly look like a modern game, you would have to rework the whole lighting system, and the developers of this version did not do that. They did redo the textures, so Twilight Princess HD is definitely going to look a lot better on an HD TV than a simple upscale of the Wii version would, but I imagined the upgrade would be bigger than it was. Additionally, there were some little gameplay tweaks like reducing the number of Tears of Light you have to gather, so thatâs nice. Whatâs unfortunate is that Wii U actually had trouble with the rare spots where some fancier visual effects are used (such as the magical fence in the final battle) and in those moments thereâs stuttering that was never present in the Wii version. Oof.
Other than Zelda, I definitely made sure to try Mario Maker, but it just didnât feel as exciting jumping into it after the heyday of its online activity. But hey, Mario Maker 2 in 2019 was fun.
What else did I miss?
Splatoon came out in 2015, as previously announced, and although it didnât turn Wii U into a sales juggernaut, it became quite a popular game. You can see its legacy through its Nintendo Switch successorsâSplatoon 3 has a passionate playerbase today and Iâm sure theyâll continue on to Splatoon 4 whenever Nintendo decides itâs time for that. I didnât actually play the original Splatoon, but I did get quite into Splatoon 2 for a bit.
Wii U got Kirby and Yoshi gamesâboth 2D platformers. I gotta be honest, a 2D platformer has to be really special to convince me to buy it. The reviews for both were good but not great. Now that I think about it, I remember yarn Yoshi (Yoshiâs Wooly World) was another part of the E3 2014 show, and you couldnât deny, it was cute. But yeah I know almost nothing about these games to be honest.
Captain Toad Treasure Tracker took the Captain Toad puzzles from Mario 3D World and expanded them into a full game, and it was a delight. It later was ported to the Switch.
After many years without any new Star Fox games, Nintendo finally decided to make a new one called Star Fox Zero. Too bad everybody hated it. Actually, the reviews werenât that bad, but itâs just not a game many people will go to bat for today. You had to aim by looking at the GamePad and not the TV, and people just found this difficult. Iâve never dared to try it out for myself, Iâll admit.
There was a new Mario Tennis. I liked Mario sports games on GameCube, but I hear this one was way too basic.
And then towards the end of Wii Uâs life there was Paper Mario Color Splash? Man, after the absolute disappointment of Sticker Star, I didnât have hope for this one. I hear it was better than Sticker Star, but still not like the seriesâ first two games.
That Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei crossover game with Atlus finally released as Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. I still want to try this game, but I donât know when Iâll get to it. If it would just go on sale itâd be such an easy choice, but alas.
Oh and X became Xenoblade Chronicles X. Xenoblade would grow into a more popular series on Switch, but it was still young at this point (đ¤đumm well actually itâs a successor to Monolith Softâs previous Xenogears and Xenosaga games that werenât published by Nintendo so can you really call it young?) Surprisingly, Xenoblade X is still a Wii U exclusive to this day.
What else we got? Uhhh Pokken Tournament! Pokemon meets Tekken. Itâs also an arcade game, but it was indeed on Wii U as well. And later it got a Switch version.
There was a new game in the Fatal Frame series, which is another series I didnât know existed until⌠actually, I think an Assist Trophy from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is what made me aware of its existence. You can play this game on PS4 now, so I guess the GamePad features werenât crucial (but of course thatâs not saying much; I mean even Ubisoftâs ZombiU got ported to the other consoles).
I almost forgot there was a Mario Party game on Wii U in 2015. It has a 66 on Metacritic. Which reminds me, there was an Animal Crossing party game too. Not an Animal Crossing game. An Animal Crossing board-game-style party game called Amiibo Festival. 46 on Metacritic. YIKES.
Look, just watch the Scott the Woz episodes on âThe Dark Age of Nintendoâ if you want to learn about these games.
Anyway, that about covers most of the big stuff that happened in the last couple years of Wii Uâs life.
Definitely by 2015 if not earlier, it was clear without a doubt that there was no way Wii U was going to turn into a big money maker for Nintendo. All they could do in the last couple years of its life was finish some games that wouldnât be too expensive to make and try to keep fans from rioting until they could release Wii Uâs successor.
Also, Nintendo got a little into mobile games and ended up causing a beautiful worldwide event in the summer of 2016 thanks to their partnership with Niantic. Bet that wouldnât have happened if Wii U hadnât flopped.
And then of course, in March 2017, the Switch released, and with it, Breath of the Wild. And the first time I beat the game, it was on Wii U. This version is almost identical to the Switch one, as the game doesnât utilize the touchscreen at all. You can use the Pro controller, though if you run into one of the motion control shrines, youâll have to switch to the GamePad. Itâs kind of funny that the biggest remnant of the GamePadâs influence on this game is just that the Sheikah Slate resembles it.
The GamePad: What Happened?
So, whatâs the deal with the GamePad? Second screen gaming was supposed to bring new possibilities! Where were they? Was the weird control scheme of Star Fox Zero all we could do?
People like to say, âThe GamePad is perfect for viewing a map!â
But I gotta be honest. Usually in a game, if you want to look at a map, you pause. And if I pause a game, my eyes are off the action. But if I look down at the GamePad, my eyes are still off the action. Really, is there a meaningful difference? Other than the role-playing aspect of âoooh Iâm looking down just like the character in the game would be.â
I just donât see the advantage of it at all. You think about the Nintendo DS and 3DS, and the two-screen set-up works there because the screens are small and close together. You can pretty much see both at the same time. This is not the case with Wii U.
What is a use case for the GamePadâs screen that makes a meaningful difference in gameplay? A use case beyond mere gimmicks.
I mean, in Arkham City for Wii U, they make you use that touch screen for some stuff like decoding passwords, but did anyone actually find those moments to be truly better than the normal version of the game? Those are game mechanics I would call gimmicks.
A gimmick isnât necessarily a bad thing, in my eyes. A gimmick can be amusing, for a while. But gimmicks arenât pushing gaming forward. Gimmicks can be abandoned and their absence will barely be noticed.
Second-screen gaming was used, in most cases, as a gimmick and not a meaningful gameplay innovation. Which is why the vast majority of Wii U exclusives have been ported to Nintendo Switch without any issue.
But that said, there are two innovations the Wii U GamePad brought to the table that I consider a big deal.
One was demonstrated in Nintendo Land. Itâs that asymmetric multiplayer, baby. The problem with this feature, from a commercial perspective, is that itâs difficult to sell a system just for this one specific concept. There was something special about having a group looking at the TV while one person did their own thing on the GamePad that I donât think is quite replicated by online asymmetric multiplayer games. I donât think weâll get something quite like it anytime soon, because itâs just not practical.
The other innovation of the GamePad, of course, was off-TV play. The ability to play a full home console game on a handheld device. Even on a device like the PSP or Vita, handheld games were never fully on the level of their home console counterparts. But today weâre at a point where we can get the exact same console games on our handheld devices, either through streaming or devices like the Switch that run them natively. Wii U broke new ground.
People are quick to place the blame for Wii Uâs failures on the name and general marketing. But it was hard for the marketing people to know how to tell people why they should want it when Nintendo themselves didnât even have a clear answer.
Off-TV play should have been the main answer, in retrospect. But I donât think Nintendo was satisfied just with that. âPlay normal games but on a small screen? We can do more than that!â They mightâve thought something like that (just guessing). During E3 2011, Nintendo released a video where Iwata was talking with Miyamoto, and they discussed how there were so many potential ideas they were just trying to figure out where to begin.
Back then, I wouldâve been rather surprised if you had told me that, at the end of Wii Uâs life, Nintendo didnât end up with a problem of âso many good ideas we donât know where to start,â but rather, âlots of ideas but most of them are not actually that good when you try to make a game out of them.â Star Fox made a serious attempt to use the GamePad as a unique controller, and almost no one thought it worked very well. It was good of them to try, but just because something is new and different, that doesnât mean itâs better, easier, or more immersive than other methods.
Do I Like Wii U?
Thinking back on the original Wii, I went from being super excited about it as a middle schooler to being slightly embarrassed by it as a high schooler. I still saw a lot of value in the system, but thanks to the controllers and the lack of horsepower, it was difficult to really defend it to anyone who was into âseriousâ games.
When I got a Wii U, for one small moment I felt like Nintendo had made the technical leap I had wished forâI mean, the console could at least run games like Arkham City and NBA 2K, and the controllers had all the standard buttons you need for modern games (though they lacked analog triggers).
But tech aside, it was immediately clear that the console had that same charm and quirkiness that Wii did. And Wii U would always have that going for it, even while its intentions of winning back the core gamers never came to fruition.
Nintendo approached so many things differently from everyone else. They didnât add online features the competition has had for years, but they did create a whole social network. And it turned out to be a lot of fun!
For better or worse, though, Nintendo left many of those fun, quirky ideas that brought personality to Wii U, Wii, and 3DS behind when it moved on to Switch. There was no more Miiverse, nor any gathering place for Miis. There was no message board like Wii had. The consoleâs main menu had no background music, and even though you could still make Miis, you did so in silence. There was no TVii (which, I never really talked about, but this service never launched in Europe and was discontinued in America in 2015). The focus was clear: this thing plays games.
I never really mourned the loss, to be honest. When I got a Switch, I was just happy the touchscreen felt a heck of a lot better to use than Wii Uâs, and there was no long wait when you turned it on.
But on the other hand, I can honestly say the soundtracks and the goofy, free applications available on Wii U, 3DS, and Wii endeared me to those systems. Some of that is probably nostalgia for my youth, Iâm sure, and ultimately the games are far more important, but still, perhaps Nintendo should think about bringing some of that charm and quirkiness back for the next console now that theyâre back on top again.
When I look at Wii Uâs game library as a whole, it may not be the biggest, but there are definitely some gems in there. It sometimes felt like Nintendo was struggling with the change to HD game development, as most of their early games for the console werenât nearly as big and shiny as I imagined the ânext genâ would be. Despite this, Nintendo was able to release a unique blend of exclusive games throughout the consoleâs life that really gave the system its own identity. Of course, most of those games are on Switch now, but still. The fans know where these games got their start.
On a personal level, I will admit that there isnât any one game I truly fell in love with on Wii U other than Breath of the Wildâbut honestly, I think that may be more on me than the console itself. I thought Pikmin 3 was a fantastic gameâI just didnât give it all the time it deserved. Life circumstances and timing prevented me from giving games like Xenoblade X or the original Splatoon a try. If not for that, maybe some of my favorite games ever would have been on Wii Uâwho knows?
That said, I canât really ignore the issues I see with the GamePad. Using a second screen for gameplay is a decent idea with a couple of really great applications. But it probably wasnât a good enough idea to justify the cost it added to the console.
Without the GamePad, Nintendo probably could have upped the specs of the console itself, which might have meant better third-party supportâbut then again, maybe not! PS4 and Xbox One arrived a year after Wii Uâs launch anyway, and even a slightly upgraded Wii U probably would not have been near as powerful as those consoles at $300. And if that were the case, would third parties see a reason to stick around for long? As much as I like to entertain the idea, ditching the GamePad definitely would not have been an automatic recipe for success with third parties.
Besides, without the GamePad, the console would have needed something else to differentiate itself, because Nintendoâs strategy depended on that. With Wii, they reached the non-gamer audience, and they hoped the GamePad would bring them back once more, while also attracting the gamer audience who would appreciate off-TV play. Unfortunately, Wii U didnât quite make it big with either audience. Non-gamers didnât understand the product, and for gamers (the type who arenât already Nintendo fans), sure Wii U might have had a few games some of them were interested in, but do they really want to buy, in 2012, a $300 console roughly on par with Xbox 360 just for Bayonetta 2 and off-TV play? Also the controller looks like a toy (and I really do think that was a turnoff to a non-zero number of people). The console just didnât seem like a good enough deal (apologies to the child actor who had to say âHot butter popcorn thatâs a deal!â)
Still though, you canât deny off-TV play was a good, innovative idea! The last decade has proven that Nintendo had tapped into something people wanted. PlayStation created Remote Play to stream PS4 games to a Vita (RIP), computer, or mobile device over the internet. Steam even allows you to stream games from a PC to another device over your local network. But the biggest change began when Nintendo launched the successor to Wii U, the Switch, which was based around the idea that you can play on the TV, or you can play on the handheldâbut this time, thereâs no streaming; the game is running natively on the device itself. Not only was this idea appealing to gamers, it was easy for casuals to understand, too, and the Switch has become one of the most successful consoles of all time.
It goes to show you that sometimes a great idea is found in the midst of imperfection, and iterating on an imperfect concept can bring out something truly special. Wait, am I writing for the LinkedIn crowd now or something? But seriously, Iâve had so many great experiences on the Switch, like Super Mario Odyssey, Fire Emblem Three Houses, and Tears of the Kingdom. In a sense, Wii U was pivotal for Nintendo as a sort of prototype that showed the promise of the hybrid console concept. Wii Uâs commercial failure, which was evident relatively early, allowed the company to shift their resources to ensure Switch had a remarkable lineup of games available within its first two years on the market. So, even though Wii U wasnât a commercial success, it was a stepping stone that led to Nintendoâs biggest success ever.
The Wii U era was definitely a time I wonât forget. The reveal at E3 2011 taught me that sometimes a company you like can disappoint you, and even though you can point to things to be excited about, and tell yourself the Wii brand might actually help the console sell, in your gut you feel this console is not destined to be a hit. And then you find out your gut feeling was exactly right. Despite all that, I definitely had fun with it. Although the GamePad didnât really improve most games that much, it did allow Nintendo Land to exist, so I have to appreciate it for that. More significantly, it was essentially the forerunner to the era of capable handheld consoles we find ourselves in now. And thatâs pretty cool.
Nintendo had to think outside the box in order to survive as a solely games-focused company against the giant conglomerates of Microsoft and Sony. I think itâs amazing that not only were they able to do so, their oddball consoles eventually caused changes in the entire industry. Wii U may not be my favorite Nintendo console, but it is a fascinating example of not only a bunch of questionable decisions, but also of Nintendoâs impressive creativity. Thereâs no other company thatâs quite like them.