I started my hobby of gaming with a Gameboy Color, and my first home console was a Gamecube. Ever since I've had a fondness for Nintendo games.
Just wanted to establish that my criticisms here are coming from a lifelong fan before sharing my grievances with this decade in Nintendo Gaming.
For me, the 2010s was pretty much the Decade of Disappoint from Nintendo, bar a few exceptions.
- The Wii U was a total flop, and I feel like a bunch of games got delayed, cancelled, or moved to the handheld with worse hardware (aka the 3DS) due to its poor sales. Also all the ports on the Switch made those who owned a Wii U feel like the Switch had an incredibly slow start with only a small handful of new first-party games within the first 2 years.
- Pikmin 3 was visually gorgeous, but felt painfully short compared to Pikmin 2, and lacked a lot of the interesting unlocks and late-game challenging areas/dungeons/bosses.
- Mario Kart 8 had a number of new design choices that made it feel a lot worse than previous games imo (course design was mostly ultra curvy stages with no good spots to mushroom boost over for shortcuts, the way the camera turns made the course feel more based on memorization than pure skill, only holding 1 item, no thought put into battle mode). Of course Deluxe fixed some of these issues, but rebuying the game to fix them isn't acceptable, and just further dumps on people that supported Nintendo through the Wii U era.
- NSMBU just feels like a lazy re-hash of the one on the wii, which I actually liked. For some reason none of the new power ups from this are in the NSMB theme in Mario Maker either.
- 3D World I loved the style and power ups, but 3D with a fixed camera was atrociously awkward. The 3D World Theme in Mario Maker is what I wanted the normal game to be.
- The new Mario Party Dev team just can't get it right. 9 was actually OK, but 10 was awful, and Super removed the car but took like 5 steps back in every other aspect with the lack of interesting board design, only 4 boards total, and 10 coin star change.
- Nintendo still has no idea what they're doing when it comes to online. They charge money now, but somehow every game comes out lacking proper online functionality. No online boards in Mario Party, Mario Maker lacked any online with friends until half a year after release and still it's clunky cause there's no filter for coop stages, and half the important games lack cloud save compatibility.
- Wasn't a big fan of Odyssey. All the new design changes I felt negatively impacted the game, such as getting a Moon for literally anything (makes challenges not really feel rewarding), no HUB world, open world levels, the whole "re explore every world" post-game.
I just generally prefer 3D Mario levels to be smaller in scale and have a greater sense of direction cause I felt in Odyssey I was just spending most of my time walking around picking up stuff rather than attempting to do some challenge. I also felt the scale of the worlds encouraged me to play through all of one before moving to another, which hurt the gameplay variety and pacing a decent bit (old games I'd bounce between worlds a lot as the game would boot me out to the HUB world after each main objective in any level. I felt discouraged from doing that because I thought I'd lose track of which areas I did and didn't explore if I left a world before getting everything).
- Haven't cared about Smash since Brawl. Played the heck out of Brawl and Melee, but the series has stagnated to me since. For me to get back into it, it'd need to try to do something completely new like add a couple different multiplayer oriented modes, and try to reinvent the move sets and play style each game for all the characters.
Mario would get boring if every game he functioned the same, that's why they make every theme graphically and functionally completely different in almost every aspect with every new title, and I feel like Smash should be no different in that aspect.
- Paper Mario just got totally flushed down the toilet with the last 2 games.
- LABO was a good concept but they didn't use it at all. Literally just released each with a tech demo and forgot about it.
If they only had first party titles that supported them in meaningful ways, they would've been really neat DIY controllers.
As I said at the start though, it wasn't all bad. BotW was a fantastic game, ACNL kept me busy for a few years and left me craving a new Animal Crossing more than ever (super hype for NH), Pokemon ORAS and SM/USUM I really liked (although Pokemon isn't really made by Nintendo), and Mario Maker 2 is fundamentally pretty good (still could use some new modes and better search functionality).
I have high hopes for the decade of 2020 though. I have a gut feeling that it's going to be the Decade of Good Games.
- Animal Crossing New Horizons looks beyond amazing
- Nintendo surely will realize their past mistakes with online and start releasing games that have online play built in from day one for games like the next Mario Party, and hopefully learn to pair people up with randoms online based on similar network quality (patching this in for Mario Maker would also be greatly appreciated)
- BotW2 will prob be an all around better version of BotW, and Zelda being around in this game sort of leads me to believe it'll be 2 player, which would be icing on the cake (99% chance I'd love it either way though).
- Surely Pokemon Diamond and Pearl remakes will come soon... These were some of my favorites in the whole franchise so a return with improvements (and hopefully no major things removed) would be awesome.
- Pikmin 4 this decade? I really hope this franchise isn't dead, and that 4 is closer in length and gameplay variety to 2. Maybe they'll do something crazy like make it possible to play the whole game coop? There always has been multiple captains so it should easily be possible...
- New 2D Mario with an actual new theme (last new theme was 3D World... since then it's just been Mario Maker for 2D Mario). Hopefully this new theme would also get patched into Mario Maker 2 shortly after release.
So how would you rate the decade of 2010 for Nintendo?
What are your hopes for 2020?
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* This article was originally published here
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