The Nintendo Lineage Finale: Wii-U

The end of an era, content to come and putting the Wii-U to bed once and for all

Over the past 8 years a right of passage has manifested itself online: if you like Nintendo or create retro content, it’s become inevitable that someday you will release a post-mortem on the Wii-U. This will be mine.

The reasons for the Wii-U’s failure have been covered time and time again all over the internet, along with the consequences it had for Nintendo and how they led to the massive comeback story that was the Nintendo Switch, because of this, I won’t be mentioning the history of the console much during this article. From beginning to end this series has been about taking a trip down memory lane while simultaneously lifting those rose-tinted glasses from our eyes and smashing them to pieces; I want to celebrate the history of gaming but not get stuck in it. Every console has flaws, even our favourites and I’m not one of these retro guys who swears blind that the days of DOS, cleaning CD-ROMs with toothpaste and putting a book on top your PS1 to get it to read discs was the peak of gaming.

For a long time now, I’ve considered this article to be the end of the first chapter of Scanlines’ Journal. The Nintendo Lineage put me on the map and I’m not stopping any time soon but at long last, we have arrived at our final stop in this series. Perhaps in future, when the Nintendo Switch is discontinued, I’ll revive the series for another episode but that’s likely going to be years away and I’ve made it clear already that the Switch is easily one of the greatest consoles ever in my opinion.

Let’s settle this once and for all. Was the Wii-U a misunderstood masterwork let down by poor marketing? Or was it an unmitigated disaster with boring games and poor choices? Let’s find out.

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Hardware: ** 2 Stars

The Wii-U is a famously botched piece of hardware. Its gimmicks were rarely, if ever, utilised well, the gamepad is oversized with poor battery life, it was yet another underpowered home console with pathetic storage capacity and no wired internet connectivity in the generation where connectivity became everything. I originally awarded it 1 star in this category but what narrowly saved it is that, unlike the Nintendo 64 and its hideous gamepad, I don’t find the Wii-U actively uncomfortable to use, in fact, I think the Wii-U pad is more comfortable to hold than the Switch and I appreciate how easy it is to take apart and repair, having done so myself.

A trait of the consoles of this era I strongly dislike and shared by the Wii-U is the sensation that they’re always on, always connected, always watching and always seem to have a mind of their own. My Xbox One with the Kinect would sometimes turn itself on in the morning when I got out of bed and passed in front of the camera, sometimes, when I’m at my desk my Wii-U power button turns blue and the console whirs to life doing… something, or it will be red but I hear fans. I’ve taken to unplugging it as a result. It was around the Wii-U’s release in 2012 that I felt the internet and its influence began to overstep its boundaries and pierce too far into the real world and this is emblematic of that.

Aesthetically it’s hard to dislike the Wii-U but it desperately needed some more identity… what does the U stand for? It looks and sounds like an accessory, down to its operating system and menus which resemble that of its predecessor but with the added clunk of requiring you to crane your neck down at the gamepad screen to select what you want.

Another small slice of praise I can give the Wii-U is that it repurposed a lot of the Wii’s controllers and accessories, which is a boon for the environmentally conscious and those of us who like to hold onto their old hardware. You could play Wii games portably using the Wii-U gamepad too, that was really awesome.

I have massive nostalgia for the Wii-U’s now long-dead Miiverse social network, which it shared with the 3DS. It has lived on in infamy but in my lonely young teenage years, living in a new, big city where I didn’t know anyone and hadn’t made any friends yet, I really felt like I was connecting with ‘my people.’ Alas, there is zero chance it returns.

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Software: *** 3 Stars

It’s really difficult to fault the Wii-U library; Nintendo played this era too safe but if we look at the sheer quality alone (and ignore the frequent software droughts) I think Wii-U owners ate well for the most part.

While it did struggle on the 3rd party front, the Wii-U still had some stand-outs: the Tekken community generally considers Tekken Tag Tournament 2’s best version to be the one on Wii-U (although the lack of cross-play and no fight-sticks supporting the Wii-U meant it was irrelevant to the competitive scene) Zombi-U was an excellent survival-horror game by Ubisoft at a time when the genre was in atrophy and who could forget that Nintendo saved the Bayonetta franchise and made the sequel a Wii-U exclusive? Nintendo’s output was a bit uneven on Wii-U but Mario Kart 8, indisputably in my opinion, is the best in the series, the HD remasters of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess fixed a lot of issues with those games (and made Wind Waker tolerable) and games like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Splatoon and Super Mario 3D World made my Xbox One owning self jealous at the time, all we had to enjoy were the worst renditions of every Xbox 1st party franchise and a lot of disappointing Triple-A games; there’s a reason nobody talks about the first Destiny or the original Titanfall.

Both then and now, the Wii-U was/is a retro and homebrew machine as well, through the Virtual Console service, you could buy retro games for cheap from virtually any old console you can think of (that wasn’t Sony) and own them forever on your Wii-U, with all the portable capabilities of the gamepad. I was late to the Wii-U and only got to enjoy its E-Shop for a couple of months before it was shut down but I picked up both Metroid: Zero Mission and Metroid: Fusion for my Wii-U when I got the chance and they look and play magnificent on the tablet with a good pair of headphones.

The tragedy of the Wii-U is that as good as many of its games are… there’s just not point in playing the Wii-U versions today. All of the console’s best games have been ported to Switch, usually with better graphics, more content and online features restored. I try not to factor in retrospective issues with a console like re-releases and backwards compatibility with a more available device but the incentives to playing on Wii-U are so scant that it’s hard not to factor it in. Above all else though? The best of the Wii-U doesn’t really match the best of its predecessor or its successor, which is why it has been awarded 3 stars.

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Impact: **** 4 Stars

The Wii-U is ingrained so deep into the DNA of the Nintendo Switch that it’s impossible not to consider it when looking at the success of that console.

The best selling Nintendo Switch game is a Wii-U port, arguably the most iconic game on the system: Breath of the Wild, was developed and released for the Wii-U on the same day, the hybrid console gimmick fully embraced by the Switch was prototyped with the Wii-U and the 3DS/Wii-U shared ecosystem is something that laid the foundations for Nintendo and the Switch having several dedicated and interconnected smartphone apps. The Wii-U might have failed, but it deserves its flowers nonetheless.

More than its games and ideas though, the Wii-U represents something else for a lot of people: the end of their childhood and Nintendo’s consumer-facing era of building rapport. Say what you want about the Nintendo of the 2000’s and 2010’s (I know I have) but one thing they did better than anyone else in the industry was connect with people and foster a community. How many iconic Reggie moments can you remember? How many pictures were released of Shigeru Miyamoto playing with Nintendo fans at events? How weird does it feel to have a Nintendo console revealed without Reggie Fils-Aime holding it up on stage like a severed head? Don’t get me wrong, the Nintendo of today is doing a much better job but the stale, corporate air around the company is enough to make me pine for the old Wii-U days just a little bit.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder and Wii-U era Nintendo feels worlds away from now.

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Sentiment *** 3 Stars

I’ve alluded to it in the past but I always wanted a Wii-U when it was current, I was very unhappy with my Xbox One back in the day but it’s where all my friends were and with those being the exam years, I spent most of my money on fleeting joys and games my friends wanted to play rather than going for what I actually wanted; the console passed me by. As such, my time with the Wii-U has always been haunted by the spectre of missing out.

The online was pulled 2 months after I finally got one, all my cousins who I remember watching the Wii-U reveal with and getting excited aren’t gamers anymore and most I haven’t seen for over half a decade now. The home screen has an eerie quality to me with the dead Miiverse app and loads of random Miss rushing to greet you, it’s like a little slice of a forgotten civilisation.

Some speculate the Wii-U might end up like the Sega Saturn someday but I doubt it. That console had hundreds of amazing games that never left Japan and most of us never knew about them but the Wii-U is very much charted territory; there are no hidden gems on the Wii-U and the must haves are on Switch.

I’ll never forget the Wii-U. I didn’t really get to experience it and I don’t particularly love it but with it coming out when I was 12 and moving away from the home I grew up in, it will always remind me of leaving childhood behind.

Final Score: 12/20

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Wall of Fame and Shame

And now for the big moment! After weeks of giving my mostly-objective rankings of the Nintendo home consoles, it’s time to reveal my favourite and my least favourite.

Winner of Best Nintendo Home Console Award:

It might come as a shock considering I awarded it a single star for hardware but the Nintendo 64 is my favourite Nintendo console. As crap as its controller and the actual hardware is, I adore the N64 library and I’d argue Nintendo haven’t put out such a definitive and influential set of games since.

Winner of Worst Nintendo Home Console Award:

To be honest, I think the Wii-U is the only option to put here, which is a damn shame because compared to some of the worst consoles ever made, it’s really not that bad. There’s just so little reason to own one of these things today and even if you do, you’ll likely need to splash out extra on a separate controller and a battery pack upgrade for the tablet.

My favourite video game console of all time is not a Nintendo console but we’ll get to that another day…

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The Future of Scanlines’ Journal

When I started this Substack in January, I had it in mind that if I didn’t hit 50 Subscribers by the 1st of June then I’d quit… but I ended up hitting 50 back in mid-May and am now on 80. I think it should be pretty clear that this publication is going nowhere, however, there are a few changes coming.

Firstly: monetisation. I don’t like subscriptions, Stripe lacks anonymity and I refuse to gate-off content to my audience, so in terms of content you all have access to? Nothing is changing, however, when I come back (more on that in a minute) I’m planning to add a donation button to my articles, probably linked to Ko-Fi or I’ll set up a PayPal specifically for the publication, so those who’d like to support Scanlines’ Journal can do so. I’m at the point now where what I want to play is heavily dictated by the kind of content I want to write and it would be cool if I could cover more triple-A games more often, or newly released niche titles but gaming is expensive. I am going to try and seek out a sponsor but it will be something on-brand and a product, not a service, if I can help it; I’m not going to try and shill Manscaped while I’m writing about escaped slaves in Kenshi.

Secondly: the articles you should expect from now on. Since early April I’ve been writing one article every 3 days: one for The Nintendo Lineage and one based on… whatever I want. Recently, my reviews have been kind of blowing up: my Kenshi review got double the 3DS lineage article’s reads in about 24 hours and achieved several hundred more in 48, and my review of Starfield became my most successful post ever, so I’m going to carry on with those and hope that they continue to do well. As well as that, I’ve been wanting to do some long-form video game franchise retrospectives so expect to see those at a later time.

Another big change is that The Xbox Legacy will be replacing The Nintendo Lineage. I consider myself a kind of Xbox-refugee and in the retro community Xbox doesn’t really get much love, so I’d like to cover those consoles plus the Kinect next.

I love to write fiction. Once Scanlines’ Journal is a little more established, don’t be surprised if I start up a second publication for writing sci-fi and fantasy, if and when I do, you’ll be the first to know but I won’t be fusing the two together so to speak, I expect to cultivate 2 entirely different audiences.

Lastly… my hiatus. For the past 2 months I’ve made it my mission to be the hardest worker in the Substack gaming space. I challenged myself to publish an article every 3 days and to keep up with what everyone else has been doing too. I have gotten inspiration from all sorts of writers here, made some fantastic connections with all of you and I feel I’m at a point now where I’m known by other people in this space and not posting into the void anymore. Some of my earliest posts still have about 20 views, I get that in about half an hour now. But… I’m tired.

Substack is my only social media. I’m not an existing blogger or content creator, I built my platform on here, as a noob to the whole thing, I wasn’t prepared to handle the analytics, the notifications, the work required to build a platform or the constant stream of information so I have to admit, my brain has been a bit overworked and my creative batteries are a little low. There’s a lot of good on here but seeing US Politics, people complaining about US Politics, Sabrina Carpenter, people complaining about Sabrina Carpenter, the occasional weirdo who quotes their own work and pretends to be agreeing with an author they found and the 900th ‘AI bad’ post day-after-day takes its toll. I get very sick of social media, very quickly.

I’m lucky to have almost never received scathing comments or harsh reader feedback; people have disagreed with me of course, but it’s almost always been in good faith and we’ve had a good discussion in the comments. But there was a time where I was vaguely insulted and had thinly-veiled accusations of misogyny aimed at something I wrote, still annoys me a bit to think about that.

This site is always on my mind. Even when I have a week of posts done I’m scheming about what to write next, what I feel nobody else is doing that I could do and what I think I could write about better than anyone else right now; you shouldn’t be so competitive or focus on the numbers but I’m a 25 year old man full of too much piss and vinegar.

The Switch 2 is out on the 5th of June and I want to sit back and enjoy it without worrying about my next post or what I’m going to say about the games or how many views or likes I’ll get, so until the 12th of June, I’m going to have a little bit of a break to enjoy the weather, the new console and a bit of quiet time. I haven’t read any Conan the Barbarian for a while either and I’ve been delving into my copy of The Conquest of New Spain as of late and really enjoying it.

I hope you’ll all stick around, because when I get back, it’s only going to get better.