You know, sometimes I see a comment here or there complaining that Nintendo doesn’t have their games on Xbox or PlayStation. That they should just sell themselves to do that.

I would hate to see Nintendo go away. I love their gimmicky systems. I leads to interesting, innovative experiences. For example, I am very disappointed by how badly the Wii U flopped. There were some games that did cool stuff with the asymmetric gameplay and I would have loved to see more game developers try to come up with cool concepts for it.

Ah, the graphics-based console wars. Been going on since the '90s, despite especially the last couple console generations proving that realistic graphics are less relevant to a game’s overall quality than ever. Nintendo’s been doing just fine with “underpowered” hardware since the Wii (N64 and GameCube could keep up with their contemporaries hardware-wise but Nintendo made poor storage format decisions that held those consoles back - imagine what a CD-based N64 could’ve been…). The Wii U didn’t sell as well but it still was by no means a bad console (though Nintendo can thank the 3DS keeping them profitable enough to produce the Switch during that time - looking at the games that came out then, you can tell Nintendo knew their “main” console in that era was actually the 3DS). Heck, the Wii U maybe could’ve gotten the third-party support it desperately needed if Nintendo didn’t push them to shoehorn in funky gamepad features so hard.

It was a good game, but was definitely pretty iterative at a time when there’s a certain exhaustion around iterative titles. The higher price tag and late-gen release didn’t help either.