Wii U Review

The Wii U failed for reasons that had almost nothing to do with its games. Nintendo followed the best selling console of its generation with a machine whose name suggested a peripheral, whose tablet controller was demonstrated in ways nobody could summarize in a sentence, and whose advertising never made clear that this was a new console at all. Third party publishers turned up, sold nothing, and left inside a year. The hardware is underpowered next to what Sony and Microsoft shipped twelve months later, internal storage is almost insulting, and the tablet's short wireless range and short battery undercut the one idea the entire design rests on.

What is not in dispute is the software. Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, Bayonetta 2, Pikmin 3, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze and Xenoblade Chronicles X stand with anything Nintendo has made, and the Switch spent its first four years selling most of them again to an audience ten times the size. A great library on a console that hardly anybody bought, which is the whole story in one line.