Topic: Nintendo Life 10/10s

With NL giving out a couple of 10s in quick succession recently, it got me thinking about how there seem to have been far more games getting the coveted full marks since the Switch launched. I see that as a sign of the quantity of great games the Switch has been getting rather than the rating's prestige being cheapened over time or whatever, but I thought it would be interesting to look back at what games have received a 10 in the past and the distribution by console.

NES - 2
Mega Man 2, Super Mario Bros 3

SNES - 9
Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, EarthBound, Chrono Trigger, Yoshi's Island, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, Super Mario RPG, Terranigma

Game Boy (Color) - 1.5
Link's Awakening and its DX version

N64 - 4
Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Ocarina of Time, Ogre Battle 64

Game Boy Advance - 2
Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros 3, Densetsu no Stafi 3

GameCube - 2
Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4

DS(i) - 3
Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! 2, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, Shantae: Risky's Revenge

Wii - 13
Resident Evil 4, Super Mario Galaxy, World of Goo, Metroid Prime Trilogy, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Bit.Trip Runner, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, MotoHeroz, Rayman Origins, Skyward Sword, La-Mulana

3DS - 7
Ocarina of Time 3D, NightSky, A Link Between Worlds, Majora's Mask 3D, Pokemon Sun/Moon, Metroid: Samus Returns, Pokemon Ultra Sun/Moon (maybe this should be 6.5 to be consistent with how I counted Game Boy)

Wii U - 4
Super Mario 3D World, Super Mario Maker, Axiom Verge, Breath of the Wild

Switch - 28
Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2, Axiom Verge, Super Mario Odyssey, Celeste, Subsurface Circular, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Super Mario Maker 2, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, A Short Hike, Hades, Horace, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury, Quake, Metroid Dread, Tetris Effect: Connected, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Persona 5 Royal, Bayonetta 3, Metroid Prime Remastered, Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed, Tears of the Kingdom, Ghost Trick, Quake II, Dodonpachi DaiOuJou Blissful Death Re:Incarnation, Balatro, Pentiment

No surprise that the Switch has the most 10s, with over twice the amount of the runner-up, the Wii. Of course, NL didn't review most games on the consoles that outdate the website, so it stands to reason there are fewer top scorers on those systems. Plus the Switch has had far more ports and remasters than any previous console, and those comprise quite a few of its 10s. But the main thing to take away from this is that the Switch has a lot of good games, in case you hadn't noticed.

Obviously a 10/10 is actually a fairly arbitrary accolade in that any game could have ended up with a different score had it been assigned to a different reviewer, but it does still feel like quite a prestigious badge of honour to me (and many other long-time readers of the site, I'm sure) and always makes me interested in games I might otherwise have overlooked. The fact that there's some pretty niche and even controversial choices in there as well as the Marios and Zeldas makes it quite an interesting list; there's probably no single person who would give all of these games a perfect score if they played them all, but the fact that even a single reviewer thought that highly of them makes them worth highlighting, I think.

But how many of these games have you played? Are there any games you're surprised did or didn't get a 10? Or do you not care about the score at all? (Obviously keep it respectful, remember none of this actually matters, etc etc)

@Dogorilla
If you click my profile, you will find one game that I gave 10/10.
It's Everybody 1-2-Switch. 😁

Funnily enough, I've actually been keeping track of this exact thing for the past couple months myself over on Backloggd as a side-hobby. Here's the list!

https://www.backloggd.com/u/Fizza/list/nintendo-life-1010s/

As for the question itself, I've managed to knock out 24/78 games featured on this coveted list so far (around 30% worth according to Backloggd). I'm usually the kind of guy who's VERY late to the party when it comes to playing highly critically-acclaimed titles (I've barely touched 3D Zelda outside of about 4 hours in Ocarina of Time on NSO XD) so I'm hoping to maybe reach 30-ish titles come the end of this year 😁

@Anti-Matter Classic Anti

@Fizza Nice! If I've counted correctly I've played a nice round 40 of them (though not necessarily to completion - just started Majora's Mask 3D for example), which is more than half so I'm pretty happy with that!

@Dogorilla To be fair, Wii had around 3,000 games including virtual console games. Switch has well over 10,000... so is it surprising there are twice as many 10/10s? Random indie games like the 10/10 Poker game are bound to happen if you have enough games overall. So it is less we are getting lots of good games and more we are getting lots of games.

As for surprise of 10/10s... Balatro certainly surprised me. Haven't played it but it looks... awful tbh purely from the screen shots and game description — but apparently actually playing it is great? Makes me wonder what other games sound like potential shovelware but are actually amazing — I suspect some of those never get noticed. The only other one on any of the lists which surprises me is Subsurface Circular because... I feel like I've never heard of that game.

I own 13 of the 10/10 Switch games and the list contains 5 of my personal top 10 Switch games.

it amuses me the Wii U 10/10s are (basically) a subset of the Switch ones.

Are those ordered by date? 🤔 I just noticed the 13 Switch ones I own are all near the start of the list... I've never played the most recent 11 of them.

I think I've played 30 overall from all the lists though some I never owned so never fully played.

I've played 57 of the games. They're all solid choices even if they don't totally align with my personal preferences.

The sheer size of the Switch game library, with something like 13000 distinct games according to Deku Deals, largely explains its representation. That's in contrast to a Wii U library that numbers less than 800, and even smaller libraries for the GameCube and N64. The SNES and NES have bigger libraries but a good chunk of them never got released in English, so only tend to get reviewed if they're notable for other reasons.

I don't think there will ever be a game that is a 10/10, even from different people's perspectives. Sure, there's plenty of games that I absolutely adore, but none were perfect from a critical perspective. Of the games in that list, I own Super Mario Odyssey, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and Persona 5 Royal. I had some issues with all those games. Maybe I'll find a perfect game one day, but I doubt it. Curious if anyone else has.

@imadeanaccount FYI, NintendoLife defines 10/10 specifically as not perfect. From their policy:

"10 - Outstanding
Of course no game is ever truly perfect, but a score of ten indicates that it is an outstanding example in the current climate of games. We don't dish this score out lightly, this is a genre defining game that we absolutely feel you should own."

@imadeanaccount
10/10 is very subjective judgement.
One game could be a 0/10 by one people, but it could be a 10/10 by other people.

It's mostly but not entirely a function of how many games each platform had. If you throw the above list and put it alongside the number of games on each of those platforms (from Wiki)

Switch has got more 10s than it probably should have all things considered. It's certainly doing much better than the DS did comparatively. But for a library that's 5X bigger than Wii U and over twice the size of Wii? Makes sense it has about 5X and 2X as many 10s

Also worth noting that Nintendo Life didn't exist before DS/Wii so for all of the consoles before that the only reason they'd be reviewing those games is as a retrospective. Which almost surely colours those reviews and also changes the perspective vs if they had been done at the time of release

It's always felt so odd to me how NSMBW got a 10/10 score from this site. I mean, the game's fine and all, but I bet that reviewer was most likely offered a good amount of $$$$ for that review.

Switch - 28
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Axiom Verge, Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury, Quake, Persona 5 Royal, Metroid Prime Remastered, Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed, Ghost Trick, Quake II, Dodonpachi DaiOuJou Blissful Death Re:Incarnation

I count 10 "Switch" games from your list that were either originally released BEFORE the Switch launched, or are remasters/re-releases, or are DLC.

So I think it's fairer to say there are 18 "10/10" Switch games.

The point is that their ports to the Switch are rated 10/10 when reviewed. That's as opposed to things like the Switch ports of Resident Evil 4, Skyward Sword and Super Mario Galaxy that didn't, in spite of getting 10/10 on other platforms.

@imadeanaccount I agree that no game is perfect, but Celeste unironically might be the exception as the “perfect game”

@MontyCircus
Yes, and the ones that got 10 on those other platforms were on are also listed on those other platforms. If you're going to be pedantic and ask for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to "not count" for Switch because it's a "Wii U" game then you also need to exclude Ocarina of Time 3D on 3DS, Resident Evil 4 on Wii, Super Mario Advance on the GBA. And if you're excluding 3D World + Bowser's Fury you should probably also exclude Samus Returns. And what about Breath of the Wild? It released on both Switch and Wii U at the same time!

So yeah, if you're going to "count" the number of 10/10 games a console has got? Just count all of them. The game was natively running on those new consoles? It's on that console. It got a review. That review was a 10. The game is one of the games NL gave a 10/10 on that platform. Simple

I agree to all of those. They're games from separate eras.

There are Neo Geo games that were released over 25 years ago that were rated highly by NintendoLife on Switch. Are those "Switch games" too?

@MontyCircus
It we're excluding Virtual Console and NSO then we should exclude Arcade Archives. But anything that was, or was at least potentially was, a product you could go into a shop and buy in a box? Anything that was ported to and therefore running native code for that platform? Anything that wasn't just a ROM packaged in an emulator with no other changes? For the purposes of a forum post discussing "how many games got 10s"? Fair game

But yeah, mostly I just get tired of this arbitrary "this game doesn't count" BS that people always play when someone posts a list like this. It's on that platform, it counts. End of discussion

@skywake I guess this is being pedantic in a different way, but can we please stop using the inaccurate 4K total Switch games Wikipedia number which hasn't been correct in years? Even Nintendo themselves announced on their website when Switch passed 10k games. NL lists 12,000 Switch games, Deku lists 12k if you restrict to English and 14k if you don't. For the purpose of your graph, a more correct value makes the Switch bar completely overshadowing the others.

Don't get me wrong, I like your graphs when you post them, but that one incorrect wiki article has been haunting these forums for a long time and it just keeps growing more wildly inaccurate. Good graphs deserve at least vaguely accurate data.

@skywake
Ignore me - it's too early!!

Edit: rather than as a percentage of total games per system, it might be better as games reviewed per system.

Again, guys.
Games are very subjective.
What is a 10/10 (Perfect) for you, it might be a 0/10 (Rubbish) for other people and vice versa.