Topic: Wii U is better than people think

I never liked Wii U, but now I feel extremely sad saying something like this: Wii U is less good than Switch and AT THE SAME TIME Wii U is less bad than Switch.
I would have never believed I could say something like this.
It is so sad and disappointing what Nintendo is doing.

I never liked Wii U, but now I feel extremely sad saying something like this: Wii U is less good than Switch and AT THE SAME TIME Wii U is less bad than Switch.
I would have never believed I could say something like this.
It is so sad and disappointing what Nintendo is doing.

The main selling point of the Wii U, for me, was the dual-screen stuff. I felt that the games that used it well were vastly improved experiences, such as the 2 Zelda HD ports, Nintendo Land, Rayman Legends, The Wonderful 101, ZombiU, Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water, Batman: Arkham City, Darksiders II, and Resident Evil: Revelations (although the analogue dead zones knackered that port a bit). Even with games that were basically just a map, I still found the experience improved over other home consoles, such as with Watch Dogs, Assassin's Creed, Sonic and All-Stars Racing, and Pikmin 3 (which also used the Wiimotes well, too).

The Switch feels like it offers less than both the Wii U and 3DS. It's basically a portable, HD Wii. The main selling point is "it's portable HD gaming!", but I'm like, "so what? I've got HD on my TV." Just being portable isn't enough to justify the removal of a second-screen, which has been seen to improve gameplay, not just on Wii U, but on handhelds since the DS. In my opinion, a far better successor would have been a portable HD DS type console, with added Wiimotes/Joy-con, that connects to the TV. It would have unified Nintendo's home and handheld consoles, without sacrificing the improvements they've made over the years.

In the end, if you're less interested in the console itself, the games are the only thing to sell it, and I've not seen enough yet on the Switch for me to purchase one, especially at Nintendo's high prices. I waited until this year to buy a PS4, because it now offers enough games to justify a purchase for me. I'll be doing the same thing with the Switch.

@RainbowGazelle

It's the smartest move !

I think the Wii U could have been saved or had greater success longer if........

it was simultaneously multifunctional.....you could play certain games directly on the tablet controller while playing streaming media services like Netflix on the tv (from the console)

if the tablet itself had a large enough memory to download a whole game from the console to the tablet and take it with you as a portable away from the console (like a trip out of town or waiting at doctors offices, ect.)

and obviously adding DVD support, seriously

the tablet controller while a great idea, was very cumbersome and uncomfortable, but if they had given the controller autonomy and added separate multi function, consumers would have been willing to see past the killing part of the Wii U

@RainbowGazelle "The Switch feels like it offers less than both the Wii U and 3DS. It's basically a portable, HD Wii"

I strongly disagree.
Wii is one of my favourite console ever and I like it much more than Wii U and 3DS.
It has better games, it can run Gamecube games (that are better than Wii U and 3DS games for me as well), it can be used to view photos, you can backup your saves by yourself, you can buy Virtual console games and it does not require any subscription.
Switch on paper would be the best device ever made but:
1) its games are not as good as Wii and Gamecube games (except games like Kart and Smash that belongs to a category that usually just get better with every new game because they basically just get add-ons to the original game so everytime they are the same but better and more rich, so obviously the latest is the best one in this category of games)
2) it cannot run previous consoles games, so it has only its own games, one can say that Wii had twice the games
3) it cannot be used to view photos
4) you cannot keep your saves backups
5) you cannot buy Nintendo Virtual consoles
6) you are forced to pay a subscription if you want saves backups (but only on their own cloud, you still cannot handle them by yourself) and if you want to play Nintendo retrogames

Wii is better than Wii U and than 3DS and it is IMMENSELY better than Switch.
It's so sad because Switch could easily top everything else and be just the most amazing and incredible thing ever made, but it is the opposite in fact

@ReaderRagfish
For me this is very important as well as many other things that I have wrote.
Not sure if you noticed but this is not the only one. But for me it is very important anyway.

I haven't bought a PS4 at first because of this same issue back then. I bought one only when GOW2018 was released and I don't know if I would have bought it if Switch did not made me so angry with its subscription.
I wanted GOW2018 a lot, but I was so much into Nintendo games and there was not much else aside from GOW that I liked about PS4 (GOW and the fact that by then it was possible to view photos and videos on PS4 but not on Switch).

@ReaderRagfish
I am positive BoTW would not have mattered, BoTW helped to temporarily extend the life of the Wii U, but the Wii U was a dying system back in 2014, before the "Secret Project: NX" was leaked but not confirmed even as a sure thing, BoTW was a gift to those who already owned, not an attempt to renew sales, if BoTW had come out in 2012/2013, maybe it could have helped from the begining, but the Wii U has been treadding water trying not to go down Niagara Falls for 5 years now, occasionally a game would come out that kept it afloat just that much longer, but when the rumors of Nintendo finally said NX (now called "Switch") was going to be a full hybrid, Wii U's new system sales almost hit almost 5% overnight, Nintendo had to kill it in March 2017, it was a paperweight on their resources

@ReaderRagfish I think mentioning NX in early 2015 followed by E3 2015 being bad was the point where Wii U had no chance of recovery.

Think about XB1, Microsoft mentioned Scarlett but E3 2018 showed that XB1's 2019 lineup is very strong which gives people a reason to buy an XB1 this holiday. Meanwhile E3 2015 showed that Wii U was approaching the end of its lifespan as we knew about all the games shown before E3.

@LuckyLand
did you buy your Wii U used or something ???
maybe it was messed up ???
I'm no defender of the Wii U, practically threw mine away after 4 years and went back to my Wii, but the reason I ask is....

you said it did NOT play Wii or Virtual Console ???
well, I never had a problem with that, so im VERY confused

@ReaderRagfish
BoTW didn't save Wii U obviously, the sales for BoTW on Wii U were terrible for some reason, I think if BoTW had come out in say late 2014, it could have renewed sales of new Wii U's, but it just wasn't meant to be, besides, my friend who has BoTW on his Wii U says it doesn't look or play as nice on his Switch

the way you are phrasing some things is curious.....

you do know BoTW DID come out for Wii U right ???

@jhewitt3476 I said that Switch is the worse one because it does not do any of that.
I know Wii U has virtual console games and run Wii games, but Wii was even better than that.
It has more things that I like more.
It can run Gamecube games that are better than Wii U games imo.
It can be used to view photos.
And I honestly hate the dual screen system not only I dislike it it also give me headaches so it is even painful for me.
I was not talking only about the Wii U I was talking about Switch too.
I think it is quite simple to understand what I meant if one want to understand.
Wii is the best one.
I dislike Wii U.
Switch could be better than all of them but it is in fact the worst one because it lacks many things.
Wii U had some of those things (only SOME. Not all of them). If it didn't I would consider it worse than Switch, not "less worse".
But honestly it is still extremely unconvenient and uncomfortable to use with its dual screen system and its uselessly huge pad.
In that regard even Switch (obviously) is much better.

@LuckyLand I wasn't having a go at the Wii; it's a great console. I meant Nintendo have just gone back and made what is effectively a Wii 2, but portable this time.

@ReaderRagfish that’s how I see it. A lot of people were holding off buying a Wii u because of zelda u. Mario Maker came out really late aswell

I think the interesting thing about the Wii U is that the games on it were more or less the same quality you'd expect from a Nintendo console, just with some indie games (which in hindsight was only a handful compared to the Switch) instead of having much in terms of major 3rd party publisher support. It's almost the same.

We got a 3D Mario that while disappointing to some people, was still a higher rated game than Mario Sunshine, so it fit well into the series. We got a 3D Zelda that was amazing and popular at the end so everyone bought it on the new system, like Wii. We got a casual launch game that I felt was almost exactly as lesser compared to Resort as it was better than the original Wii Sports. Paper Mario and Mario Party were the norm of how the series were at the time, for better or worse. Star Fox was halfway there (WHOOOA-OA!) to being great but then did a dumb thing, just like every Star Fox after 64. It had a great 2D Donkey Kong game, just like Wii and yes, GCN. 3DS was also getting Zelda remakes, so we got Zelda remakes. Smash was another good Smash, Splatoon was practically a halfway point in popularity between GCN new IPs and Wii new IPs so that checks out, and was of the quality I expect from Nintendo.

Platinum was dangerously close to being like a Rare but wasn't Rare since they only released 3 games on the console and they can't make half the genres Rare could in their prime. Xenoblade was an ambitious Wii U title like it was a Wii title, and came out way too late.

There's some people who thought Wii U's titles just consistently disappointed, I don't agree with that at all. But I've seen some people suggest Wii U was some new high point for Nintendo and...not really. Nintendo has consistently made top tier games since they got into making consoles. This has never not been true, so I don't know what those people are even talking about. Wii U was just Nintendo making great games but then...not being able to as much because it was their first HD console and also not successful enough.

While I did like the Wii U a lot at points, and some of its games had crazy amounts of content that helped the smaller library quite a bit, it's hard not to see how things didn't go as well as they should have. Like when Switch passed GCN's lifetime sales recently, I saw discussion about it and it reminded me of the biggest problem I had with Wii U's library. Because during the GCN era, there seemed to be a strong focus on making new takes on ALL their franchises. Mario is now a tropical resort, clean stuff up game. Wind Waker is a cartoon in an island traveling adventure, Star Fox is now Zelda and then later a proper Star Fox game but with a new emphasis on ground based combat. F Zero is just an extreme version of what came before, but Metroid is first person. Pokemon now actually encourages catching a trainer's Pokemon! And I don't even love all these games, but I highly appreciate how they tried to find the best balance between what worked before and something new. Even their Mario sports games were like that.

I think around this era of Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo had a tough time finding a balance between old and new ideas. The biggest example of that is when they tried to run Mario platformers into the ground with 5 games (3 NSMB games, 2 3D brand games that actively tried to make 3D Mario closer to 2D Mario in the same way NSMB does), and then over-innovation on Paper Mario that missed the appeal of the type of RPG battle game that Paper Mario pretends it isn't but still is. There was just no balance for anything, and they over-relied on the same games. Most obvious with how much the 3DS was making Wii U irrelevant. I don't think anything exemplifies how much Nintendo was failing to put out high quality content on Wii U than remembering that 3DS had triple the amount of Mario Party games than Wii U.

The point of this is not to complain about the Wii U's library. It's more that it's really easy to see why people wouldn't be into it. Though for me, I actually prefer a lot of the Wii U version of these big franchises over GCN (especially considering I never bought my fav Zelda (TP) on GCN). And Wii U is the only way I'd ever play Wind Waker again. But GCN also had my favorite game in Metroid Prime and a Smash Bros with good single player, and an actual Animal Crossing game, and more than one Pikmin and plenty of good 3rd party games that anyone could find at their local gaming store during the GCN era. Again, it all comes down to the fact that there was less to it.

tl;dr: Long rant about why people weren't into the Wii U when even compared to GCN, it is not inherently a defense nor attack on Wii U.

@kkslider5552000 You shouldn't sell yourself short: I've actually read the entire comment, and I think it's well-written, and I agree with practically all of it.

Your story had one glaring omission though, and that is the truly horrendous marketing campaign, or rather: the lack thereof, to really sell the Wii U, and explain to people that the GamePad was not a Wii accessory.

As a seasoned sales & marketing professional myself, it was like being tied to a chair and forced to watch a train wreck happening, without being able to do anything about it. I still can't fathom how they were able to screw that up so badly, them being first-timers in HD development aside, that was truly one of the major factors in the failure of the Wii U.

But regardless of all that, I'm still happy that I own one, and I'll be damned if I'll ever sell it or throw it out, it is still a high quality Nintendo product, and it has some unique titles and capabilities, neither of which can be found, or probably will be found, on any other platform.

Even to such an extent, that I would still prefer the original Wii U versions of certain Switch games, simply because of the unique differences, and in that respect, I think the Wii U versions are superior, because they offer a more complete and/or unique experience, and that makes it easier to overlook the perhaps better looking version on the Switch.

On a side note: I also don't get all the hate towards the GamePad. I think that it's pretty easy to hold, and not heavy or cumbersome at all, and I don't even have humongous hands: they probably fall into the average-sized category, so that's not it either.

And I absolutely HATE the massively over-exaggerated "smeared with Vasoline" comments about the screen's picture quality. To me, everything on the screen is clearly visible, to this day, and I already owned one HD system before the Wii U, namely the Xbox 360, and even now that I have an Xbox One S to go with those consoles, I still think the quality of the Wii U's screen is just fine.

And technically, it's of course quite the achievement, something that not a lot of people seem to (or want to) realize. A game is being rendered twice simultaneously, in two different resolutions (either in 720p or 1080p on TV, and in 480p on the GamePad) and all that is done with at the most 1 missing frame in every 60, so that's really quite the technical feat, especially considering the simple tech they used for it.

The only criticism concerning the GamePad that I consider to be valid and genuine, and another stupid decision of Nintendo, is the lack of analog triggers, something that they weirdly (and sadly) enough repeated on the Switch...

Oh yeah, the marketing was a disaster, but everyone kinda knows that. I just think a lot of the strong opinions about its games are a bit silly. Nintendo Wii U really did not have dramatically better or worse Nintendo games than any major Nintendo platform, barring factors relating to how clearly Nintendo had stopped focusing about it in order to have a strong first year for Switch.

That might be why the Dreamcast comparisons always bothered me, because that's a way different situation. Like Sega's three major consoles were pretty different in terms of the games they put on it, and the different IP they used and the failure of the latter two directly lead to Sega going 3rd party which in hindsight forever hindered their ability to support having a strong variety of games to release. The only similarity is that good games got saved by being ported, but the direction they went was the complete opposite. Dreamcast was just crazy idea after crazy idea that made it a haven of underappreciated, arguably ahead of their time, cult classics. Wii U was Nintendo insisting that some of its major franchises alone could save itself. To the point that half the time it underutilized the controller that was supposed to be what was innovative.

But at the same time, I guess for some people a first time HD, heavily polished continuation of the formula for Nintendo's franchises just happens to be the favorite for some people. I'm not pretending to have the one true objective opinion while I love the flawed dated N64 era stuff. shrugs

@kkslider5552000
the real big problem was the Wii U really only brought one thing to the table....
the tablet controller, the Wii U took some things away also, but the controller was cumbersome, clumsy and uncomfortable unless you were playing with a pillow in your lap, plus it wasn't so much the games for it, but rather the number, the Wii U did not put out the number and variety of games the Wii did, and most of those games didnt even make full use of the controller anyway, plus the Wii was still very popular and current system, not even ready to be slowed on game output yet, at least with the 3DS, the DS had plenty of time and was ready to be retired, it's sales were proving that, the Wii however was still a top seller

the Wii was a good idea, they just released too soon, the new things that were brought in actually held it back, people wanted more from it, especially at the cost, then there just wasn't enough games, the Wii U didn't fail the consumer, Nintendo failed the Wii U

I didn't think the Wii U controller was uncomfortable for most games (I've literally been playing Deus Ex the past month or two, a game not even originally made for the console), but I do agree otherwise.

@electrolite77 I don't really remember many game droughts. Though I suppose that might be because I like to finish my games, have other hobbies and responsibilities besides gaming (that might not apply to everyone, particularly on forums like these).

Again, the only point about the Virtual Console is that it was a good feature the Wii U had that lots of people miss. Kind of like free online.