Topic: Digital version of 'Super Mario Galaxy 2' keeps crashing my Wii U.

Am I the only person having this issue? I mean console freezes happen, they do, it's pretty much unavoidable. My issue is every time I try to load specifically the digital version of Super Mario Galaxy 2, my Wii U crashes. I literally have to unplug it because a hardboot won't register. I've played the disk version of SMG2 and never had this issue, but so far out of the 20 times I have tried to play the digital version, only -ONE- time has it actually loaded up.

Sounds nasty. Do you have the game stored on an external storage? If yes, you might wanna try backing up any personal data and then reformat it - you could've hit a bad sector or some other kind of error.
If it's on the WiiU's internal storage, try redownloading the whole thing. Your save data for it should still be on the flash memory of Wii Mode.

Try deleting it and then redownloading it. Since you already bought it you won't have to pay to redownload.

It is on an external flash drive, but everything else on it works perfectly.

I think that's what I'm going to have to do. My internet here is like 5kb/s, and it took hours to download this game. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the download files were corrupted during the process, but I also wanted to see if anyone else had the issue too.

It's a known issue that has already been reported here at Nintendo Life and many other websites. It has something to do with unexpected incompatibility issues regarding certain "Wii U Compatible" hard-drives.

So it may be because of my Flash Drive?

Not so much your hard-drive as it simply being a compatibility issue. Nintendo adding Wii games to the mix has rendered some of their "fully compatible hard-drives" for the Wii U no longer fully compatible as some of them can't handle Wii titles for some strange reason.

It's probably because the Wii U behaves like a Wii (kind of) when playing Wii games. Now, since the Wii never had nor needed any external HDD support, the system's code isn't used to data coming from anywhere other than the disc. Maybe this could be solved by 'pretending' that the external hard drive IS a normal Wii disc, maybe not.
Hope that explains it a bit.

So I switched the location from my Flash Drive to the internal memory, and it worked on the first try!

Well that was the issue then. Just avoid playing your downloadable Wii titles from your hard-drive and you should be fine.

Please note Azikira said "flash drive" - hard drives probably wouldn't have the same issues, which Nintendo would say is why they don't recommend using USB flash storage for games.

I'm running the Wii games off of a 500GB Toshiba external drive via Y-Cable and everything is fine, got 329GB left and Prime trilogy loads 90% faster than the disc version~

Random Question-do these new wii releases work on the gamepad or do they load up in wii mode?

The game loads a sort of "mini" wii mode, the game is in wii mode, but you don't have to move around in the wii menu and selecting "Wii menu" from the home menu sends you back to the wiiu instead of the Wii mode.

Can you use the gamepad to play it?

No, it stills says that the Gamepad is not compatible with Wii software.

Dang.
Thanks for the reply.