I have a love–hate relationship with the Wii U. The GamePad is bulky and unattractive, while the Pro Controller is nearly perfect. I'd take the aesthetics of the system menus over the Nintendo Switches' apathetic sterility any day, but awful loading times made them an obstruction that Nintendo had to build detours around. I loved using Miiverse and seeing posts crop up in-game, i miss the Internet Browser's gyro scroll mode every time i think about it, and the Switch 2's C button wishes it had the allure of the GamePad's NFC touchpoint—but there weren't many other features to explore, especially compared to everything the Nintendo 3DS came with, and much less what it got through system updates.
The barren feeling of the game library was a vicious cycle. It was hard not to dwell on series like Animal Crossing, Kirby, and Wario skipping the console or only delegating experimental spinoffs to it. At the same time, games like Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, and Super Mario Maker felt like cultural phenomena and left a deep impact on me. There is no substitute for experiencing the beginning of the latter two series alongside the tighter-knit fan communities of the time.
It was a good and bad time to be a Mario fan. Games must have been coming out more regularly, and i felt that they were iterating more consistently from the DS to then. However, it often seemed to come at the expense of creativity, which would only be addressed afterwards. Combined with the 3DS, we often ended up with two games of the same design. That was excellent for series like Mario Kart, but maddening with others like Paper Mario. This pattern started the console off on a horrible misstep with New Super Mario Bros. U, which is great fun in a vacuum, and yet a total waste as a selling point for the new hardware. And i love Super Mario 3D Land as a handheld game, but with all signs pointing to Super Mario Universe in glorious HD, the announcement of 3D World felt like a similar waste.
As a Wii U owner, the Nintendo Switch felt similarly barren and boring for many years, since Nintendo released so many Wii U ports at full price plus online tax (up to industry darling Breath of the Wild, whose status as a Wii U game is probably effaced from the public consciousness at this point). I always felt that if the Wii U did so poorly, players who bought its games should have gotten ambassador discounts, to make it less painful to double-dip, have the original online lobbies obsoleted, and have fewer new games on Switch in general. Instead, buying a Wii U dragged the next console down even further for me. Nintendo has a storied history of anti-consumer practices, but, being on the back foot, the Wii U era felt like the last time they were willing to extend an olive branch.
The end result is that i look back on the Wii U fondly, in spite of the disappointments that the journey brought. People act like owning the console was nothing but frustration and regret. Sure, there were times when i felt completely fed up and betrayed, but such feelings never came to define that era like they would with the Nintendo Switch family. The Wii U is a clunky, confused mess, but it valued aesthetics, community, and novelty, and put out plenty of games so damn good that its successor had to pass them off as its own—all of which fills in a lot of the cracks with gold.
