Best Nintendo exclusive is no easier a question for me than best game, full stop. The only platform of theirs where I don’t think there are at least two or three legitimate exclusive candidates for best game ever made is probably the Virtual Boy. Well maybe the original DS too, if I’m being honest.
‘Best’ is a difficult adjective here, in the sense that the Nintendo exclusive I’d probably most enjoy playing right now might differ from the one I think is the most timeless and perfect. Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Super Mario Odyssey fall into the former camp.
Odyssey was my top game of 2017 at the time, mainly because I couldn’t think of much it could improve upon and I had a list of flaws in Breath Of The Wild that was as long as my arm. I completely disagree with any claims that Odyssey was overrated despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to come up in conversation too often nowadays (at least compared to Breath Of The Wild). It’s my favourite Mario game ever, though, for reasons I went into in more depth in a two-part feature a while ago.
To this day I still struggle to place it above Breath Of The Wild, though, as that game not only aimed to achieve so much in terms of interactivity and worthwhile environmental detail compared to any other game, it mostly succeeded.
People expressed concerns about Zelda just becoming another open world franchise in a generation that was oversaturated with them, but I always had faith that it would be more about what Zelda could bring to open world gaming than what open worlds could bring to the series. I never imagined it would do so in the form of layered logic and physics systems that encouraged and rewarded experimentation, discovery and play in such an unprecedented way.
If I consider ‘best’ to mean the most timelessly perfect, though, so I’d have to say Zelda: A Link To The Past. I only need to consider just about every game that came before it to see how incredible it was to have existed at that time and other than the fact that it’s best ideas have probably been overused by others now, there’s not a single aspect that doesn’t work as well today as it did back then. Even the visuals and sound hold up today.
Panda
