I was discussing the WiiU on a separate blogpost where I started looking at the top games I played on the system. Turns out, only 6 of the top games I played were WiiU games and the rest were Virtual Console ports of SNES and N64 games. List looks like this:

1. Breath of the Wild: 70+ hours

2. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE: 60+ hours

3. Mario Kart 8: 40+ hours

4. Mario's Super Picross(Virtual Console): 40+ hours

5. Musou Orochi 2 Hyper: 30+ hours

6. Super Mario Maker: 30+ hours

7. Ocarina of Time (Virtual Console): 20+ hours

8. Super Mario 3D World: 10+ hours

9. Super Mario 64 (Virtual Console): 10+ hours

10. Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (Virtual Console): 10+ hours

I had always thought that I had gotten a lot of mileage from my WiiU but looking at the list written out like this I don't know if I actually have. From 8 downward I barely cracked 10 hours. For comparison, my 10th most played Switch game is 40+ hours. I looked at my 3DS history and I played 5 games for longer than I played Mario Kart 8.

I was always of the opinion that the WiiU was an underappreciated system and got a bad rap because of the mishandling of the announcement and not making it clear that it was a separate console and not just a controller upgrade. The fact that Nintendo ported most of the games to the Switch and they're selling gangbusters for the most part shows that the games were good at least. But I guess it's also a sign that the second screen on the controller was mostly just dressing as you can play all those games perfectly fine on the Switch.

Super Mario Maker was pure lightning in a bottle and it's a shame that its sequel could replicate the X-factor it had that made the game so fun to make and share levels. It was also the system I introduced my son to video games with. When he first started to talk he would shout "Eiiiiighhhht!" along with Mario when I booted up Mario Kart 8. I was finally able to replay the N64 games from my middle/high school years through Virtual Console.

All in all, despite not clocking in as many hours as I have on other consoles, the WiiU still holds a place in my heart for the time I did have with it.