{"id":78283,"date":"2026-08-21T16:52:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T08:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=78283"},"modified":"2026-08-21T16:52:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T08:52:58","slug":"5-nintendo-games-you-need-to-play-at-least-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=78283","title":{"rendered":"5 Nintendo Games You Need to Play at Least Once"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Nintendo’s reputation for decades of certified bangers is well-earned, though between new releases and the classics that hog all the attention, it’s easy to overlook some of the company’s more influential games. Maybe you’re young and missed out on entire generations of essential games, or you’re (comparatively) old, like me, and got into video games later in life. Whatever the case, learning about them through cultural osmosis isn’t quite the same as playing them yourself.<\/p>\n

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I’m not gonna tell you to go play Super Mario Bros. 3<\/em> or A Link to the Past<\/em>. You should play them, but you’ve probably heard that from a dozen other people already. This list is more interested in examining a few pivotal games from Nintendo’s history that marked turning points for the company, either for the risk involved in making them or by representing a high point in creative design that informed Nintendo’s future strategies. All of these are available in some form or another on modern hardware, either via remakes, Nintendo Switch Online’s retro library, or even on PC thanks to later ports.<\/p>\n

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\n Metroid Prime (Remastered on Nintendo Switch)
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\"Samus\n <\/picture>Image: Retro Studios, Nintendo\/Nintendo<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Metroid Prime<\/em>‘s a bit of an obvious choice given its popularity, but it’s no less deserving of a recommendation. It was a big, potentially risky step forward, a bid to make an obsolete franchise relevant again, and Nintendo adopting a genre that its competitors had dominated in that generation. The gambit paid off spectacularly. Metroid Prime<\/em> is an exceptional case study in level design and integrating storytelling and puzzles in a type of interactive media that’s usually hostile to those things. In other words, it proved FPS games can be smart and<\/em> shoot-y at the same time without sacrificing anything. It also set a precedent for how Nintendo would approach its other lagging franchises in later years, like Donkey Kong Bananza<\/em> and Breath of the Wild<\/em> \u2014 redefining them with big creative leaps that defied expectations.<\/p>\n

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\n Pikmin (Gamecube, NSO)
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\"Olimar\n <\/picture>Image: Nintendo EPD\/Nintendo<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Nintendo played it safe with the GameCube. You might think otherwise, what with Mario Sunshine<\/em> sending the plumber on a goop-cleaning vacation and The Wind Waker<\/em> turning Link and Zelda into cartoons. These were still Mario and Zelda games, though. And what is Luigi’s Mansion<\/em>, but a Mario is Missing<\/em> that doesn’t suck? Pikmin<\/em> was something new and wildly different than anything Nintendo had developed for years: A real-time strategy game (a genre that, nearly three decades later, remains quite niche) starring a corporate lackey and an army of sentient, expendable vegetables.<\/p>\n

The idea is that the lackey crashed on an alien planet and needs to rebuild his ship, which he can’t do alone because everything is gigantic. And he has 30 days before he dies. That’s where the sentient veggies come in, to lend a\u2026 well, whatever they use in place of hands, by finding and grabbing ship parts and avoiding the murderous indigenous fauna in the process. It’s a giant puzzle with a timer, basically, and it makes you feel really, really<\/em> bad when one of your veggie friends dies. It also features some of Nintendo’s best level design, the kind of work that makes me wish the company developed more puzzle games.<\/p>\n

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\n Fire Emblem (Game Boy Advance, NSO)
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\"Heath\n <\/picture>Image: Intelligent Systems\/Nintendo<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

If you liked Three Houses<\/em> and are excited about Fortune’s Weave<\/em>, you can thank Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade<\/em> (just plain Fire Emblem<\/em> for everywhere outside Japan). It’s the seventh Fire Emblem game and the first that Nintendo launched internationally, after years of assuming the series’ difficulty would alienate American and European audiences. Maybe it would have. Intelligent Systems found success with Advance Wars<\/em> a few years before, but that was a different story. Your COs can’t die, for one thing, and (on some maps) you can always rebuild units. Fire Emblem<\/em>‘s permadeath and lengthy, large-scale tactical battles were a different matter, but Nintendo wanted to make this one of its major franchises. So, Lyn’s campaign at the start of Blazing Blade <\/em>functions as an extended tutorial before you’re tossed into the more complicated main story.<\/p>\n

As stories go, it’s one of Fire Emblem’s weaker entries. That said, few video game villains have come close to outshining the absolute monster that is Sonia, a callous assassin-slash-abusive-mother (eat your robotic heart out, Shion from Overwatch<\/em>). But Blazing Blade<\/em> introduced what would become the baseline standard of Good Fire Emblem to a global audience for the first time, including things like:<\/p>\n