When the Wii was first released in 2006, gamers and critics alike appeared to have a hard time taking it seriously as a gaming console.

The name alone provoked mockery and derision from those who wanted more “hardcore” gaming experiences, while the fact that games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit proved popular seemed to reinforce the Wii’s casual reputation.

The fact is, though, that the Wii had a huge library of excellent games for both hardcore and casual players, and if you knew where to look, you could find some truly incredible titles.

From massive open-world RPGs to tight platformers and even horror games, the Wii acquitted itself very well in the gaming sphere, proving that it wasn’t just a phenomenon because it was loved by families.

Here are the top 30 Wii games of all time!

1. Super Mario Galaxy 2

• Genre: Action, platform
• Audience: E

To put it simply, Super Mario Galaxy 2 represents the apex of Nintendo’s 3D platforming design prowess.

Every stage in Galaxy 2 is tuned to perfection; each jump and hazard shows Nintendo’s mastery of the medium, and the incredible soundtrack seals the deal.

While it might be true that not much has changed in mechanical terms since Super Mario Galaxy, that game’s controls were so accomplished that no real change was needed.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a representation of everything the Wii did well; colour, joy, life, and good old-fashioned great game design, packaged in a generous game that had plenty of content to enjoy.

2. Super Mario Galaxy

• Genre: Action, platform
• Audience: E

We couldn’t compile a list of the best Wii games ever made without mentioning the original Super Mario Galaxy.

The first 3D Mario platformer to launch since the GameCube’s much-maligned Super Mario Sunshine, Galaxy got things back on track with aplomb.

From the opening notes of the bombastic “Gusty Garden Galaxy”, it was clear that the game was going to be something special, and its trippy wraparound planetoid stages made it feel unique and exciting, too.

There’s no such thing as a bad Mario 3D platformer, but Super Mario Galaxy is excellent even by Nintendo’s exacting standards for itself.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

• Genre: Action, adventure
• Audience: 8 years old and up

Don’t let the critics and naysayers get to you: Skyward Sword is an underrated masterpiece, and while it certainly has its flaws, they’re not enough to bring it down.

Beautiful painterly visuals render the world of Hyrule in glorious detail, and the characters are full of life and charm, especially after the somewhat dour (but still wonderful) Twilight Princess.

Gameplay-wise, Skyward Sword introduced the Wii Motion Plus to the world of Zelda, increasing the precision of sword fights and augmenting the series’ trademark puzzles in fascinating ways.

4. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

• Genre: Action, adventure
• Audience: 8 years old and up

As the Wii’s first Zelda outing, Twilight Princess bookended the life of the console with Skyward Sword, and there are many who prefer this adventure to Link’s latter-period journey.

Twilight Princess eschews Wind Waker’s cartoony art style, opting instead for a gritty visual aesthetic that emphasises realism over impressionism.

What follows is probably the darkest mainline Zelda game (if we’re not counting Majora’s Mask, of course), but still one that’s full of the usual excellent puzzles and satisfying exploration.

If you love Zelda and you haven’t yet checked out Twilight Princess, the Wii is the perfect place to do so.

5. Xenoblade Chronicles

• Genre: Action, RPG
• Audience: 10+

“The Wii can’t do full-fledged RPGs,” went the naysayers. Not so, said Monolith Soft, releasing one of the best RPGs not only for the Wii but for any system.

Xenoblade Chronicles features massive open environments full of enemies to battle and sidequests to discover, as well as a genuinely fascinating plot that goes to some unexpected places.

The combat takes inspiration from MMORPGs, with characters lining up skills and trying to time them properly in order to achieve certain synergies and exploit weaknesses.

Composers for the soundtrack include legends like Yasunori Mitsuda and Yoko Shimomura, too.

6. Mario Kart Wii

• Genre: Racing
• Audience: E

What more need be said about Mario Kart? It’s a multiplayer stalwart, and the Wii version of the game is still the one to which many gamers return, even several console generations later.

Mario Kart Wii is hugely accessible thanks to its brightly-coloured visuals, pick-up-and-play controls, and ingenious implementation of motion via the Wii Wheel.

The range of courses on offer is excellent, and there are plenty of characters to choose from as well, although they don’t have the unique special moves seen in Double Dash!!.

If you’re in need of party entertainment, hook up Mario Kart and watch the arguments begin.

7. Super Smash Bros. Brawl

• Genre: Fighting
• Audience: T

Among Super Smash Bros. purists, Brawl is often seen as the black sheep of the family thanks to some slightly controversial changes to its core combat systems.

For most casual players, though, Brawl is one of the best fighting games on the Wii thanks to its huge roster of diverse characters and excellent nostalgia-inducing stages.

If you want a game that also serves as a museum-style monument to the glory of Nintendo and its associated franchises over the years, then Super Smash Bros. Brawl serves that purpose as well.

8. Wii Sports

• Genre: Sports
• Audience: E

Say what you will, but Nintendo packing in Wii Sports with every Wii console was a stroke of genius on the company’s part.

It meant that every gamer could experience what the Wii was capable of without needing to commit to a lengthy single-player adventure, and it gave families something to do at Christmas as well.

To put it simply, Wii Sports may not be the most technically accomplished game in the world, but it’s a hugely enjoyable way to spend a few hours swinging a Wii Remote around.

The sequel, Wii Sports Resort, is also well worth your time, adding in Wii Motion Plus functionality and several more sports.

9. Donkey Kong Country Returns

• Genre: Platform
• Audience: 6+

Rare’s Donkey Kong Country series is often seen as one of the best 2D platformer franchises around, so when it came time to revive the property, many wondered if Retro Studios was up to the task.

Happily, we needn’t have worried, because Donkey Kong Country Returns is excellent, and it might even top the original Donkey Kong Country in terms of gameplay.

The visuals are gorgeous, and Kenji Yamamoto’s excellent score pays homage to the Rare originals while still adding its own flair into the mix.

If you love difficult (but fair) 2D platformers, give this one a shot and experience one of the best Wii games around.

10. Punch-Out!!

• Genre: Fighting
• Audience: E

The original Punch-Out!! is one of the NES’ most legendary games, pitting the scrappy Little Mac against a series of increasingly tough boxing opponents.

This Wii remake adds more content and makes a few changes, but it keeps the spirit of the original intact; at its core, Punch-Out!! is a game of pattern recognition, and this remake is no different.

Each boss has a set of tells you’ll need to identify if you want to knock them out, and those tells become increasingly harder to both spot and exploit.

A tougher variant of the career mode also adds new moves and tells to bosses for an extra challenge.

11. Metroid Prime Trilogy

• Genre: Adventure
• Audience: T

Metroid Prime Trilogy represents absolutely astonishing value for money, at least when you consider its original retail price.

What you’re getting here are three excellent first-person shooters that still haven’t been bettered or even successfully imitated to this day.

The original Metroid Prime is a masterpiece, and while the two sequels can’t quite hold a candle to the first, they’re both still accomplished exploration-heavy shooters in their own right.

While you wait for Metroid Prime 4, go back and see where it all began.

12. New Super Mario Bros. Wii

• Genre: Action, platform
• Audience: E

While Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel hogged the limelight, New Super Mario Bros. Wii was quietly providing one of the best side-scrolling platformers the Wii has to offer.

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel; this is very much classic Mario action, complete with all of the trappings you’ve come to expect from the franchise.

The addition of what can charitably be described as “co-op”, though, makes things more hectic and enjoyable; this is co-op as competition, since players can bump into one another and disrupt each other’s experience in hilarious ways.

Don’t play New Super Mario Bros. Wii if you’re looking to build or salvage a relationship, but otherwise, it’s great fun.

13. Super Paper Mario

• Genre: Action, platforrm
• Audience: E

It might not quite reach the dizzying highs of the GameCube’s Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, but Super Paper Mario is a blast.

This game eschews the turn-based RPG trappings of its forebears, choosing instead to adopt a strange platformer-RPG hybrid that feels innovative and unusual.

If you’re in it for the excellent writing, rest assured that Super Paper Mario is still hilarious, albeit a little more grounded than The Thousand-Year Door’s Agatha Christie-meets-professional wrestling shenanigans. 

14. Okami

• Genre: Action, adventure
• Audience: T

It seems that it is the fate of Okami to go massively underappreciated by the public at large, even if it is beloved by video game critics and fans everywhere.

This Zelda-inspired adventure transposes that series’ signature overworld-dungeon loop to classical Japan, adopting a truly breathtaking sumi-e-inspired art style along the way.

You play as Amaterasu, the Shinto sun god, who also happens to be an adorable white wolf. Accompanied by the tiny artist Issun, you must save Nippon from encroaching darkness.

Beautiful, varied, and touching, Okami is an essential adventure.

15. Resident Evil 4

• Genre: Horror
• Audience: Mature

The Resident Evil 4 remake may be turning heads (at time of writing, at least), but the original also received an excellent port on the Wii.

Resident Evil 4 is a timeless classic, and its Wii port adds motion controls into the mix, making the aiming more precise and helping you to land more hits on the Plagas.

If you haven’t played Resident Evil 4 before, we’d actually recommend starting with the original over the remake, if only because then you can see just how much has changed in the intervening years. 

16. A Boy and His Blob

• Genre: Puzzle
• Audience: E

Another NES curio resurrected from the vaults, A Boy and His Blob is an odd experiment, but it’s one that works on the Wii thanks to developer WayForward’s care and attention.

Rather than the wacky humour of the original, this Wii reimagining seems to take inspiration from Studio Ghibli movies and classic coming-of-age stories.

The young boy and his blob companion must navigate a series of puzzle-platformer stages, using the blob’s unique abilities to traverse varied environments and avoid dark monsters.

If you don’t well up by the game’s conclusion, you might want to check your pulse.

17. Dead Space: Extraction

• Genre: Shooter
• Audience: Mature

If there’s one area where the Wii absolutely excels, it’s rail shooters, and nowhere is that more true than in Dead Space: Extraction.

Serving as a prequel to the original Dead Space, the game shows the events leading up to Isaac’s journey as the USG Ishimura is taken over by the vicious Necromorphs.

Naturally, Dead Space’s emphasis on exploration is here replaced entirely by on-rails movement, leaving you free to aim and shoot at Necromorphs to your heart’s content.

Thankfully, Dead Space’s hugely satisfying combat makes the transition unscathed.

18. Animal Crossing: Let’s Go to the City

• Genre: Adventure
• Audience: E

Considered by some to be the black sheep of the Animal Crossing series, Let’s Go to the City was a decidedly more urban experience than Animal Crossing usually is (as the name implies).

As well as managing your little village, it also allows you to make trips to the titular city in order to indulge in activities like going to the theatre or getting a haircut.

It makes the game feel more connected than its somewhat isolated predecessors, so if you’ve ever felt lonely playing Animal Crossing, this is the game for you.

19. Wii Fit

• Genre: Sports
• Audience: E

True, some of Wii Fit’s features might feel a little outdated and unpleasant today, but it’s undeniable that this game got a lot of people up and moving.

Wii Fit was another one of Nintendo’s experiments for the Wii wherein the company attempted to position the console as a lifestyle aide as well as a gaming machine.

It came complete with the innovative Balance Board peripheral, which could weigh you and offer tips to help you improve your level of fitness.

20. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

• Genre: Survival
• Audience: Mature

Masterminded by Sam Barlow, who would go on to create Her Story and Immortality, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a much-needed refocus for the series.

Instead of Homecoming’s slightly silly action emphasis, Shattered Memories brings things back to psychological horror; it’s a (very) loose remake of the original game.

You are Harry Mason, and you must find your missing daughter, just like in the original game. Don’t worry, though; the PS1 original’s ridiculous cult nonsense is nowhere to be seen here.

21. The Last Story

• Genre: RPG
• Audience: T

See what they did there? The Last Story is unashamedly reminiscent of Final Fantasy, as it should be; it boasts the involvement of that series’ creator, after all.

The game focuses on Zael, a mercenary who dreams of a more chivalrous life, as he’s caught up in a war between humans and beastmen.

While the story is involving, the combat is the real star of the show, incorporating action-RPG elements as well as stealth and pulling it all off with surprising aplomb.

22. Mario Party 9

• Genre: Party
• Audience: E

It’s fair to say that Mario Party 8 is a very divisive game indeed.

Some people love it for its old-school stylings, while others hate it for how slow and ponderous it can feel. Mario Party 9 fixed the latter issue with an innovative change: everyone moves at the same time.

While this does take some of the tension away from the board game mode, it also ensures that the focus remains steadfastly on the minigames, which are the best part of Mario Party without question.

23. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn

• Genre: RPG
• Audience: 10+

Radiant Dawn is Fire Emblem’s War and Peace. It’s a hugely lengthy epic with over 40 chapters, split across several different character perspectives.

As such, it can feel a touch disjointed at times, but it also offers some of the deepest and most satisfying strategy RPG gameplay you’ll find in the series.

Just don’t feel ashamed for playing this one on Easy, which is actually supposed to be called Normal by the original Japanese game’s standards (it’s complicated).

24. No More Heroes

• Genre: Action, adventure
• Audience: Mature

Suda51 is a legendary game designer for a reason, and while No More Heroes might not quite approach the unabashed weirdness of Killer7, it’s still a great game in its own right.

Travis Touchdown is a hopeless nerd, and he wants to be a renowned assassin. He must hack and slash his way through a legion of killers, all while completing odd jobs to get money in the meantime.

It’s a bizarre mixture of open-world sandbox adventuring and Platinum-style hack-and-slash combat, but it all works thanks to Suda51’s characteristic off-kilter sensibilities.

25. Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth

• Genre: Action
• Audience: T

One of the saddest things about the Wii’s demise is the death of the Wii Shop Channel, where several curiosities could exclusively be found.

One of those curiosities is Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth, an excellent remake of a classic Game Boy Castlevania game that sharpens up the visuals and gameplay significantly

This results in an adventure that feels very much like a lost old-school Castlevania game, complete with tight, deliberate controls and Dark Souls-style pseudo-trial-and-error gameplay.

26. The House of the Dead: Overkill

• Genre: Shooter
• Audience: Mature

Another excellent rail shooter, The House of the Dead: Overkill leans into the series’ inherent silliness, adopting a grindhouse splattercore aesthetic as it goes.

The writing is massively stupid, but the game absolutely knows this and runs with it, resulting in some of the most unexpectedly funny dialogue you’re likely to find in a Wii game.

The shooting is sharp and satisfying, and while the overall package is a little on the short side, Overkill is as long as it needs to be to avoid overstaying its welcome.

27. Little King’s Story

• Genre: Strategy
• Audience: Teen

Ports of the first two Pikmin games were released for the Wii, but this is as close as you’ll get to a bona fide brand new Pikmin game for the system.

This adorable exploration-based RTS takes the basic gameplay of Pikmin and transposes it to a fairytale-inspired world in which your young king must conquer all of the lands around him.

It’s all soundtracked by adorable arrangements of classical music, giving the whole thing a surreal quality that makes the game endure to this day.

28. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars

• Genre: Fighting
• Audience: Teen

Here’s another fighting game that has tragically been lost to the annals of time thanks to the Wii’s demise, but you can still find it second-hand if you look hard enough.

This fighter is an unlikely crossover between Capcom’s franchises and the characters of animation studio Tatsunoko, which include Jun the Swan, Tekkaman, and more.

If you’re not up on Japanese culture, some of the references might pass you by, but you don’t need to be versed in Tatsunoko lore to love the fluid 2D action of this game.

29. Muramasa: The Demon Blade

• Genre: RPG
• Audience: Teen

Vanillaware has to be one of the most consistently underrated developers working in games today, and Muramasa routinely turns up on underrated-Wii-game lists.

There’s a good reason for that; it marries gorgeous 2D art with fluid action-platformer gameplay, resulting in a package that looks and feels consistently great to play.

If you seek out just one underrated Wii classic from the vaults, make it this one, because even though it might not be the out-and-out best Wii game, it’s the one that deserves a reappraisal the most.

30. Kirby’s Adventure Wii

• Genre: Platform
• Audience: Everyone

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of Kirby games: classic platformers and weird experimental outings.

Kirby’s Adventure Wii (known by the far more sensible title Kirby’s Return to Dream Land outside of PAL territories) belongs to the former camp, reuniting Kirby with many of his allies and erstwhile foes in an old-school 2D platformer.

As you might expect from Kirby games, it’s wonderfully satisfying to play and packed full of cosy charm, and although it’s a touch on the easy side, the co-operative gameplay focus easily makes up for that.