Cliff Notes – The 8 worst Nintendo games ever – from Welcome Tour to Donkey Kong Jet Race
- Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour: With a Metacritic score of 52, this game is considered one of Nintendo’s worst, lacking the charm typically associated with the brand.
- Everybody 1-2-Switch: Scoring 54, this sequel to the unpopular original was released six years later and faced internal doubts about its potential impact on Nintendo’s reputation.
- Donkey Kong Jet Race: Originally designed for the GameCube, this racing game received a low score of 46 due to its shallow gameplay and cumbersome motion controls.
The 8 worst Nintendo games ever – from Welcome Tour to Donkey Kong Jet Race
Following the launch of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, GameCentral looks back on the worst Nintendo games ever made.
Whereas Mario Kart World is a joyous experience worth getting a Nintendo Switch 2 for, the only other first party title available for the system is Nintendo Switch 2 World Tour: a shockingly banal experience unbecoming of a company like Nintendo.
Reviews were late in arriving, because consoles weren’t sent out more than a day before launch, so it’s taken a while for the game to get a consensus of review on Metacritic. But now that it has, it’s sitting at just 52. That makes it one of the worst reviewed games that Nintendo itself has ever made – but not the very worst.
Badly reviewed games are impressively rare in Nintendo’s discography, with most never getting any worse than average. But if you’ve ever wanted to see what a genuinely bad game from Nintendo looks like, here is their hall of shame…
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour
Metacritic score: 52
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
Just to get the ball rolling, let’s start with the impetus for this list. While there’s far worse yet to come, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is baffling in how sterile and un-Nintendo-like it is in its presentation.
Be sure to read our full review for a proper breakdown, but per Metacritic, it’s only scored higher than two games this year: hack and slash action game Captain Blood and Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator.
Everybody 1-2-Switch
Metacritic score: 54
Not only one of the worst games Nintendo has ever made but almost certainly their least asked for sequel as well. Arriving six years after the already unpopular launch game 1-2-Switch (Metacritic score: 58) it’s baffling as to who thought this would be a good idea.
If a 2022 report is to be believed, it bombed so hard with playtesters that some Nintendo execs were hesitant about releasing Everybody 1-2-Switch out of fear it would damage the company’s reputation. It didn’t, but you can’t help but wonder why Nintendo bothered.
Donkey Kong Jet Race
Metacritic score: 46
Titled Donkey Kong Barrel Blast elsewhere in the world, this racing spin-off was originally designed as a GameCube game you controlled with the DK Bongos accessory. However, it was delayed and retrofitted for the Wii to make use of the Wii remote and nunchuk.
The end result was a physically and mentally tiring experience, given how much motion-controlled shaking was required, although we don’t think it would’ve been much better on GameCube thanks to how shallow and dull the actual racing is.
Chibi-Robo! Let’s Go, Photo!
Metacritic score: 49
The original Chibi-Robo! on GameCube was a flawed but mildly interesting distraction, with some neat ideas, but every subsequent sequel seemed to strip away its best qualities and make things worse with every new entry.
Chibi-Robo! Let’s Go, Photo! (aka Chibi-Robo! Photo Finder) was designed to show off the 3DS’s camera and AR features, but it didn’t use them very well. The end result is a simply awful collection of minigames and while normally people would be upset that the game was lost to the ether, when the 3DS eShop shut down, it’s hard to care in this instance.
The worst of the worst
Although these games weren’t developed by Nintendo itself, they were published by them, as format exclusives, and in many cases they’re even worse than the in-house failures.
Devil’s Third – A Wii U exclusive from the creator of Ninja Gaiden and Dead Or Alive, Devil’s Third is a laughably awful action game that is almost so bad it’s good.
Gardening Mama 2: Forest Friends – This was only published by Nintendo in Europe – for some reason – with its drab collection of minigames unlikely to please even the most undemanding child.
My Pokémon Ranch – This barely counts as a game, since it serves mostly as a place to store pokémon from other games, but it did include a number of vapid minigames and some extremely ugly 3D models.
WarioWare: Snapped!
Metacritic score: 53
We were stuck on whether this or the Wii U’s Game & Wario is the worst WarioWare game, but at least Game & Wario has a couple of fun minigames. We’re not sure the same can be said for WarioWare: Snapped.
A digital download made exclusively for the Nintendo DSi and its digital cameras, it had a criminally small pool of microgames that often didn’t work and weren’t even that micro – thus eliminating the manic, fast-paced excitement of the rest of the WarioWare series.
Pokémon Dash
Metacritic score: 46
Although the Pokémon games aren’t made in-house at Nintendo, we still think they should count, since Pokémon is one of the company’s premiere franchises and, as evidenced by Pokémon Dash, something they consider useful to push a new console launch.
This racing spin-off was one of the very first DS games and it forced you to use the stylus for making Pikachu (who was the only playable character for some reason) race through painfully uninteresting courses.
Pokémon Battle Revolution
Metacritic score: 53
Pokémon Battle Revolution felt very much like the Wii successor to the Pokémon Stadium games, letting you bring your party of pokémon from the 2D games into 3D.
While it did boast online play, it lacked the meaty single-player content seen in the Stadium games, making it nothing more than a battle simulator. Considering the same developer, Genius Sonority, had previously made the fan favourite Pokémon Colosseum spin-offs, this was quite the downgrade.
Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival
Metacritic score: 46
It’s still so strange that after Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the 3DS, the next traditional Animal Crossing game wouldn’t be until Animal Crossing: New Horizons roughly eight years later.
The only entry the Wii U ever saw was Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, an atrocious board game spin-off that demands you have the appropriate amiibo figures to play and yet has no real gameplay to speak of. You just watch things happen. How the same studio went on to make Super Mario Party Jamboree beggars’ belief.
For as bad as these games are, it speaks volumes to Nintendo’s quality control that this is the worst that we could find. In fact, if you look at Nintendo’s output on Metacritic, very few games it’s published have scored lower than an average score of 50.
Past that, you start getting to games that may be considered bad by Nintendo’s standards but are otherwise inoffensive, such as Wario: Master Of Disguise (Metacritic score: 60) and Kirby Air Ride (Metacritic score: 61).
And yet clearly Nintendo isn’t bothered by these atypical duds. They didn’t take the hint with 1-2-Switch, they kept making Chibi-Robo! games for years, and, bizarrely, Kirby Air Ride is getting a sequel later this year – despite being one of their lowest rated games ever and the Switch 2 already having a Nintendo racing game, in Mario Kart World.
It just goes to show how unpredictable Nintendo can be, not just in the sort of games it releases and their quality, but also which ones it thinks are worth revisiting.
Kirby Air Ride didn’t make much of an impact and yet its sequel was one of Nintendo’s first Switch 2 announcements (Nintendo)