The GameCube was a commercial disappointment that produced an outrageous number of masterpieces. Freed from expectations, Nintendo and its partners spent five years making strange, confident games, several of which are still the best entries in their series. These are the 12 best GameCube games of all time.
12. Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
The 2003 entry remains the series’ biggest mechanical experiment: two characters per kart, one driving and one throwing items, with character-specific special weapons. Its co-op mode, where two players share a single kart, has never been repeated and is still a delight.
11. F-Zero GX
Sega’s Amusement Vision studio built Nintendo’s 2003 racer, and the result is one of the hardest games ever published by either company. Thirty ships at 1,000 km/h on tracks with no railings, running at a locked 60 frames per second. The series has been dormant since, which is a genuine loss.
10. Luigi’s Mansion
The console’s 2001 launch title starred Mario’s brother with a vacuum cleaner instead of Mario with a jump button, which tells you how confident Nintendo was feeling. Short, atmospheric, and full of physics and lighting showpieces that still impress.
9. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
The 2004 RPG is the funniest game Nintendo has ever published and the high point of the Paper Mario series, with a stage-performance framing where your audience affects battles. Its 2024 Switch remake introduced it to a new generation and confirmed how well the writing holds up.
8. Pikmin 2
The 2004 sequel removed the original’s 30-day time limit and added caves, two captains, and treasure hunting, turning a tense survival game into a deeper strategy one. Its enemy design is genuinely frightening in places, which few people expect from a game about plant creatures.
7. Super Mario Sunshine
The 2002 follow-up to Super Mario 64 gave Mario a water jetpack and a tropical island, and remains the most divisive 3D Mario: its movement is the most expressive in the series, and its difficulty spikes are the least forgiving. The secret levels, stripped of FLUDD, are pure platforming.
6. Metroid Prime
Retro Studios’ 2002 game turned a 2D exploration series into a first-person adventure without losing a thing, mostly by treating the visor as a character: rain beads on it, explosions light Samus’s face in the reflection. It is one of the greatest atmospheric achievements in the medium.
5. Super Smash Bros. Melee
The 2001 sequel was made in thirteen months and accidentally became one of the deepest competitive fighting games ever released. Its technical ceiling, discovered by players rather than designed by Nintendo, has kept a tournament scene alive for a quarter century.
4. Resident Evil 4
Originally a GameCube exclusive in 2005, Shinji Mikami’s reinvention moved the camera over Leon’s shoulder and rewrote action game design for a decade. The village opening remains one of the best-paced first hours in games. It was ported to almost everything afterward, including the console on our best PS2 games list.
3. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
The 2002 game whose cel-shaded art style caused an outcry at announcement and now looks better than any Zelda of its era. Sailing a vast ocean with a conductor’s baton is unlike anything else in the series, and its final confrontation is the best-staged in Zelda history.
2. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
The series’ 2005 console debut in the West is still, for many fans, its best story: a mercenary company caught in a war between nations, with a cast whose relationships develop across two connected games. Loose copies became famously expensive because so few were printed. The newest entry, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, launched this month.
1. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
The 2004 sequel is harder, darker, and more structurally ambitious than the original: two mirrored versions of the same world, one of which actively drains your health, with items in one dimension unlocking paths in the other. Its boss fights are the toughest in the series.
It takes the top spot narrowly over its predecessor because it does everything Prime did while asking more of the player. The Light and Dark Aether structure could easily have been a gimmick; instead it turns the whole planet into a single interlocking puzzle, and finishing it feels like genuinely mastering a place. It is the most complete expression of what Retro Studios built on this console.
Honorable Mentions
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem remains the only Nintendo-published game that pretends to delete your save file to scare you. Animal Crossing, Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, Viewtiful Joe, Killer7, Tales of Symphonia, and Skies of Arcadia Legends all found audiences the console itself never quite did.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best GameCube game of all time? Metroid Prime 2: Echoes for design ambition, with Metroid Prime, The Wind Waker, and Melee all defensible choices depending on what you value.
How can I play GameCube games today? Nintendo Switch Online’s Expansion Pack tier added a GameCube library for Switch 2, and several titles have standalone remasters, including Metroid Prime Remastered and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
What was the best-selling GameCube game? Super Smash Bros. Melee, at over 7 million copies, which is more than a third of all GameCube consoles sold.
What came next? The Wii, whose library we rank in our best Wii games of all time.