The Wii is remembered for motion controls and grandparents bowling, which undersells it badly. Underneath the phenomenon sat one of Nintendo’s strongest libraries, including two of the best 3D platformers ever made. These are the 12 best Wii games of all time.
12. Wii Sports
The pack-in that sold the console. Five simple sports, no tutorial needed, and a control scheme your grandmother understood in ten seconds. It sold over 82 million copies, making it one of the best-selling games ever made, and it remains the purest demonstration of what motion control was for.
11. Donkey Kong Country Returns
Retro Studios’ 2010 revival is punishingly difficult in the way the SNES originals were, with barrel-blasting sequences and silhouette levels that rank among the best 2D platforming Nintendo has published. Its remaster reached Switch in 2025.
10. Kirby’s Epic Yarn
Good-Feel’s 2010 platformer renders everything in fabric, felt, and stitching, and removes death entirely: you lose beads instead of lives. It is the most relaxing game on this list, and its art direction has aged better than almost anything else on the hardware.
9. Punch-Out!!
Next Level Games’ 2009 revival is a pattern-recognition classic dressed up in gorgeous cartoon animation. Every opponent is a puzzle with a tell, and the Title Defense mode remixes all of them into something genuinely brutal.
8. Xenoblade Chronicles
Monolith Soft’s 2010 RPG nearly never left Japan; a fan campaign got it localized, and it turned into one of Nintendo’s most important franchises. Its world, built on the bodies of two titans, remains one of the most striking settings in the genre.
7. Metroid Prime Trilogy
The 2009 collection brought all three Prime games together with pointer controls that made the first two play better than they ever had on GameCube. For years this was the single best value package Nintendo had ever assembled.
6. Super Smash Bros. Brawl
The 2008 entry added Solid Snake and Sonic to a Nintendo fighting game, which felt impossible at the time, plus the Subspace Emissary, a full side-scrolling campaign. Competitive players still argue about its floaty physics; everyone else had the time of their lives.
5. Mario Kart Wii
Twelve racers, bikes, and a plastic wheel in the box made this the best-selling Mario Kart until Switch: over 37 million copies. Its online play was Nintendo’s first genuinely popular multiplayer service, and its tracks keep reappearing in later games. The current entry is covered in our Mario Kart World guides.
4. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
The 2011 entry is the most divisive 3D Zelda and also the most mechanically inventive: one-to-one sword control with MotionPlus means enemies guard specific angles, turning combat into a puzzle. Its dungeon design is superb, and its story gives the whole series its origin.
3. Super Mario Galaxy 2
The 2010 sequel is pure design: it drops the hub world, adds Yoshi, and delivers ninety-odd stars of ideas that most studios would have stretched across three games. Many critics called it the best platformer ever made when it launched, and the argument has not really been settled since.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The 2006 launch title is the darkest, most conventional Zelda, made in direct response to fans who wanted Ocarina of Time grown up. Its dungeons are among the series’ best, its horseback combat is thrilling, and Midna is one of Nintendo’s finest characters.
1. Super Mario Galaxy
The 2007 game that took 3D Mario into orbit and rewrote the rules of platforming with spherical gravity. Running around a tiny planet and falling upward into the next one is the sort of idea that sounds gimmicky until you play it, at which point it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
It takes number one for its confidence and its heart in equal measure. Every galaxy introduces a new concept and then discards it before it wears out, the orchestral soundtrack was Mario’s first and remains its best, and the Rosalina storybook interludes gave the series an emotional register it had never attempted. Nearly two decades on, it is still the high point of the franchise.
Honorable Mentions
Super Paper Mario, Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, Little King’s Story, The Last Story, Pandora’s Tower, No More Heroes, and Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition all belong in any serious Wii conversation (the original ranks high on our best GameCube games list), and Wii Fit deserves credit for getting more people off the couch than any game before or since.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Wii game of all time? Super Mario Galaxy, with its sequel close behind. Twilight Princess is the best Zelda on the system.
How can I play Wii games today? Several have been remastered for Switch, including Super Mario Galaxy, Skyward Sword HD, Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, and Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. Original Wii hardware still plays GameCube discs too.
What was the best-selling Wii game? Wii Sports, at over 82 million copies, largely because it was bundled with the console.
What came next? The Wii U, a commercial failure with a superb library; see our best Wii U games of all time.