This is an argument which has been annoying me for a while. I don't see how Nintendo hasn't had any innovation in 10 years when it kickstarted the motion gaming buzz singlehandedly with the Nintendo Wii. And I swear I must be the only person on the internet who actually uses the GamePad's touch screen to play games when the TV in the lounge is in use. Seriously, it's really convenient and so many arguments have been entirely circumvented. I think people also forget about the GamePad's other features horribly. Mario Kart 8 is more fun with gyro than with just the joystick 100% IMO, go use it. Even the microphone has some gimmicks in Super Mario 3D World which just ends up being really fun and amusing.
Obviously all the people care about is the touch screen though. The touch screen which is how you control your characters and fling Pikmin in Pikmin 3, a game which also makes use of the Wii U's GORGEOUS HD graphics. I think there are other control methods too, but if you're not using the touch screen that's your fault, because it's certainly most fun in Pikmin 3 with it. Oh, and it's also the same touch screen which makes Wind Waker so much easier to play in Wind Waker HD, having a map you can flick through while sailing and being able to organise your weapons into different button spots while sailing all by using the touch screen! The same GamePad which has a whole mode dedicated to it in Mario Party 10: Bowser Party, and let me tell you, those Bowser minigames are a hell of a lot of fun, and they use all the features the GamePad has (besides it's own little speakers, which are so handy when I'm playing early in the morning/late at night and don't want to wake my Dad up). No, Nintendo doesn't innovate at all, and the Wii U is a failure of a system!
The Wii U has only "failed" because Nintendo ended up having a slow start in terms of games, but don't forget that the XBone and PS4 had the same, and both of them have far less must-have games than the Wii U does. Speaking of, the Wii U also had backwards compatibility built in from the start! Hell, it's got backwards compatibility all the way to the NES thanks to Virtual Console and arguably games like NES Remix. I suppose bringing these retro games to a newer generation is also a "cash in", huh?
But no, the Wii U must be a copout because the amazing games didn't start flooding in until 2013. Since then there have been countless hits and should-be-system-sellers which have failed because the Nintendo fans are having none of it. And Nintendo must be a copout because they had a poor E3, even though they also won every E3 for I don't know how many years before this last event. For Goodness sake the hate Nintendo has got for the Wii U is so unfair and dumb, all the while I've been sat in my lounge playing on the countless amazing games Nintendo has for the system (and catching up on other games; I'm juggling Xenoblade Chronicles (not X yet, still the original) Bayonetta 2, Pikmin 3 AND the new Smash DLC characters/stages). Keep doing what you're doing Nintendo...
...but don't release any more free 2 plays please! :]
I really suck at estimating. I'm talking more of late Wii and Wii U, so let's say 5 years.
Anyway, the Wii was a genuinely great idea and started out with some fantastic games. We had Metroid Prime 3 which used the Wii Remote in some interesting ways and really took FPS to the next level (well, on consoles anyway). We had Mario Galaxy which also made use of the Wii Remote for new things and gave us a bold new Mario adventure with innovative gravity mechanics. I was fine with everything then.
This all really started around 2009-2010, when we started seeing a surge of 2D platformers on the Wii. There was NSMB Wii in 2009, Donkey Kong Country Returns in 2010, and Kirby's Return to Dreamland in 2011 to name a few. Now this was all right at the time, several of these games hadn't been seen in a while (the last new DK platformer was on the SNES and the last console Kirby game was on the N64) and the Wii already had some great games so they could be ignored if you really didn't want them. But there were some disturbing trends that popped at this point. NSMB Wii was similar to the first NSMB. Very similar. In fact, it's practically the same gameplay altogether with a few neat things thrown in. Also (and this isn't a 2D platformer but it's relevant to the problem), we had Super Mario Galaxy 2 which was meant to expand on what the first Galaxy game did. It did add some new powerups and level gimmicks, but it also watered a lot of things down, the story was downplayed because Miyamoto wanted to focus on gameplay, the gravity mechanics were more subdued, they started making more levels with less Power Stars in them, and the hub was watered down and paired with a Classic style map screen. Basically, the game started resembling the Classic 2D games more.
Then they launched 3DS and Wii U. Neither of these consoles really have great hardware innovations (3DS is literally just a DS with stereoscopic 3D graphics, whereas the Wii U is just DS in console form, which doesn't exactly open up to some exciting new possibilities for games), they're more like past gen consoles than Nintendo consoles have ever been since the SNES.
As for the games, none of them are particularly inspiring. None of the games have really come up with great ways to use the hardware, at best they usually just use the touch screen for the same things they did last gen. But what's really driven home the point of how un-innovative the games on these consoles have become is what's happened to their platformers. My god does it suck to be a platformer fan this gen. We got an entire slew of 2D platformers (plus 3D Land and 3D World, which were 3D platformers that played like 2D platformers) which took the NSMB Wii and Galaxy 2 approach: they recycled the same gameplay from the last game and again only really added powerups and gimmicks, the stories were all watered to excuse plots, and most of them stuck with the same kinds of level environments that we see all of the time. Basically all of their platformers turned into rehashes meant to cash in on nostalgia, there was no bold, innovative gameplay mechanics added to them to spice things up nor did they utilize the new hardware to create next gen gameplay. This especially stung with 3D World and Tropical Freeze, as we had come to expect better from 3D Mario (which until 3D World was the flagship game for the console that proved to the world that it could take Mario and Nintendo as a whole in bold new directions) and Retro Studios (who was best known for bold reinventions of classic IPs) and they handed us a steaming pile of mediocrity. In addition to rehashing, we've also seen a trend towards smaller scale download games and F2P games, and with the DeNA deal and Nintendo's entrance into the smartphone market, this is likely to go even further. And now with this E3 we're seeing games like Animal Crossing Amiibo Party and Metroid Prime Federation Force which are completely different games with the Animal Crossing and Metroid Prime games slapped on when both of those IPs are in need of main series games.
So to sum things up we've seen several disturbing development trends in the last 5 years which point towards Nintendo becoming more cash grabby and less innovative:
-Subdued hardware improvements that offer less possibilities and piggyback off the success of past consoles.
-Games that fail to utilize the hardware improvements in whatever new possibilities they provide (which granted, aren't much, but it's not as if there's nothing)
-Nostalgia fueled games that refuse to evolve their gameplay.
-Trending towards mobile style gameplay and F2P.
-Abuse of IPs by giving fans unrelated spinoffs instead of main series games.
The only semblance of innovation we're really getting now is from the games that aren't flagship IPs, and there's not a whole lot of them which really do that (ZombiU, Splatoon, I'll have to look at Fatal Frame to see about that one). Plus Nintendo themselves are the ones trying to innovate, so if they really do want to demonstrate that to consumers they really need to make that argument with high profile games that grab people's attention.
