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Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition wears its inspiration in its title. It seeks to capture the nostalgia for the competitions from over 30 years ago! And perhaps mostly the legacy built after the fact by collectors and communities wishing they weren’t just one-offs and actively building around that old branding.
The aesthetics of the game work really well! The soundtrack and backgrounds really remind us of The Wizard, which is absolutely correct for this package. The gameplay of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition appears to build on the framework of NES Remix, the Wii U and 3DS collection of similar challenges. There are bite-sized and… slightly larger but still bite-sized gameplay segments from 13 games: Super Mario Bros 1, 2, Lost Levels and 3; Zelda 1 and 2; Metroid; Donkey Kong; Kid Icarus; Excitebike; Ice Climber; Balloon Fight; and Kirby’s Adventure.
Speedrun Mode, the one mode you can play offline, is extremely like NES Remix, with escalating challenges to unlock and coins to collect to do that. They start at the shortest and simplest “Normal” ones, and go all the way through Hard, Master and Legend. Master and Legend challenges aren’t necessarily the hardest to complete, but they are the longer and more interesting ones, and perhaps there are many more things you’d need to get exactly right to get a top time. There are even Nintendo Power-like strategy tips for these final ones, and these add to the atmosphere and are a nice touch.
Of course, the selling point of NES Remix was the, well, remix part, and this release has none of that. The game segments here are fully ones you could experience before. Instead, it’s built around online competition. The two online modes are World Championships, which gives you a weekly playlist of five challenges, and Survival Mode, which collects ghost data to create a 99-like battle royale spin.
The World Championships mode of the game is understandably intended as the centerpiece. Each week, you play five challenges and compete for the best times on leaderboards. Unfortunately for the experience, it deviates from the original Nintendo World Championships formula in one big way: you can replay it as many times as you want, and each part is tackled separately. You don’t chain together challenges, and there are no interesting score strategies. It boils down to “do these five again, just like you’ve done before.” Just you have to log on every week.
Survival Mode also recycles those challenges, this time formatting it as a battle royale-like competition. That said, like we mentioned, it uses ghost data! So it’s just an artificial way to make the normal speedrunning look different. You’ll take on three of the challenges — at least in the pre-release review period, these were identical to the World Championships ones for the week — and winning is a combination of doing well and happening upon the ghost data and event order that makes the finals most winnable. Half the “players” are eliminated each round, so early ones are more forgiving. So maybe keep entering and quitting until your weakest one is first, to save time? To the game’s credit, your performances in these two online modes do update your best times for Speedrun Mode, which is something.
You don’t want to chase slightly better times through repetition? Truly the game’s not for you. It’s geared exclusively toward this sort of play, and it’s unapologetic about it. As an example, Kirby’s Adventure is a game about enjoying power-ups and creative solutions. Many of its included challenges? They’re no-power-up boss time challenges. We’re well-documented Kirby fans, and we’re not having fun playing the Kirby parts here! It works better for a game like Balloon Fight, but the true genres for this sort of thing don’t feel represented. There’s no Tetris, even as a nod to the original competition, nor do we see something like Dr. Mario here as a substitute. Scrolling shooters would also be good to see, or white-knuckle games like Punch-Out!! and such.
The game really wants you to play on TV, and with an audience. The interface is more for a spectator than a player, for better and worse. If you play by yourself, especially on a handheld screen, your actual view of a given game is only about a quarter of your display. The local multiplayer option, Party Mode, lets you play with up to eight players locally at the same time. And hey, this could be fun with a group?
Nintendo has been exceedingly clear that full NES games are not part of the Nintendo World Championships package. But, frankly, why not? We know that all of these titles are part of the Nintendo Switch Online offering, so they’re available to play, but what if there were built-in speedrunning milestones with split times, verified leaderboards and ghost data? This would be extra value, and still fit within the premise. If this project started life as one of the annual Nintendo Switch Online freebies, we’d believe it. With its focus on online play and general depth of content, it fits better beside Tetris 99 than Tears of the Kingdom.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a release held together by sentiment and atmosphere, partly because that aspect of the game is so good and partly because the remainder of the game is so devoid of merit. Like NES Remix before it, it lives in a liminal space between viable gameplay ideas. If it were supposed to be a punishing speedrunning challenge, it would give players one try in the weekly championship and offer more long events. If it were a WarioWare-like fun time, it’d have a faster pace and a lot more variety. If it were a weekly Nintendo Switch Online diversion, it’d be a lower-commitment free download built around a real-time experience. And, well, it’s none of those.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition launches July 18, 2024 for Nintendo Switch.
