「RISINGSUPERBLOG」

Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: indieszero, Nintendo EPD
Release Date: July 18th, 2024
Version Played: Nintendo Switch

Let’s be frank: not everyone was excited for Nintendo World Championships. When it was announced a scant three months ago to an audience chomping at the bit for the barest scrap of Switch 2 news, the news landed with a bit of a thud. Many labeled it a “calendar-filler” — a quick and dirty release to buoy the Switch through its last year or so in the limelight. 

This is, of course, a very silly thing to say. Nintendo has routinely shipped smaller titles throughout the Switch lifecycle (and it’s frankly a mean thing to direct at any game’s staff). It’s sad to see the de-facto successor to the NES Remix series taking so much flack—those are great games, after all! 

Thankfully, this one’s great too. If you’ve never played an NES Remix title, then you’re in for a treat.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition presents the player with a variety of challenges across 13 classic Nintendo-published NES titles. The games begin with the simplest of the simple: collecting a mushroom in stage 1-1 of Super Mario Bros., or popping a single balloon in Balloon Fight. The stages build up your individual game knowledge as you progress through these micro-tasks, before dumping you into more elaborate speedruns. Now, you’re racing to finish the whole of world 1 in Super Mario Bros. 3, or clearing a full Ice Climber level. 

You’ll collect coins for finishing challenges, which can be spent on cosmetics for your profile. Faster times pay out more coins, which is most of the game’s single-player replay value, alongside a selection of achievements, represented by cute metal pins. Pretty standard fare, but it’s just enough to work.

Progression through the game is very straightforward—with a bit of dedication, the average player could probably clear all 156 challenges in about two hours. For some people, this will already signal that the game is a hard pass. Honestly, if all you want to do is see the content through once, there’s not a lot of meat on these bones (especially since it doesn’t include the full NES games—Nintendo still wants to sell you a subscription, after all!). 

But for some people, like me, clearing a challenge for the first time is only the tip of the iceberg. After getting your initial end-level performance grade, you might be surprised that your ace mushroom-grabbing skills only netted a B+. How could that be? Welcome down the rabbit hole!

In order to snag S rank times, you’ll often need to perform at maximum efficiency. Slip your character just past the lip of each block, don’t stay in the air any longer than need be, and slay your foes with only the farthest tip of your sword. Only through practice and repetition will you stand a chance at the vast majority of S rank times.

The game, thankfully, provides optional guides so you’ll never be totally clueless as to general strategy, but workshopping your own additions and repeatedly squeezing the next fraction of a second off of your time can be an addictive process. The game does an excellent job keeping you in the action, too; repeating challenges and navigating menus is lightning fast, with soft reset and quit options just a button combination away. 

If you’re the type to shoot for S-ranks, I think you’ll find the game will take quite a few more hours to polish off. For my own sanity, I’ve decided to accept A+ ranks and move on in most cases. Some of these S rank times are absolutely not messing around, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I just don’t like Excitebike that much.

That main selection of challenges forms the backbone of the game’s content, supporting three additional game modes. Firstly, there’s the weekly World Championship mode. Five challenges are chosen for the week’s contest. You get to submit your times individually for each one, so there’s no need to fret over consecutive perfect execution. You’ll be rewarded with more coins than usual for playing the weekly World Championship challenges, and any new high scores you land also count towards your offline letter rankings. Grinding out your weekly World Championship mode ends up being rewarding on both a competitive level and a game progression level, which is well thought out.

A fun wrinkle the mode has is that you actually don’t get to see where you rank until the week is up. The game’s baked-in letter ranking system gives you a general performance review. But is your S rank time perfect enough to top the leaderboard? You’ll just have to go with your gut and move on!

At the end of the week, you’re treated to an animated score reveal sequence. It shows your placement in the rankings, what percentage of users you bested, and a quick comparison to other users born the same year as you. The secrecy of it all means it’s truly gratifying to see the scores you were confident in pull in the results you expected. Afterwards, you can also watch the top replays for each challenge, and it can be similarly revelatory to see masterful players showing off tricks that you’d never even considered, which you can replicate for your own S rank completions.

Next up is Survival Mode, where you play a set of three of the weekly World Championship minigames, randomly organized back-to-back against replays from seven other players. Half are eliminated after each round, making for some tense finales.

At first blush, I was surprised this wasn’t a real-time online mode. But in practice, the decision to make it a ghost competition really speeds things up. No need to wait for other players to finish behind you, you can just move onto the next level once you’ve won. Like the main game, there’s a brevity that just works. This mode also hands out large batches of coins quickly, so there’s good incentive to try and beat your opponents each week.

The last major game mode is the fabulous multiplayer mode, in which you and up to seven other people can compete in sets of challenges. There’s a selection of premade sets, or you can customize them yourself, as far as I can tell. Players get points for their placement after each contest, and a winner is chosen after the set. It seems like a lot of fun, but I haven’t had a chance to play it myself, though I did watch six children and one grown man compete on a massive screen at Nintendo Tokyo here in Shibuya recently. The lone adult won and happily showed off his prize to an audience that I assume was largely the kids’ parents, so there wasn’t much applause. One child was visibly unhappy. Having had this experience, my assessment of the game’s multiplayer greatly increased.

Initially hidden from the menu, there’s actually an unlockable final mode called Legendary Trial, which presents you with all of the game’s 13 Legend difficulty levels, back to back. Even a great performance takes close to half an hour, as it includes a full playthrough of both Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., so it’s no joke to practice for an S rank on this one! Thankfully, you also get individual rankings for each of the levels along the way, so you’ll have a good idea where you’re slouching. 

One unfortunate quirk is that while the game saves your individual top times for the levels within the Legendary Trial, those individual scores don’t contribute to your letter grades back in the main challenge mode. Playing them back to back is genuinely a different overall challenge from just playing them on their own, but I would think that given this is a higher pressure environment, it would be acceptable to let these scores overwrite your old ones. A slight fumble, I think, but no big deal.

I found this mode very compelling, but I must admit that with such a long completion time, I was glad I got an A+ rank early and was ready to move on. Half an hour is a big commitment every time you want to shoot for an S rank.

All in all, I really enjoyed Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, but there are some fair critiques of the game out there. At USD $30, the game is by no means expensive, but it costs just as much as both of the Wii U NES Remix titles. Those were each USD $15, and together, had around 370 challenges by my count, representing 30 NES titles overall. That includes the funky Remix challenges which added various modifiers to the games and emulators to create entirely new experiences that weren’t possible in the original games. 

Looking at it from a brass-tacks, pure value proposition perspective—you’re plainly coming out with less bang for your buck. That said, I would strongly argue that Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a much more polished version of the NES Remix titles, from the menus to the emulation features, and that the other modes are genuinely great additions to the overall package.

If you happen to own a Wii U or 3DS, well, you should weigh whether those factors are worth it to you. Although I haven’t played it myself, I believe the 3DS version is a mix of content from NES Remix and NES Remix 2, and does not include 100% of the overall content, despite being called “Ultimate NES Remix”, so watch out for that one.

If you’re already a fan of NES Remix, you might notice that many challenges are more or less recreated exactly in this game. Nonetheless, I genuinely believe Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is overall the best title of the bunch. Having the original NES games fully playable would have been a great addition and made for a clear value add over NES Remix, as it would have made a nice little modern hub for people to hop into speedrunning the 13 games on show, but alas.

As it stands, I do think Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a fantastic game when engaged on its own terms as a collection of tailored micro challenges, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a speedrunner’s dream, given the absence of features like challenge-specific leaderboards. Regardless, improving your high scores remains fun and addictive, and working to collect the game’s unlockable Player Icons is giving me enough motivation to stick with it for a few more weekly championship cycles. If you’re a fan of NES games, or otherwise into minigame collection style titles, I heartily recommend it! 

If you’re not into that sort of stuff, well, you’ve probably already made up your mind at this point, and that’s okay as well. It’s far from an essential Switch title, but it would be a shame to think that all this game is doing is filling time while we wait for the Switch 2. The game’s worst crime is ultimately that it’s a bit expensive compared to its predecessors, after all. 

As a final thought, I dearly hope that the game’s title alludes to the possibility that we might see an SNES edition, a Game Boy edition, and so on! The game was apparently developed using the new Switch emulators powering the Nintendo Switch Online retro apps, so I’m hopeful we’ll see another title in this vein that can finally move past the NES.

tl;dr

The best NES Remix game there is, even if there’s less content on board.