Mario and Pokemon are the two points where I think a bit of a gray area exists. Pokken Tournament was a spin off, but so has technically every non-handheld Pokemon game.
Even if 3D World wasn't what people were expecting to exclusively act as Mario for Wii U, it's still a Mario game with 3D platforming. It's a step in the right direction, though by making bite sized levels instead of full sized functional, dynamic worlds like other 3D Mario titles, it probably helped keep development costs down and development time shorter. Instead of having 100 people collaborate on a world at a time, they could give 100 people tools and assets and ask them to create functional levels with an end goal. It fit the necessities of the Wii U: faster and less expensive development. A more traditional 3D Mario would have been great, but financially irresponsible and too time consuming.
You can see the faster and cheaper development process in a lot of the main IP Wii U games, really. Splatoon got lucky that the staggered content release model actually worked out instead of dooming the game, and I'm sure Nintendo realizes that. They couldn't afford to hold the game back for three more months of development time though. As a new IP, they needed to get it out while the release schedule was relatively bone dry. That did the trick though. It got people to try the game because there was nothing else new to play, and it caught fire, half finished product or not. Otherwise though, you see Mario Party, that poor excuse for Animal Crossing anything, Pokken Tournament, Star Fox, Zelda remasters, and all of it is low effort or lower cost for varying reasons.
There are very few titles on the Wii U, seriously few, that reflect Nintendo having a comfortable amount of time to really develop games at their pace. I give them some kudos for trying as hard as they did to support the Wii U until this year where they just sorta threw in the towel. Even they must have realized that you can't use a bucket to save a sinking ship pretty early on though.
