For home consoles only:
1. Switch - there is a tremendous volume of titles far beyond anything I’ve seen on a Nintendo console before.
2. SNES - The RPG golden age began here. While the third party games list is small compared to Wii and Switch, the games it did have include several of the all time greatest games ever.
3. Wii - There was a tremendous boom in creative third party software across all genres.... except new RPGs, which is why I have to put this one lower than SNES. But it DID have gems like Rune Factory Frontier, Little King Story, and the virtual console library. Including VC, this is the first console I owned over 100 individual games on. Switch is close to being the second.
4. N64 - while the library was small, it did have a several really standout exclusives.
5. NES - Lots of exclusives, but very few of them were high quality. Beat em ups and side scrollers were fairly good, but they got smoked by the SMD.
6. Wii U - Exclusive games were almost unheard of. Much of the time done better on other consoles. Usually because of the greater performance.
7. GameCube - Like Wii U, but an even blander library with gameplay/controls/content dumbed down or missing.
Basically, GameCube and Wii U fall into the category of “Yeah, Game X, Y, and Z are on the console, but I’d rather play them elsewhere for the better experience.”
NES falls into the “Yeah, but many of these are not as good as I remember.”
And the top 4 have ample exclusives and reasons for why you’d want to play the games on THAT console for those that aren’t exclusive.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
