Iwata was a nice person and personable in things like Directs, but the Yamauchi and Furukawa eras are better IMO.
The Wii was an enormous rip off, it was a repackaged GameCube with a different $30 controller modestly upclocked with a bit more RAM for 2.5x (!) the cost and people act like Nintendo did them a favor, lol.
The Yamauchi era hardware was far better, NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and now the Furukawa era kinda starts with Switch OLED and Switch 2 and both are very nice and feel premium. You feel like you are getting your money's worth and not getting a toy either.
The game quality too, honestly I don't miss the days of like Wii Fit or Wii Music being the "big" release for the entire year and the main focus of their E3/June Directs.
Sorry but you'd have to pay me to go back to that. I'm loving playing big ticket 3rd party games again on Switch 2 like Resident Evil 9 and Indiana Jones because the hardware is actually well made and has some real horsepower under the hood.
The DS was not Iwata's idea either, Yamauchi insisted on a 2 screen portable to which Iwata and the head of the Game Boy thought it was a dumb idea but they had to humor him because he was Yamauchi.
I wish Furukawa era Nintendo was a little more open in sharing things about future game releases, but it's fine. Seeing a game like Star Fox and being able to play it within a couple of months is not bad either.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 13 May 2026
