I'm using a 60ish inch 1080P LCD Samsung Smart 3D TV and am sitting at least five to six feet away and the game looks great. Of course, if I stand a few inches away the pixels appear. Maybe the Wii U default settings aren't working well with your TV, you're sitting too close, or your TV has a bad upscaler.

And I can't stand playing off screen TV unless I have to because the colors look less crisp and vibrant compared to the TV. The little texture details are gone too like the ones on the asphalt road in MK8.

Hope you fix your problem!

weird... my friend brought his wii u and mk 8 to play on my 65" tv... i thought the tv looks better than the pad... it looks washed on the pad.

Is your TV a Philips?

Are you using HDMI?

Just test around the system settings for resolution and picture quality.

My TV is 1080pso yeah probably want to just change the resolution

No problems on my 720p TV, try changing the resolution.

It's one of the nicest looking games I've yet seen on my 50" LG plasma. Many games do look a little bit nicer on the pad, but I credit that to the smaller screen and more concentrated resolution.

Yeah the image quality is pretty awful if you have a decent sized TV... There are multiple low resource AA solutions Nintendo could have chosen to help the issue, but they seem to have decided to just skip out on it entirely. As i said to Curl-6 a while back, i think Nintendo optimized the game around the 2/4 player modes at the expense of the single player/online. They could have gone with a variable resolution for the different modes, but i suppose they wanted consistency.

The game itself is lovely looking though. Next time i have a WiiU in my hands i'll give it a go on the pad.

Maybe you should check if your tv is on game or computer mode, it helps when playing game as the tv won't try to compensate for things that doesn't need to in games. For my TV 46'', it does help.