Well, I bought it on launch, because Nintendo promised a good launch window including Pikmin 3. Little did I know that this "launch window" was a year long. Still, WiiU had many good games... that nearly all now are available on Switch. Xenoblade Chronicles X not, not the bets Xenoblade, but still a great game. Also Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, one of the best MonHuns still. WiiU has great Wii emulation and a HDMI-connector, so it is still my go to way to Wii games. And WiiU had Miiverse, which made for great communities. Yeah, I have fond memories, but overall it was a weak console. But a stepping stone for Switch, because the great games on WiiU while sparse in the lifetime of the console itself really helped Switch have a rounded library pretty early.

I did own a Wii-U and some of my favorites were Pikmin 3, Splatoon and Mario Kart 8. Shoutout to Wind Waker for being my favorite version of one of my absolute favorite games.

Also I guess I played BotW on the Wii-U since I didn't have money for the Switch at launch but I still forget that it is a Wii-U game.

Terrific console. Probably the one where I put most hours in. Amazing exclusives (Bayonetta 2, DKC Tropical Freeze, Xenoblade X, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HD, Affordable Space Adventures, Breath of the Wild, Mario 3D World, Splatoon, ZombiU...), huge and varied Virtual Console, Off-TV was very handy, the second screen made many games just better thanks to gameplay innovations or just on the fly menus, 100% backwards compatible with Wii and its controllers (literally had a Wii inside), internet browsing was super handy too thanks to the Gamepad (I think I put like 1000 hours in just watching movies and shows xD)...

I know it was lacking in third party support and some key Nintendo franchises... and it didn't last for long. But man, I sure had fun with it while it lasted. I still boot it up from time to time to play some stuff ^^

Kinda of a waste of a purchase since I have almost all (6) games on the WiiU on Switch.

The only ones that matter that are left is the Zelda games TP and WW HDs.

Wii U. Now I’m generally an optimist, but as a Nintendo fan, I wasn’t too happy with this console. I‘m sorry, but I gotta be pessimistic on this one :D

The 2 minutes of loading to turn it on sucked. Three years later (or whatever) when they claimed they “fixed” it, but it was still like 85 seconds, sucked.
The broken portability sucked.
The fact it was limited to one Gamepad controller sucked.
The abandoned features sucked.
That Nintendo cut support of the Wii before its time to support the clunky slow Wii U, sucked.
The pretentiousness of it sucked “Asymmetric gameplay, that’s why only one Gamepad” sounds a lot like “those are speed holes, it makes the car go faster.”
The game droughts sucked (well, at least it wasn’t N64 or Gamecube).
The lack of a killer app sucked.
Its failure to not only live up to the Wii name, but even come close to it, sucked.
And the Miiverse’s ignored potential sucked. It was a goddam social media platform, it should have launched as a mobile app.

So happy 10th birthday you bastard!

It wasn’t all bad. The good parts of it: Xenoblade Chronicles X, that doodle app, Earthbound port, and Wii backwards compatibility. Also, unlike the Gamecube, I wasn’t ashamed to say I owned one :D

PS. I realize entitled pessimistic/assy posts like mine are the third biggest problem on the Internet outside of virtue signalling and fanboy activism/cancel culture. And in that, I regret my post. At the same time, my feeling of disappointment turned resentment in something I tried as hard as hell to like, in this case the Wii U, overrides my wish that the Internet was a better place.

The Wii U was so lame that I couldn't be bothered to buy one at launch. Its failure was so huge that it was discounted by €50 less than three months after its launch, so that's when I got one. The biggest sin of the Wii U was that it put AAA third party publishers above gamers, hence why it turned into such a piece of trash.

Its software droughts were more severe than the N64's and GC's. Its boot-up sequence was flat out terrible and because of that, it didn't feel like a console that was about games first. It says a lot about a console when over the course of its life more playtime is spent on using its backwards compatibility than its own games. If this thing hadn't had a Wii inside of it, then there wouldn't have been enough reasons to keep it hooked up to the TV.

My top 10 games, in no particular order:

New Super Mario Bros. U + New Super Luigi U
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
Super Mario 3D World
Mario Kart 8
Yoshi's Woolly World
Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE
Xenoblade Chronicles X
The Wonderful 101
Hyrule Warriors

And then the sad part is that it's hard to think of anything worthwhile beyond these ten games. A top 20 would be a serious challenge to compile. I think I only own 20 retail games for the Wii U and I don't even like them all. A special mention goes to Batman because of how bad it is; unbelievable that this Batman formula is held in such high regard by reviewers.

The Wii U is much like the N64 and GC where in hindsight it may not look so bad when the entire game library is condensed into the state of being available. But if you were there right then when it all developed, it was very frustrating.

Speaking of hindsight, it's hilarious that the lifetime sales prediction average of the Wii U was higher than Switch's before their respective launches, yet Switch will go on to sell at least ten times as much as the Wii U.

The best thing about the Wii U? That it didn't come close to last five years as Nintendo's main console. Good riddance, I say.

I wouldn't even call it emulation.  My understanding is that Wii games run natively on the Wii U hardware.  The way the architecture is, the Wii U can set itself to Wii mode to run games just like they would on the Wii.

The Wii U is fascinating because of how Nintendo got everything wrong it possibly could have. I can see Nintendo executives living out that scene from The Producers: 'We picked the wrong name, the wrong hardware specs, the wrong controller, the wrong marketing, the wrong games, WHERE DID WE GO RIGHT?' It was overpriced and underpowered, the games it should have launched with to sell it launched almost 3 years too late, most people didn't even know what it was, and those who did didn't care. The gamepad was innovation for innovation's sake without any mass appeal or reason for existing.

The Wii U should have been a Wii 2 with much better specs than it actually had. There was no need whatsoever to reinvent the wheel again, and all it did was confuse people and raise the price of the system. If it had the specs of a docked Switch and was as easy to port to as the Switch is its early third party support wouldn't have looked like inferior versions of old 360 games that ran worse on the newer hardware than they did on 7-year-old hardware. The Wii itself would have sold more consoles from 2012-2017 than the Wii U did if Nintendo had decided to keep supporting it instead of making a new system. It was outselling the Wii U for much of 2013. A Wii 2 that launched at $300, had specs that justified that price, and simply reused the Wiimote plus as the primary controller, would have sold many times more than the Wii U. I think it would have sold somewhere between the NES and the 3DS, which while nowhere near Wii or Switch numbers, still would have been the second-best any Nintendo home console had ever sold.

The games are both the system's saving grace and another reason it failed. The library is fantastic, even with many of the best now ported to the Switch. But it's mostly a library of supporting games. The games you buy a system for didn't start coming until 2014 with Mario Kart 8, and then Mario Maker the following year. Super Mario 3D World is as good as any Mario game, but it doesn't capture the imagination at a glance the way Mario 64, Galaxy, and Odyssey do, and the system desperately needed a game which could do that. Mario Maker was that game, but by that point it was far too late. Smash 4 also lacked personality when compared to all other games in the series. The core gameplay and roster were arguably better than ever, but it was just 'Smash for Wii U' and with Ultimate out it's far easier to forget than Melee or Brawl. The system's failure led to a ton of unique games we might not otherwise have gotten like Captain Toad and Hyrule Warriors, but again, those are supporting games and not reasons to buy the console.

The Switch benefitted tremendously from being able to pick apart the Wii U's library, the two killer apps for the Switch early on arguably were Zelda: BOTW and Mario Kart 8 and without those two games probably you have no where even close to as strong of a launch. Even to this day, those two games are probably two of the most heavily associated games with the system.

Even Splatoon 2 also recycles an awful lot of content from the Wii U game, otherwise that probably would not have made that release window either. 

Super Mario Odyssey was the first real from the ground up Switch title that Nintendo delivered and that was more than 8 months after launch, if they didn't have that Wii U content to carry the system early on they probably would've struggled a lot like the (well) the Wii U and 3DS did. 

In all honesty the Wii U to even have a chance needed to have specs comparable to PS4 as a home console that is plugged into an outlet all the time. I'd say at least 1 Teraflop system performance.

Without that, there's no way people wouldn't look at it and look at the PS4 a year later and prefer the PS4 as it was a full generational leap past the existing 360/PS3 consoles. The Wii U not being a true portable would have nothing special over the PS4. 

The crazy thing is the Wii U was wildly expensive to manufacture, probably not much cheaper than the PS4 itself because Nintendo insisted on sticking with the outdated Wii architecture rather than using a more common off the shelf type CPU/GPU/RAM and the overpriced controller gimmick.