What Genre is Nintendo?

A while back, I saw someone say that the thing that makes Nintendo games special is that they don’t conveniently fall into any genre. Before we unpack whether or not that’s a good thing, let’s ask ourself whether or not it’s even true. Nintendo’s flagship series is Super Mario Bros, which is very clearly within the platformer genre, but that’s because Nintendo practically invented the genre. Other classic Nintendo series are in a similar position, like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, which played big parts in codifying the action-adventure genre. Over time, however, their games started to become a bit more idiosyncratic. The Kirby series is nominally made up largely of platformers, but the fundamental part of the platformer genre (jumping to traverse obstacles) is trivialized by Kirby’s unlimited aerial movement. As a result, the games end up as something closer to a side-scrolling action game, which wasn’t an uncommon genre for the time, but Gunstar Heroes this was not. Even a more conventional genre outing, like the clearly Dragon Quest-derived Earthbound, separated itself from other role-playing games with its contemporary American setting. Flash forward to the present, where Nintendo’s most recent flagship series, Splatoon, is a third-person shooter in the broad strokes, but with a completely different objective from similar games.

Clearly, there is some truth to the claim that Nintendo games don’t always meet conventional genre definitions. So the question remains: Is this a good thing? One would think that experimentation and innovation are always good on principle. Defying genre convention isn’t always so forward-thinking, however. The certainly are cases where Nintendo’s genre-defying experiments have produced great results. To my eyes, Pikmin and especially Pikmin 2 are among the greatest Nintendo games, and they don’t obviously fit into any genre. I’ve heard some describe them as real-time strategy games, but frankly, the boot doesn’t fit. Whatever genre they are, they’re brilliant, however. That isn’t always the case. Let’s look to Luigi’s Mansion, released in the same year as Pikmin. This one is a bit easier to categorize: despite its cartoony aesthetics and light-hearted tone, it is very plainly a survival horror game, albeit an unorthodox one. Besides the haunted house setting, it is structurally reminiscent of games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, featuring non-linear progression with sparse save points, alternating puzzles and combat, and enemies that can’t always be faced head-on. It even has tense, close-up inserts of doors being unlocked like in Resident Evil. And while it’s not very scary, it is a little scary, especially for children. Does being an experimental take on the genre make Luigi’s Mansion better than, say, Silent Hill 2? Quite simply, no. When putting the two side by side, it becomes apparent that the “experiments” in Luigi’s Mansion amount to sanding the edges off the genre to make it palatable for a wider audience. The same could be said of plenty of other Nintendo series, from Super Smash Bros. to Pokémon. Suddenly, the experiment seems less like an innovation and more like assimilating a genre into an all-encompassing house style.

This becomes a problem for any games that do follow genre conventions. Some less-popular but beloved Nintendo series have been sidelined, perhaps because they follow genre too closely. F-Zero, a more conventional racing game than Nintendo’s juggernaut Mario Kart, has been relegated to nothing more than a battle royale conversion of its first game for the Nintendo Switch Online service, with no fully new games in more than 20 years. Golden Sun, developed by Camelot Software Planning, has been dormant since 2010, and the veteran RPG developers have made nothing but Mario sports games ever since. Fire Emblem would have shared the same fate if not for the unexpected popularity of Fire Emblem Awakening, which kept the series alive but set it down a course of shifting identity that has left long-time fans divided.

There was an era when Nintendo would publish some games well within mainstream genre definitions, and I don’t believe they have any reason to return to the era of Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside or Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run. But before praising them for simply defying convention, ask yourself which conventions they’re defying. Sometimes, it’s the conventions of a genre that make it interesting.