The 10 Best SNES Games to Play on Nintendo Switch Online

Few consoles can match the Super Nintendo’s library, and Nintendo Classics, part of Nintendo Switch Online, currently offers a healthy selection of 77 of its games. Unfortunately, the console’s best third-party titles are mostly missing. You won’t find Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, or Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the service.

The omission hardly matters, because Nintendo’s own games are all here. They come from a true golden age for the company, when the teams led by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka released one masterpiece after another. Few developers have ever enjoyed a streak this strong. It sat between the inventive spark of the NES and the daring jump into 3D that arrived with the N64.

Here are the 10 best SNES games you can play on Nintendo Classics.

1. Mario Paint

Nintendo has always had a taste for strange hardware-and-software bundles. In 1992 it released a SNES mouse packaged with this charming creative toolkit. It includes tools for drawing, animation, and composing music, with authentic Nintendo sprites to work with, plus silly minigames and cheerful tunes. On Switch you’ll need a USB mouse to play. Switch 2 owners can use a Joy-Con 2 in mouse mode instead.

2. Kirby Super Star

Masahiro Sakurai, the director of Smash Bros., has always had a restless imagination and a fondness for remixing ideas. You can see it as early as this wonderfully offbeat 1996 anthology platformer. Kirby Super Star is a collection of compact adventures, all starring the ability-stealing pink puffball. They include a racing game, a Metroidvania, a boss rush, side-scrolling shoot-’em-up stages, and several twists on classic platforming rules. It’s a glorious, disposable flurry of ideas, and it’s ideal for playing in short bursts.

3. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest

Rare’s SNES platformer trilogy astonished players when it appeared. Its pre-rendered visuals and oversized sprites still look distinctive today. The games can’t match Nintendo’s own platformers of the era for refinement and ingenuity. Even so, they’re polished and full of secrets, and their soundtracks and atmosphere are superb. Of the three, Diddy’s Kong Quest is easily the finest.

4. Panel de Pon

In the West this game was released as Tetris Attack. Nintendo of America dressed it up with Yoshi and friends and made a dubious use of the Tetris license. Panel de Pon is a flawless match-three puzzler from Intelligent Systems, the studio behind Advance Wars and Fire Emblem. It has no frills. It’s simply brilliant, endlessly replayable block-matching for one or two players.

5. EarthBound

The SNES hosted a wealth of excellent RPGs, so it’s a pity so few are on Nintendo Switch Online. Still, we do get this gloriously eccentric cult favorite from Shigesato Itoi and Satoru Iwata. It uses a conventional RPG structure to explore a satirical, child’s-eye vision of modern Americana, complete with alien invaders and homicidal taxis.

6. Super Mario Kart

This hugely influential 1992 racer created an entire genre and perfected it on the first attempt. Nearly every element of the series that later conquered the world is already here. Yet Super Mario Kart also feels quite unlike its descendants. Its tight courses and grippy handling make it a more precise, technical experience. It’s also a blast in two-player head-to-head races.

7. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

Despite the name, this “sequel” to Super Mario World is nothing of the sort. It’s the first Yoshi game, and one of the funniest and most endearing things Nintendo has ever produced. The visuals look like crayon scribbles and watercolor washes. The Super FX chip powers stretchy, wobbly physics, and the madcap slapstick action never lets up. Yoshi’s Island is a gorgeous, cheeky tribute to innocence.

8. Super Metroid

Super Metroid is, quite simply, the Metroid game, and arguably the Metroidvania as well. Its maze-like world is richly atmospheric. It captures the series’ isolated, vaguely menacing sci-fi future better than any other entry, even the original Metroid Prime.

9. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

After the evolutionary dead end of Zelda 2: Link’s Adventure, the third Zelda game went back to the original’s top-down perspective. It softened that game’s punishing obscurity and settled on a formula that would endure for the next 25 years. The result is an intricate, clockwork fable whose parts interlock beautifully. It’s built around a remarkable twist, a dark mirror world that turns the whole adventure inside out. Miyamoto and Tezuka delivered it less than a year after Super Mario World, and nobody has done it better since.

10. Super Mario World

The SNES launch title is also its best game, which is remarkable given the competition. With apologies to fans of Super Mario Bros. 3, it’s also the finest 2D Mario game, full stop. It has Yoshi and a great set of power-ups. The series’ signature surreal non-sequiturs are woven into one continuous world, more convincingly than before or since. That world is so wonderfully silly and strange that you can only marvel at it. It’s platforming perfection.

Source: Polygon