In its continuing bid to make sure that everyone forgets the Wii U was ever a thing, Nintendo has, over the past two years, brought a ton of ports from that failed system over to the vastly more successful Switch, thus making the former platform completely irrelevant. There’s nothing worse than a great game marooned on bad hardware, of course, so this is certainly justified, and it’s made some fans question whether we’ll be treated to ports from any of Nintendo’s older consoles.
That may sound slightly ridiculous; Nintendo treats its retro archive as some sort of finite treasure too beautiful for this modern, ugly world. It drip-feeds Nintendo Switch Online subscribers access to a small handful of old NES games, and the thought of an N64, GameCube, or Wii game popping up for purchase on the eShop seems almost laughable. In fact, such is Nintendo’s aversion to pre-Wii U backward compatibility this generation that it's axed disc support entirely.
Joy-Con = WiiMote?
That said, rumors regarding a potential Switch port of the two Mario Galaxy Wii titles have been making the rounds recently, and it doesn’t seem like an impossible proposition. This star-faring platformer duology has been heralded as perhaps Mario and friends’ greatest outing of all time—well… second only to Mario Odyssey, perhaps.
The thing holding these ports back, and the issue with Switch conversions of Wii games in general, is the fact that these titles relied heavily on motion controls. While the Switch controllers do offer some similar features, there really aren’t many games that necessitate their use. In fact, aside from Nintendo’s own would-be pack-in title 1 2 Switch, there’s really no reason to equate these two control styles. Yes, in practice, the Switch would be capable of emulating the controls required by Mario Galaxy, but there are a few caveats.
We've Moved On From Motion Controls
As players fond of these games—which should be a majority of Nintendo fans—should know, Galaxy and Galaxy 2 were designed with motion controls in mind. From collecting stars with the star cursor to tilting Mario through an obstacle course a la Super Monkey Ball, these games were very much products of their era. While it would definitely be possible for Nintendo to produce a straight port of the game with the controls unaltered, the industry has long since gotten over motion controls, and it would be nice to see these games redone with a more typical setup.
What’s more, playing a motion control-reliant game undocked would be something of a nightmare. We’ve seen this once before with Nintendo’s new first-party fighting title ARMS. While control schemes tend to be a matter of preference, there’s no denying that flailing your arms around while trying to keep track of what’s going on in-game while playing undocked really isn’t ideal. What could be worse than regular motion controls? Well, motion controls on a handheld console, of course.
Still, ARMS allowed for more traditional input schemes and pro controller support, and there’s no reason why a theoretical Mario Galaxy port couldn’t do the same. Plus, it would be awesome to see these games finally playable in full HD.
The real kicker is that Nintendo offered an emulated version of the first extraterrestrial Wii game to Chinese gamers via the Nvidia Shield, a console which, aside from running nowhere near as efficiently as the Switch, doesn’t feature motion controls. The star-collecting pointer was somewhat awkwardly mapped to one analog stick, but it's still totally accessible with a more traditional method of play.
With that in mind, there really doesn’t seem to be anything keeping these two entries in the long-running Mario franchise from appearing on the Switch. Why it hasn’t opted to do what it did with the New Super series and port everything over is frankly confounding, but, hey, that’s Nintendo for you.