10 Forgotten Nintendo Wii Games That Deserve A Remake (2025)

The Nintendo Wii is one of the most successful video game consoles that Nintendo has ever created.

During its launch in the 2006 holiday season, it positively flew off the shelves, with consumers climbing over each other to get at the waggling wonder, a far cry from the slightly more muted reception to the GameCube.

However, the Wii had a well-documented problem: Nintendo opened its floodgates a bit too wide, resulting in a deluge of crummy shovelware and asset flips clogging the library.

This, along with the somewhat polarizing motion controls, made it hard for all but the most prolific game releases to stand out.

That’s a shame, because the Wii had some fun and unique titles that couldn’t quite burrow out of the mountain of trash. Should any kind soul be willing to brave the mess and exhume titles for a remake, these are the ones we’d hope to see.

10 Excitebots: Trick Racing

You Can Never Have Enough Stunt Racing

During the Wii’s tenure, Nintendo sought to branch its classic Excitebike series out into other vehicular fields. This resulted in two titles developed by Monster Games: Excite Truck and Excitebots: Trick Racing.

In the latter game, you got to control one of several animal-shaped robotic racers with a greater emphasis on stunts and shenanigans.

On the surface, you have the usual party racing game, with offensive items, drift boosts, and so on. However, just coming in first doesn’t win you the race.

The winner is the racer with the best score, which is built up by coming in first, attacking opponents, and most importantly, landing sick tricks.

Every track is full of opportunities for jumps, with certain power-ups able to warp the topography and create ramps out of nowhere.

Perk up the presentation a bit and ditch the motion controls, and this game would be excellent for the multiplayer scene.

9 MadWorld

Couldn’t Quite Become A Franchise

MadWorld

Hack and Slash

Beat 'Em Up

Systems

Platform(s)

Wii

Released

March 10, 2009

Developer(s)

Platinum Games

Publisher(s)

Sega

Multiplayer

Local Multiplayer

Engine

Apex

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Mature Humor, Sexual Themes, Strong Language

How Long To Beat

5 Hours

How Long To Beat (Completionist Runs)

10 Hours

$19 at Amazon

Compared to the other consoles of the seventh generation, the Wii had a bit of a reputation as a kiddie console.

Nintendo has always been kind of fussy about M-rated games, but that didn’t stop games like MadWorld from making their blood-drenched Wii debut.

As the first official work by PlatinumGames, MadWorld is a character-action game with a big emphasis on gory spectacle.

It’s not enough to just kill dudes, you gotta kill dudes in the most over-the-top way possible, from impaling them on spiked walls to launching them into the sky with fizzy champagne bottles.

Bigger and better kills open up more of the levels, eventually culminating in a showdown with a superpowered contestant like yourself.

Platinum was looking to branch MadWorld into a proper series, with its pseudo-sequel Anarchy Reigns released a few years later, but neither managed to bring in the bucks.

Perhaps a remake or rerelease of the game outside the Wii ecosystem would do MadWorld some good. If nothing else, we wanna see that awesome Sin City-inspired monochrome some more.

8 Red Steel 2

More Katanas, More Guns

Red Steel 2

First-Person Shooter

Beat 'Em Up

Systems

Platform(s)

Wii

Released

March 23, 2010

Developer(s)

Ubisoft, Ubisoft Paris

Publisher(s)

Ubisoft

Engine

proprietary engine

ESRB

m

How Long To Beat

10 hours

$40 at Amazon

Speaking of violent spectacles, a pair of games that sought to make the most distinctive gameplay experience possible out of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk were the Red Steel games.

Both games were a combo of first-person shooter and hack-and-slash, though of the two, Red Steel 2 is the one we’d want to see remade.

Red Steel 2 is an engagement-based action game; you’re armed with both a katana and various guns, which you can swap between on the fly based on how close or far your opponent is.

If you’re feeling gutsy, you can get right in their face and swing your sword, though you also need to angle it properly to block and parry their retaliatory strikes.

Admittedly, the whole point of the Red Steel games was to show off what you could do with a Wii Remote in an action setting, so remaking it may feel a bit odd. Even so, you could probably make the sword gameplay work fine with a mouse.

7 Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

Put Your Thinking Cap On

Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

Point-and-click

Systems

Platform(s)

Wii

Released

October 23, 2007

Developer(s)

Capcom

Publisher(s)

Capcom

ESRB

e

How Long To Beat

14 Hours

$11 at Amazon

To quantify a previous statement, there’s nothing inherently wrong with games intended for younger audiences. In fact, one of the Wii’s most mechanically interesting titles was built with younger players in mind: Zack & Wiki.

This colorful little adventure follows a pair of plucky pirate kids as they search the seas for treasure. The game had a big focus on problem-solving and critical thinking, not to mention gesture mechanics for operating machinery.

Whether you needed to turn a crank or shake in time with a beat, there was a different Wii Remote motion to perform.

This would probably be one of the more difficult games to remake, at least outside of the Nintendo framework.

If we can’t get away from the motion aspect, it could at least have a solid shot on the Switch, which has more precise motion controls than the Wii anyway.

Worth The Licensing Nightmare

Due to all the waggling, the Wii didn’t have much in the way of precision-focused genres like fighting games, or at least none anyone would want to play competitively. One of the lone exceptions to this was Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, quite possibly one of the most niche crossover fighters Capcom ever made.

In addition to the usual Capcom suspects like Ryu and Morrigan, we had numerous heroes and villains from the files of legendary anime company Tatsunoko Productions. These included Gatchaman’s Ken the Eagle, both Yatterman heroes, and the massive Gold Lightan.

It was a game of deep cuts; even the Capcom side had a few, like Saki from Quiz Nanairo Dreams and PTX-40A from Lost Planet.

Even if you don’t know any of the characters, it’s a great fighting game, made better by the fact you could play it with a normal controller.

Any attempts to remake it would probably be a licensing endeavor of biblical proportions, but it’d be totally worth it.

5 Disaster: Day Of Crisis

More Exaggerated Than A Disaster Movie

Disaster: Day of Crisis

Action

Adventure

Systems

Platform(s)

Nintendo Wii

Released

September 25, 2008

Developer(s)

Monolith Soft

Publisher(s)

Nintendo

Engine

Havok

How Long To Beat

10 Hours

Plenty of games have been set in the midst of a major disaster, but the actual disaster itself tends to take a back seat to whatever plot the protagonist is embroiled in. If you wanted a game that really throws disaster survival in your face, that’s a job for Disaster: Day of Crisis.

While this game does have occasional rail-shooter combat sections, the lion’s share is about navigating urban areas that have been utterly decimated by natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, and even lava flows.

You need to manage your health and stamina, regularly eating food and breathing clean air away from smoke. You also need to rescue survivors, providing first aid and CPR before carrying them to safe zones.

Disaster: Day of Crisis is a positively wild game, with an outrageous plot and setting played hilariously straight. Barring the rail-shooter segments and some mini-games, the motion controls are hardly essential, and could be scrapped easily enough for a remake.

4 Cursed Mountain

Hidden Horror Gem

Cursed Mountain

Survival Horror

Adventure

Systems

Platform(s)

PC, Nintendo Wii

Released

September 4, 2009

Developer(s)

Deep Silver, Plaion

Publisher(s)

Deep Silver, Plaion

Engine

game engine

ESRB

Mature 17+

How Long To Beat

7h 32m

$15 at Amazon

Horror is another under-represented genre on the Wii, with little besides some admittedly pretty good games like Ju-On: The Grudge and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and to mention. If there were one original game outside the big franchises worth reviving, it’d be Cursed Mountain.

Cursed Mountain plays similarly to the original Resident Evil games, with a greater emphasis on puzzles and exploration punctuated by occasional run-ins with malevolent spirits.

During combat, you have to track an enemy with your spectral vision to make them visible, then banish them with your enchanted pickaxe.

The game’s lore and setting are heavily influenced by Tibetan Buddhist folklore, so it’s distinct from most similar horror settings and tropes. That’s what got the game most of its positive attention, though the inclusion of motion controls held it back.

If we ditched the waggle, it’d be better for it. It’s actually been tried once before, as Cursed Mountain had a Windows port in 2010, though it was Europe-exclusive for some reason.

3 Opoona

It’s Spherical!

Opoona

JRPG

Systems

Platform(s)

Nintendo Wii

Released

November 1, 2007

Developer(s)

ArtePiazza

Publisher(s)

Koei

ESRB

Everyone 10+ // Mild Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Suggestive Themes

How Long To Beat

27 hours

Just about every game console has that one game that kind of feels like a fever dream, something you’re not quite sure how to explain to someone even if you played it front to back. Opoona is that game for the Wii.

Opoona is a mix of RPG and social simulation. Your main pursuit and resource is employment licenses, which let you take on different kinds of jobs.

We don’t mean “jobs,” in the Final Fantasy way, though; we mean literal jobs, like a janitor or dancer. As you unlock more jobs, your social circle and stats will broaden, which can also help you to improve your stats for the actual ATB RPG combat segments.

Opoona is almost like a Persona game if the ratio of emphasis on combat and socializing were reversed. These kinds of social RPGs tend to do pretty well, especially if they’re weird, so the game would probably do good numbers no matter where it gets remade.

2 Elebits

Rail Shooter Meets Hide And Seek

If there were one sector where the Wii had a pretty strong hold, it was games that involved shooting stuff. You’re already pointing right at the sensor bar, so you might as well be aiming at something. One shooting-focused game with a novel concept was one of the Wii’s launch titles, Elebits.

The central conceit of Elebits were the tiny titular creatures hiding all throughout your house.

Elebits generate electricity, so you need to find all of their hiding places and zap them with your capture gun to light lamps and operate appliances. Besides looking under tables or in tight corners, you could also throw open closets or yank out drawers to expose more Elebits.

The operation of the capture gun is not dissimilar to the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2 or the Physics Gun in Garry’s Mod, so the game could theoretically be made to work on a console without motion controls. If you absolutely had to have them, it’d probably work pretty well as a VR game.

1 Captain Rainbow

The Game That Never Came West

Captain Rainbow

Action-Adventure

Systems

Platform(s)

Nintendo Wii

Released

August 28, 2008

Developer(s)

Skip Ltd.

Publisher(s)

Nintendo

How Long To Beat

10.5 hours

As was the case with pretty much every Nintendo console ever made, the Wii had its fair share of games that only saw release in Japan, with the west only learning they existed years down the line. One of those games was the delightfully bizarre Captain Rainbow.

Captain Rainbow is a little difficult to classify, but basically, it’s a split between an adventure puzzle game and an action game.

Most of the time, you’re Nick, an everyman looking to solve problems for the residents of an island populated by under-represented Nintendo characters.

When the situation calls for it, you transform into your heroic alter-ego, Captain Rainbow, to smash stuff and clear obstructions.

The aforementioned Nintendo characters might make it hard to remake this one for anything but a Nintendo console, but Nintendo has been a little more open to crossover stuff on its own turf. Nick was even a recruitable Spirit in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.