Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Game Review – Game Review

Nintendo‘s extensive history is its greatest strength; the Big N sits on a dragon’s hoard of iconography and memorabilia that will forevermore be synonymous with video gaming. The barest brushing against their history is enough to bring people in from miles away, although I’d call Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition anything but bare. It’s a curious experiment that raises a few eyebrows in its execution. While I don’t know if I can say it’s a wholly successful attempt at a community game, it’s certainly a bold attempt.

Let’s get something cleared up first: this is less a celebration of the history of these included Nintendo games. The vibes here are not that of Ultimate NES Remix; this isn’t a playground; this is a tournament. The challenges offered are less “levels” and more individual arenas all their own. Nintendo World Championship offers over 150 challenges based on 13 NES games, ranging from the obvious fare like Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda to things that would only have been relevant in the NES’s heyday of the 1980s, like Balloon Fight or Excitebike. Each “challenge” can either be as simple as a Warioware microgame (“collect the poison mushroom in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels as fast as you can”) to fairly intensive (“beat Dungeon 1 from The Legend of Zelda as fast as you can”), with players’ final time being ranked. You can’t pause during these speedrun challenges, and if you should falter (say, by dying in a run), the game automatically rewinds your position a bit at the cost of a time penalty. And that’s about it. You can retry a challenge as many times as you want, with the game showing your fastest run alongside your current one, so there’s plenty of incentive to beat your own personal best time. You can spend hours trying to perfect a run.

But that’s the thing: the game boils down to you practicing the perfect run. It’s not really structured like a single-player game otherwise. You don’t even unlock new challenges from beating old ones under par; you have to buy them from in-game coins earned from clearing challenges (with extra coins earned from improving your clear times). Sure, there’s plenty of encouragement and room for improvement, but assuming you S-rank each and every challenge, there’s little incentive to continue playing. Some of the more involved challenges can also be very taxing, like the dreaded “Up And Out” challenge from Metroid that ranks you on climbing up the first vertical shaft in the game. And for all the love that this game wants to have towards classic NES titles, it already presumes you’re well and familiar with them; it would have been nice to see some trivia or history for each title, like some of the particular figureheads behind their development, the inspirations behind each game or the relevance of each game’s iconography.

Multiplayer is where Nintendo World Championships truly shines; it’s meant to be a platform for multiplayer challenges. This is further cemented by the extensive profile options you get when you boot up the game, which NES console you started with, your unique title from a vast selection of old-timey Nintendo references, and even your favorite NES game. This last one is pervasive, going so far as to not only include (almost) every NES title from Abadox: The Deadly Inner War to Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II but also a slew of licensed titles from the era, like Yo! Noid or Friday the 13th. You can also customize your profile with adorable pins based on in-game challenges (specifically, ones you’ve beaten with an A-rank or better).

Nintendo World Championship gives you two major multiplayer options. The first is Speedrun Mode, a battle royale where you and seven other players run through a gauntlet of three challenges. Anyone whose runtime is under par is eliminated, with just one person taking the home prize with their best time. This mode earns you coins, which you can use to unlock new challenges in Single Player mode and new pins or decorations for your profile. The second is World Championships mode, which is much more ambitious. Every week, a handful of challenges are chosen, and players are invited to submit their personal best times before the week is out to battle for worldwide supremacy. At the end of the week, your best time is compared against the entire population of players, showing you your percentile group and score. In a neat little nod to history, the game will even throw out the release date for the game from which the specific challenge hails and will even track whether you were even born when the game came out. (Nintendo World Championship is humorously aware most of its players likely weren’t even born when the NES was current.)

This twist makes Nintendo World Championship such a curious game, a purposeful attempt by Nintendo to celebrate its history while courting speedrunners toward a selection of their titles. While it lacks the shared culture of something like Games Done Quick, it’s a curious attempt to bottle the lightning from a sub-culture of gaming that developed around Nintendo‘s titles. While it’s far too soon to tell, it would be interesting to see Nintendo update Nintendo World Championships with new challenges or new games, but for now, it focuses on encouraging mastery on behalf of its player base: wizened players (or young competitive souls) who wish to challenge kindred spirits on a global stage for the weirdest-yet-most-engaging little challenges Nintendo has to offer. Failing that, Nintendo World Championship at least makes a halfway-decent party game featuring up to eight simultaneous players engaging in either themed packs of challenges or custom-curated selections of in-game challenges.

Visually, Nintendo delivered on the visual theme of emulating the old Nintendo World Championships of the 1980s, with the menus and music all featuring a decidedly 80s-esque panache. Nintendo even went so far as to emulate the formatting of Nintendo Power‘s tips sections for their in-game tips on how to beat certain challenges. The games themselves are just snippets of the NES games you know and love, lovingly rendered as only Nintendo can; for better or worse, the likes of Metroid and Kirby’s Adventure look as good as they ever will.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is the best execution of its core concept as it could ever be: a celebration of speedrunning and friendly competition between gamers based around Nintendo‘s origins as a videogame company. The concept might not have enough legs for a wider audience, but I can see a smaller group continuing to gather around this title as they strive to beat records. It’s interesting to see a company lean into speedrunning for fun and profit, and while it may not have universal appeal, it’s at least fun enough to go head-to-head against others.