The 10 Best SNES Games to Play on Nintendo Switch Online
Overview & Key Takeaways
From Super Mario World to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, these are the best games on the Super Nintendo collection on Nintendo Classics
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System has one of the finest game catalogs of any console ever released, and there's a strong selection of 77 games available on Nintendo Classics as part of Nintendo Switch Online. Sadly, most of the console's great third-party games aren't represented; you won't find Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, or Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the service.
But it doesn't really matter, because you will, of course, find many of Nintendo's own games — and these represent an incredible golden age for the studio, when Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka's teams were pumping out masterpiece after masterpiece. It's one of the best runs any game developer has ever had, a time of perfection between the innovation of the NES before and the bold leap into 3D with the N64 that came after.
Here are the 10 best SNES games you can play on Nintendo Classics.
10 Mario Paint
Image: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo
Nintendo loves to put together oddball game-and-accessory bundles, and in 1992 it sold a mouse for the SNES with this delightful art creation suite. There are funny minigames, brilliant tunes, authentic Nintendo sprites to use, as well as drawing, animation, and music creation suites. You'll need a USB mouse to play it on Switch, but Switch 2 owners can use the Joy-Con 2 in mouse mode.
9 Kirby Super Star
Image: HAL Laboratory/Nintendo
Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai's restless imagination and love of remixes and mash-ups can be found as far back as this barmy 1996 anthology platformer. Kirby Super Star is a compilation of compressed ideas and stories expressed through the medium of the ability-copying pink blob: a racing game, a Metroidvania, a boss rush, scrolling shmup levels, and various rule variations on the classic platformer. It’s a glorious, throwaway blizzard of ideas, perfect for dipping into.
8 Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
Image: Rare/Nintendo
Rare's SNES platform game trilogy was visually flabbergasting at the time, and its rendered technique and huge sprites still look unique now. They can't compare with the in-house Nintendo platformers of the time for sophistication and invention, but they're slick, stuffed with secrets, and have amazing soundtracks and ambiance. Of the three games, Diddy's Kong Quest is surely the best.
7 Panel de Pon
Image: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo via Polygon
Known as Tetris Attack in the West — where Nintendo of America jazzed it up with characters like Yoshi and a rather spurious application of the Tetris licence — Panel de Pon is an immaculate match-three puzzle game made by Intelligent Systems (Advance Wars, Fire Emblem). There's nothing fancy about it, it's just brilliant, endless block-matching action for one or two players.
6 EarthBound
Image: Ape Inc./HAL Laboratory/Nintendo
The SNES was home to so many great RPGs, it's a shame there aren't more of them on Nintendo Switch Online. But we do have this gloriously kooky cult classic from Shigesato Itoi and Satoru Iwata, which uses a traditional RPG framework to explore a satirical, child's-eye-view world of contemporary Americana, alien invasions, and murderous taxi cabs.
5 Super Mario Kart
Image: Nintendo EAD/Nintendo
This incredibly influential 1992 racing game invented and perfected a whole genre at the first try. It's stunning how all the key components of what became a world-conquering series are present here, but also how different Super Mario Kart is from what the series became; with its tight track layouts and grippy handling, it's more precise and technical. It’s also brilliant in head-to-head two-player mode.
4 Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
Image: Nintendo EAD/Nintendo
The supposed sequel to Super Mario World is really anything but; it's the first Yoshi game instead, as well as one of the funniest, loveliest things Nintendo has ever made. With graphics made of crayon scribbles and splashes of watercolor, stretchy, wobbly physics courtesy of the Super FX chip, and wild slapstick gameplay that just never stops rocking, Yoshi's Island is a gorgeous, irreverent hymn to innocence.
3 Super Metroid
Image: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo
Super Metroid is, quite simply, the Metroid game. It might even be the Metroidvania. Fabulously atmospheric and labyrinthine, this game captures better than any other — even the first Metroid Prime — the series' lonely, obscurely threatening sci-fi futurism.
2 The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Image: Nintendo EAD/Nintendo
After the dead-end detour of Zelda 2: Link's Adventure, the third Zelda game returned to the original's top-down layout, tempered its brutal mystery, and found a formula that would work for the next 25 years: an intricate clockwork fable of beautifully interlocking parts built around a stunning conceit — in this case, a dark mirror-world – that turns the game inside out and upside down. Miyamoto and Tezuka turned this game out less than a year after they made Super Mario World. Nobody's ever done it better.
1 Super Mario World
Image: Nintendo EAD/Nintendo
The SNES' launch game is its best game, which is saying something considering the competition. It's also — sorry, Super Mario Bros. 3 fans — the best 2D Mario game, hands down. There's Yoshi, there's the power-ups, there's the way the series' trademark surreal non-sequiturs are somehow braided, more convincingly than ever before or since, into a contiguous universe so gloriously silly and strange you can only marvel at it. Platforming perfection.
