Collider has a list of 8 Nintendo games that are amazing from start to finish, and I've been thinking about it ever since, mostly because ranking Nintendo games is basically the fandom version of a raid boss. Everybody has an opinion, everybody thinks their pick is the right one, and somebody always ends up tilted.

The premise is simple and pretty refreshing. Most ranked lists reward games for peaks: that one dungeon, that one boss, that moment everyone clips and posts. This one asks a harder question. Which Nintendo games sustain it? No filler middle stretch, no slog before the finale, just a clean arc from the opening tutorial to the credits. That's a rarer quality than it sounds, and anyone who's pushed through a bloated back half of an otherwise great game knows exactly what I mean.

Nintendo has earned the right to this conversation. Decades of classics across console generation after console generation, and a hit rate that borders on unfair. You could build five different versions of this list and fight about all of them. And people will, which is half the fun.

I won't spoil the ordering, because the ranking is worth clicking through yourself. What I will say is that the premise is the right lens. A game you love from memory and a game that never sags in the middle are two different things, and a list built around the second kind is asking something more interesting than the usual best-of nostalgia parade.

What I keep coming back to is how rare the complete package really is. So many games, even great ones, have a stretch where you can feel the developers running out of time or ideas. Nintendo's best work mostly doesn't. Whether it's level design that teaches you without a word of dialogue, or a difficulty curve that ramps so smoothly you don't notice until you're doing things that felt impossible hours earlier, the games that belong on a list like this respect your time in a way a lot of the industry still struggles with.

And there's a community angle here too, because lists like this one are really just invitations. My Discord is already arguing about it. Someone's furious about a snub, someone else thinks a different series deserved a slot, and one person is doing the honorable work of defending a pick nobody else voted for. Honestly, that's exactly the reaction a good list should get. A list that everyone agrees with is a list nobody talks about.

Go read the full ranking, then come back and tell me which game got robbed. I already know what I'd fight for. It involves a certain green-tunic timeline and a list of excuses I've been refining since 1998.