https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8431120674
Nintendo Lionizing, Not Nintendo History
I went in hoping for a book about Nintendo: the odd card-game origins, the people who made its hits, the design choices, the institutional habits that let it keep winning. What I got, at least in the opening chapters, felt closer to a long YouTube documentary by someone who loves the subject a little too much. The tone is admiring where it should be more skeptical. Nintendo is good at many things, but not everything it touches is “just right.”
Super Nintendo spends too much time describing the game from a player’s point of view and not enough time explaining the company, the team, or the design process that produced it. That is a bad trade in a corporate history. I can remember more about the Mario movie from Console Wars, a book I read ten years ago, than I learned from a chapter supposedly centered on Nintendo’s defining franchise.
A glance at the table of contents (solely based on franchise) made that decision easier, not harder. Jason Schreier’s books are better. Console Wars is better. I’m out.
DNF Chapter 2