Every Mario game available on Nintendo Switch, ranked

polygon.com:

There have never been more Mario games available on a single console than on Nintendo Switch. There are brand-new entries in the core 2D and 3D series; numerous spinoffs, sports, and party games; a few remakes, including the freshly released Mario vs. Donkey Kong; the best-selling Mario game ever, in the shape of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe; plus a roster of classic titles on Nintendo Switch Online as it has expanded to include NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance titles — including among them what are indubitably some of the greatest video games ever made.

By our count, there are no less than 43 individual Mario games available on Switch. (In fact, there are more than that, but we’ll get to that in a second.) By “Mario games,” we mean games in which Mario is the main character, or that feature his name in the title (sorry, Luigi). To help you sort through this morass of Mario content, we decided to rank them all.

To make sense of this gargantuan task, we decided to try something new and rank the games in a tier list — S-tier, A-tier, B-tier, and so on — rather than use a numerical ranking. This is a clearer way to present such a long list, and also avoids a lot of arbitrary decisions when comparing games in such a wide range of genres: platformers, RPGs, puzzle games, racing games, sports games, and more. Unlike our numerical rankings, we’ll start with the best, S-tier games at the top, and work our way down. The games are listed in no particular order within each tier.

Similarly, to keep things simple and avoid duplication, we ruled out a few games. The Super Mario Advance titles, a series of remakes for Game Boy Advance now available on Nintendo Switch Online, are out, because the original versions are all also playable on Switch. (The Advance versions are good, though, and we’ve made a note under the original entries when one is available.) The same goes for the SNES remake compilation Super Mario All-Stars, which collects the NES-era Super Mario