Nintendo has produced few consoles with as much staying power as the SNES, dozens of its games being as entertaining now as they were in the 1990s. This includes the obvious A-list titles like Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, as well as more obscure games like Metal Warriors and Wing Commander.
Unfortunately, not every classic, beloved Super Nintendo game has stood the test of time. In fact, for overrated games like Star Fox and Final Fantasy IV, they’re practically unplayable today.
Star Fox Was Always a Case of Style Over Substance
Of all the Nintendo IPs to be treated as one of the company’s major brands, Star Fox is perhaps the least deserving, and the reasons why can be found in its original SNES game. For all that Star Fox 64 may have blown ’90s gamers away with its addicting gameplay and fantastic presentation a few years later, it was built on shoddy foundation, a fact that’s been made evident by the franchise’s decades-long struggle for relevance.
Star Fox was mind-blowing at the time of its release with its 3D polygon-based graphics but, by today’s standards, it’s actually one of the worst-looking games on the SNES. The core gameplay loop is also too arcade-like for its own good, as it means the experience is an overall short one, and it didn’t leave any room for natural expansion of its formula, something that games like Super Metroid and A Link to the Past excelled at. Whether the upcoming Switch 2 Star Fox game is able to carve out a future for the series remains to be seen.
Lufia & the Fortress of Doom Pales in Comparison to its Sequel
Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals is easily one of the greatest JRPGs of the 1990s. Unfortunately, it didn’t come out of nowhere, and Neverland didn’t simply create a masterpiece on their first try, as they first had to make the lackluster slog that is Lufia & the Fortress of Doom.
Lufia & the Fortress of Doom isn’t offensively bad, but it’s sub-mediocre in just about every way. The story is nothing special, the pacing is horribly slow, combat is always either dull or frustrating, and the entire experience just feels painfully generic from start to finish.
SimCity Has Become Outdated Over the Last Several Decades
SimCity was groundbreaking in 1991, but there’s no reason to go back to it in 2026. A miraculous port of the definitive city-building game, SimCity won fans over with its detail, charm, and customizability but, by today’s standards, its interface is clunky, and what it allows players to actually do feels limited.
SimCity can still be fun with the right mindset, but it’s unplayable for anyone actually looking for a cohesive, realistic city-builder. Beyond that, city-building games themselves have fallen out of favor, as is demonstrated by the SimCity series as a whole losing all cultural relevance, as gamers were naturally drawn to the far more expansive The Sims franchise.
Final Fantasy IV is Outclassed By Nearly Every Game in the Series to Come After It
If there’s one classic JRPG that makes it clear older gamers need to take off their nostalgia goggles, it’s Final Fantasy IV. While it does deserve credit for telling the first serious story with well-defined characters in the series, and its soundtrack is phenomenal, the story and characters are still boring, music can’t save a game alone, and the gameplay certainly isn’t helping it do that.
Some fans like to consider FF4 one of the best Final Fantasy games of all time, but it isn’t even one of the Top 2 FF games on the SNES. Final Fantasy V is filled with hilarious dialogue and has the best combat in any 2D Final Fantasy, and Final Fantasy VI has the first truly great story in the series. Popular as Cecil Harvey may be, his so-called journey as a protagonist was shallow, and his adventure remains overrated.
Every Mortal Kombat on SNES Feels Awful to Play in 2026
Much like Star Fox, Mortal Kombat didn’t rise to fame because of its stunning and innovative gameplay, but because of how unique its central visual gimmick was for the time. For the original Mortal Kombat trilogy, it rose to become the closest rival to Street Fighter almost exclusively because of how violent and controversial it was.
Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, and Mortal Kombat III all feel horrible to play, and this shouldn’t come as news to anyone, as MK games have always had worse gameplay than just about every other major fighting game series. Their digitized graphics are nice, and the amount of characters and story they packed in was genuinely great, but a fighting game is nothing if it doesn’t control well, and no one who isn’t blinded by nostalgia will be sitting down to play just for the Fatalities in 2026.