16 Best SNES Platformers

Super Adventure Island was the first Adventure Island game on the SNES, and it came out between Adventure Island II and Adventure Island 3 on the NES. Master Higgins has a new problem: his girlfriend, Jeannie Jungle, has been turned to stone by the evil Dark Cloak. Each stage starts with obstacle courses that end at a goal ball. Higgins gets an axe that only flies left or right and a boomerang he can throw in four directions. His dinosaur friends from the NES games stayed home this time.

The soundtrack is by Yuzo Koshiro, and it does a lot of the work. This is a short and simple game, and that is fine. It is the one to play on an evening when a Mega Man stage would be too much, preferably on the high flying skateboard.

Demon's Crest is the third game starring Firebrand, an enemy from the Ghosts 'n Goblins series who is known as Red Arremer in Japan. It follows Gargoyle's Quest (1990) and Gargoyle's Quest II (1992). The game is a mix of action platforming and mild RPG elements. Its stages are divided into six areas, and you can play each of them more than once.

It almost got a second life on the Game Boy Advance. Capcom rejected a port pitched by a studio that would later become Renegade Kid. That leaves the SNES cartridge as the original home of the moodiest game on this list. It is a gothic Capcom game where the monster is the one you root for, and it looks nothing like the cheerful Mega Man games made at the same company.

Kirby's Dream Land 3 sends Kirby out to teach King Dedede a lesson, and then it turns out something seems to be controlling him. Kirby gets help from his friends this time. Some parts of the world can only be reached with a certain copy ability, like blocks that break only for the ability shown on them. Collect all the Heart Stars and you see the better of its two endings. It was the last SNES game Nintendo published in North America.

The art looks like it was drawn with crayons, and it has aged better than most of the console's library. The final boss is the surprise. Zero is famous as a rare example of graphic violence in a first-party Nintendo game, which nobody expects from a Kirby game.

Disney's Aladdin was developed by Capcom for the SNES and came out in 1993. It is a 2D side-scrolling game based on the film, and you play as Aladdin and his monkey Abu. Capcom made it, and you can tell. It plays like a Capcom platformer first and a movie game second, which is the nicest thing anyone can say about a licensed game from 1993.

Don't let the Disney box fool you. Players put it among the hardest games on the SNES, ahead of Donkey Kong Country. The levels are short and bright, and the controls never fight you, so every death feels like your own fault. That is a strange thing to say about a game a lot of parents bought for a seven year old.

Mega Man X2 came out in Japan on December 16, 1994, and in North America and PAL regions in 1995. It is the direct sequel to Mega Man X, and X keeps his dash and his wall climbing, with optional armor pieces that give him special abilities. This time he goes after eight Maverick leaders on a continent south of the North Pole, while one of the villains collects the parts of the fallen Zero. The cartridge had Capcom's Cx4 chip inside, which allowed semi-transparencies and 3D effects.

Reviewers at the time were let down by how little changed from the first game. That is the whole pitch, though. If you finished Mega Man X and wanted eight more bosses with the same great controls, this is the game.

Mega Man 7 is the first and only numbered game in the original Mega Man series released on the SNES. Every numbered entry before it was on the NES. It came out in Japan on March 24, 1995 and reached North America and Europe later that year, and its story starts six months after Mega Man 6. It was only in development for a short time. Head illustrator Hayato Kaji said the team stayed devoted to finishing it despite the rush.

Reviews were mixed to positive, and some critics said it leaned on the old formula next to the more inventive Mega Man X. That is fair. It is also classic Mega Man with big, colorful 16-bit sprites. The team even squeezed in a versus mode a week before beta, on the condition that Mega Man and Bass were the only fighters.

Diddy's Kong Quest came out on November 21, 1995 in Japan, then in December in North America and Europe. It is the sequel to Donkey Kong Country, and Diddy Kong takes the lead with Dixie Kong at his side. Miyamoto even pitched designs for the logo on Dixie's beret, including one inspired by ABBA. It is one of the best-selling games on the Super Nintendo, and it reached the Game Boy Advance in 2004.

David Wise wrote the music, and the soundtrack is considered one of the greatest of all time. Stickerbush Symphony, the song from the bramble levels, went on to become an internet phenomenon of its own. Critics praised the graphics and gameplay as well. Some people think it beats the first game. The ranking says it comes close.

Super Star Wars follows the first film, with brief cutscenes between levels that tell a shortened version of the story. You fight your way from the wastelands of Tatooine to the streets of Mos Eisley and beyond. Later stages let you play as Han Solo or Chewbacca, and a couple of first-person 3D sequences put you in a vehicle. The film's music was converted to the SNES's 8-channel sound chip with samples from Ensoniq keyboards.

Players also call it one of the hardest games on the console, so bring patience along with your blaster. A PC port was almost finished and into playtesting when LucasArts cancelled it in 1995. Two sequels followed, The Empire Strikes Back in 1993 and Return of the Jedi in 1994.

Plok is a side-scrolling platformer from Software Creations, released for the SNES in 1993. It began as an arcade game by Ste and John Pickford at Zippo Games, built for Rare's "Razz Board" hardware. That project was cancelled in 1990 when Zippo closed. It came back as an SNES game after the Pickfords were promoted at Software Creations, Ste to art director and John to producer. Software Creations was the first company outside Japan to have an SNES development kit.

Critics praised its ideas and its music. It still sold poorly, and the Pickfords blamed a market saturated with mascot platformers. A Mega Drive port was planned and then cancelled. Plok is the deepest cut this high on the list, and it earned the spot.

Kirby Super Star was advertised as eight games in one, most of them short adventures with the same basic play. Spring Breeze is a shortened remake of the first Kirby game, Kirby's Dream Land. The Arena makes you fight every boss in the game with only one life. Kirby can also turn a copied ability into a Helper, a partner controlled by a second player or the computer. Masahiro Sakurai directed it, his third Kirby game, and development ran long enough that it came out late in the SNES's life.

The Helper is what makes it. Hand the second controller to a younger sibling and the hard parts get easier for both of you. Its DS remake, Kirby Super Star Ultra, sold just under 3 million copies.

Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is the third Ghosts 'n Goblins game and the first not released in arcades. Arthur is back to save the princess and the kingdom from Emperor Sardius, who has revived the Ghoul Realm. Chests can hold bronze or gold armor. They can also hold a magician who turns Arthur into a baby, a girl, a seal or a wasp for a while. The European version removed some enemies and obstacles to lower the difficulty and the slowdown.

That should tell you how hard the full game is. Players call it the hardest game on the SNES, ahead of everything else on the console. It is also beautiful and fair, and every death teaches you something. You will die a lot, so you will learn a lot.

Yoshi's Island is a prequel to Super Mario World, and it was the first game with Yoshi as the main character. He escorts Baby Mario through 48 levels to reunite him with Luigi, who has been kidnapped by Baby Bowser's minions. Yoshi got his signature flutter jump here, along with the eggs he makes from swallowed enemies. The graphics were drawn by hand, scanned, and rebuilt pixel by pixel, and Koji Kondo wrote the music.

It took four years to make. Halfway through, Donkey Kong Country came out and made computer-generated graphics the norm, and Nintendo stuck with the hand-drawn look anyway. Good call. Craig Harris of IGN, reviewing the Game Boy Advance version in 2002, called it "the best damn platformer ever developed".

Super Castlevania IV takes place in 1691 Transylvania, where Simon Belmont must defeat Dracula, the same setting as the first Castlevania on the NES. It came out in Japan on October 31, 1991 and in North America that December. The big change is the whip. Simon can crack it at different angles, and he can use it like a grappling hook to swing past traps. The game also shows off the console's Mode 7, and one stage is a Rotating Dungeon.

Weekly Famicom Tsūshin's reviewers praised the graphics and the control. Game Informer said it "perfect[ed] the classic formula" because of that whip. Official Nintendo Magazine placed it at 70 on its list of the 100 best Nintendo games ever. It is the best-feeling Castlevania of the classic era.

Mega Man X was the first Mega Man game on the SNES and the start of a new series set a century after the original, in 21XX. Keiji Inafune said the plan was to reinvent Mega Man with more gameplay and a more mature story while keeping the basics. X can dash and scale walls, and he has a partner, Zero, who saves him from Vile at a critical moment. Zero was going to be a bigger part, but the team feared a negative reaction from fans and made him secondary to X.

Some critics list it as one of the greatest video games ever made. It was remade for the PSP as Mega Man Maverick Hunter X, and iam8bit re-released the SNES cartridge in 2018 for the series' 30th anniversary. Players put it ahead of every SNES platformer outside Nintendo's own.

Donkey Kong Country is a side-scrolling platformer by Rare, released in November 1994. Rare had bought Silicon Graphics workstations to render 3D models, and 12 developers spent 18 months on the game. It was one of the first home console games with pre-rendered graphics, and critics hailed its visuals as groundbreaking. It was also the first Donkey Kong game neither produced nor directed by Shigeru Miyamoto, though he contributed design ideas.

It sold 9.3 million copies, which makes it the third-bestselling SNES game. Nintendo then bought a large minority stake in Rare. David Wise wrote one track after a breakup that made him feel like he was drowning, and he calls it the game's biggest technological accomplishment in sound. In Team mode, two players play as a tag team.

Super Mario World was the first Mario game for the SNES, designed to make the most of the console's technical features. Takashi Tezuka directed it with Shigeru Miyamoto as producer, and a team of fifteen people made it. It introduced Yoshi, a dinosaur Mario can ride who eats most enemies. Yoshi had been an idea since the NES games, but hardware limitations kept him out until now. It came out in Japan in 1990 and in North America in 1991.

It sold more than twenty million copies, making it the best-selling SNES game, and it led to a cartoon series and the prequel Yoshi's Island. It added a save system and a less linear world map. Players named it ahead of every other SNES platformer, and it is still the easiest recommendation on the console.