10 Best Wii Open World Games

The Incredible Hulk is the game of the 2008 film. It came out of a deal between Marvel Entertainment and Sega that gave the publisher the rights to video game adaptations of films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The story follows Bruce Banner as he defends himself from the military and the Enclave organization while searching for a cure. It takes its cues from The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and features an explorable recreation of Manhattan.

Reviews were mixed. Critics enjoyed the city-wide destruction and picked apart the repetitive missions and weak storyline. That is a fair summary of the whole deal. You get a big green guy and a whole city to smash, and the story is mostly there to point you at the next pile of tanks. Plenty of movie games gave you a lot less to do with your evening.

Parallel Lines was the first Driver game without undercover cop John Tanner. You play TK, a getaway driver whose gang frames him for the murder of a drug lord. He spends 28 years in Sing Sing prison and comes back for revenge, and New York changes with him. TK's appearance goes from his 1970s look to a more modern one in 2006, and the guns and cars around him change with the times. The World Trade Center is only present in 1978.

Reviews were mixed, with praise for its 1970s soundtrack and city atmosphere and gripes about parts of the driving and shooting. One player summed up the Wii version simply: "Pretty surprised how much content they stuffed in the wii." Two versions of New York on a console most people bought for bowling is a good trick.

The Crystal Bearers took the Crystal Chronicles name somewhere new. Exploration and free-roaming are the heart of the game, to the point that only fifteen bosses are needed to progress through the story and the rest are scattered everywhere for the player to find. You can travel on foot, by riding chocobos, by taking the train or through warp portals. It is a world built for wandering, and it wants you to go off the path.

Western reviews were mixed. Some critics faulted the game for being an action adventure rather than an RPG, and one publication criticized the map for making it hard to tell where you were. On a list like this one, that first complaint reads more like a selling point. It is a Final Fantasy that cares more about poking around than about menus, and that is exactly why it belongs here.

Skate It is the Wii's own Skate game, and it is the only game in the series without the main character of the series, because it is set while he is locked up (Skate 2 explains why). Home is the city of San Vanelona. The Wii version adds a deep career mode where you earn sponsors and unlock gear, and it was the first game in the series to send you to several cities outside San Vanelona.

Skating games live or die on whether the city is fun to roll around in. Players who owned this one still recommend it, years after the Wii left the shelves. It is the one game on this list where the worst thing that can happen to you is a bad landing and a sore pride.

Bully first came out for the PlayStation 2 on 17 October 2006, to positive reviews, with praise directed at its missions and its soundtrack. It sold over 1.5 million copies. The Wii got the remastered Scholarship Edition, developed by Mad Doc Software and released on 4 March 2008 for Xbox 360 and Wii.

It was a lightning rod before anyone had played it. Groups such as Bullying Online criticized the game for glorifying school bullying, although they raised their objections before the game was released to the public, and Jack Thompson filed a lawsuit attempting to have the game banned from store shelves in Florida. The game itself turned out to be far kinder than the headlines. Bully keeps turning up when players list the Wii games worth owning, often next to the console's best action games.

The World Is Yours is based on the 1983 film, and in 2007 a version with enhanced graphics was released for the Wii. The game uses Al Pacino's likeness for Tony Montana but not his voice, as he and the producers felt his voice had changed too much since the film came out. Instead, Montana is voiced by André Sogliuzzo, who was personally selected by Pacino. Money runs everything here. The only way to protect Tony's money when the player dies is to launder it in a bank, and the higher his cop heat, the bigger the bank's cut.

Critics compared it favorably to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and San Andreas. Players say the same thing more plainly: if you want GTA on a Wii, this is the closest you will get. And it might be the only crime game where your hero refuses to shoot innocent people.

The Godfather first came out in March 2006 for Windows, PlayStation 2 and Xbox, and it was EA's first ever M-rated title. EA wanted more than a film tie-in. Its executive producer talked about making "an open- and living-world Godfather experience rather than just making a movie game." You rise through the Corleone family from Outsider all the way to Don of NYC, but completing all of the storyline missions will only take you to Underboss. The rest of New York you take yourself.

Francis Ford Coppola condemned the game, but it still features James Caan as Sonny Corleone and Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen. Players often name it in the same breath as Scarface, and the two make a fine pair. One gives you Tony Montana's money problems, and the other gives you New York family business.

Blue World is the sequel to Endless Ocean, released in Japan in September 2009 and in February 2010 elsewhere. This time the sea fights back a little. The player encounters a hostile caiman, and the story has the heroine threatened by an aggressive tiger shark while she tries to retrieve a second pendant she lost as a child. The plot even sends the crew to an aquarium in Japan, where a professor agrees to decipher a tablet in return for research on polar bears.

Reviewers gave good reports of the thrill and graphics, which earned it a slightly higher score than its predecessor. Players tend to recommend the two games together, as one long holiday under the water. A follow-up, Endless Ocean Luminous, was released on May 2, 2024, for the Nintendo Switch, so the series did get its happy ending.

Endless Ocean came out in Japan on August 2, 2007, in Europe on November 9, 2007, and in North America on January 21, 2008. The song "Prayer", performed by Hayley Westenra, is featured in the game and its trailers. You can also put your own MP3 files on an SD card and listen to them while you dive, and Endless Ocean is the second game on the Wii to use this feature, the first being Excite Truck. Its start in Japan was rocky: Nintendo issued a product recall after a major bug was found in copies of the game.

Players recommend it for older relatives who want something calm and easy to pick up, and they mean that as high praise. An open world does not have to be a crime spree. Sometimes it is just you and a lot of blue water.

Xenoblade Chronicles started with a model. In June 2006, director Tetsuya Takahashi visualized and constructed a model of two giant titans frozen in place, with people living on their bodies, and the game grew out of that picture. Development began in 2007 under the title Monado: Beginning of the World. It was released in Japan in 2010, in the PAL regions in 2011 and in North America in 2012. That last one was never a sure thing. The North American release stayed unconfirmed until December 2011, when a fan campaign called Operation Rainfall drew attention to the game.

Critics hailed it as one of the best recent role-playing games and called its story innovative and surprisingly complex. Today it is considered one of the best video games of all time. Players recommend it to anyone with a Wii who likes RPGs, and it was picked more than four times as often as the next game on this list.