(Copied from a forum post, but I figured it belongs here too?)

he SNES is my favorite console and I feel like (along with the Genesis) this is where 2D gaming really got refined. Games were getting bigger and more elaborate and moved past arcade game design, and cartridge sizes were getting to be multiple megabytes so you could fit a big adventure without having to pad it out by making the game overly hard.

I feel like there's a big difference between the SNES's identity and visual aesthetic compared to some other well known consoles, in that it's defined by its features rather than its limitations; with 16-color (or 256-color if you really want) tiles and lots of palettes, plain 2D pixel art can really look pretty much however the artist wants, and the main limiting factors are that it is tile based and that you don't have a huge amount of video RAM (2D PlayStation games show what kind of stuff you can achieve with those limits raised; there is definitely a contrast) but I don't think most people who don't know the technical details will recognize a SNES game from the console limitations like they will an NES or Game Boy or 3D PlayStation game.

Instead, you may have scaling/rotation from mode 7, color blending, arbitrarily shaped windows/masking, pixelation via the mosaic feature, columns scrolling independently of each other, and the general category of effects that are very easy to do because of HDMA (like vertical gradients). You've got this fun grab bag of different features on top of the plain high-color 2D base. Of course there definitely are limitations, especially prominent when trying to make it pull off 3D stuff.

I feel like a lot of people haven't really explored the library all that much outside of stuff like Super Metroid and Super Mario World and A Link to the Past, and it's definitely worth looking through. There's a bunch of really cool Japan-only games that have translations now; I found Sutte Hakkun to be a really interesting puzzle game, revolving around sucking up a color or a block and putting it somewhere else in the level. Mario & Wario is a cool early Game Freak puzzle game.

There's so many great RPGs on this console! I had a really great time playing through Chrono Trigger and found its battle system to be really interesting, making me think about strategy relating to how the enemies are placed in relation to the heroes and to each other, and it has some really great characters and a really cool story that kicks off and gets interesting pretty much right away.

Puzzle games are also very strong here; you've got Tetris & Dr. Mario, Wario's Woods, Tetris Attack, Lemmings, Zoop, Bust-a-Move, Yoshi's Cookie, Kirby's Avalanche... And there's tons of cool platformers, though I think platformers were generally really big in this era hehe. I really like Kirby Super Star, Aladdin, Yoshi's Island, and I find Ardy Lightfoot inspiring as a developer.

The Super Game Boy is also definitely worth a mention; it's very specific and distinct and there's no technical reason for a game to ever look like a Super Game Boy game again unless it specifically wants to. Graphics that are very low color surrounded by a fancy custom border, and there's technical reasons that make games inclined to have a HUD/status bar much more colorful than the actual game area, which I don't think games would normally opt to do?

This is also the only console I know of that sometimes had coprocessors in the cart (aside from the single Genesis game that does), though it was done much more rarely than people tend to think. I think most of them are Japanese board games and strategy games that need some extra power for calculating moves, or golf games (and I think at some point it became more of an anti-piracy measure than anything.)