Good Things Iwata has been involved with.
+ Almost single handedly drafted the idea of Brain Age, and went to Dr. Kawashima himself to acquire the license and concept. Then created the internal Nintendo teams that would develop Brain Age, English Training, DS Dictionary, and all those mega successful Touch Generation games.
+ Iwata Asks
+ Nintendo Direct
+ Expand EAD to Tokyo. (But what about Osaka and Sapporo?)
+ Purchased Monolith Soft.
+ Salvaged ND Cube
Bad Things Iwata has been involved with.
- Destroyed Nintendo of America's self government.
- Over empowered Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto has mismanaged EAD Division's scheduling and concepts on several occasions.
- Poorly managed Western first-party productions and localization approval
- Virtual Console horrible management
- Failed to expand Overall R&D at a sufficient rate
- Western R&D management
I'm not even touching the hardware decisions.
Wasn't that just a way for Namco-Bandai to cast off Nintendo's influence after Yamauchi's failed takeover of Bandai?
I mean, buying Monolith does seem like a great move, but it wasn't really an "Iwata" thing to do, and Iwata's actively spoken out against such moves, and... maybe he didn't really "buy" them at all, he just traded one small piece of a big company for a big piece of a small one.