After zipping around in Kirby Air Riders for maybe an hour, I rushed back to my apartment to get in a round of Mario Kart World just to see. In the game’s Direct earlier this week, director Masahiro Sakurai said (even if he was just being cheeky) his unlikely GameCube sequel was “basically Mario Kart.” And yeah, if you compare the two on the level of “a bunch of guys from decades of Nintendo games race around and/or duke it out” then sure, I guess.
In every other way, Kirby Air Riders is so extremely not just a Mario Kart redux that riding around 150cc matches at home felt practically quaint. Wall rides and bar grinds? That’s cute. In Kirby Air Riders, I’m drifting corners so screamin’ fast that I barely had time to blink. Whirlpool traps and gentle river runs? How serene. Air Riders’ Waveflow Waters race course has violent vortexes and corridors of walls made of water to punch through. Oh, and brace yourself for a gigantic meteor shower of fireballs that reign down during City Trials too!
In the time I spent with Air Riders, I got through a good chunk of tutorials, raced through two Air Rider courses (Floria Fields and Waveflow Waters, both of which were featured in the Direct), and crushed three rounds of City Trials, the topographical brawler and power-up collection zone that ends in a challenge of your choosing. Getting through the checklist of lessons to get a handle on maneuvering, as patronizing as they may seem for a game that now relies on two whole buttons (up from one!), was actually quite nice. Because once an Air Ride or City Trial started, it was buckle-up time and not as easy as it might seem on paper.
Part of that boils down to each of the many machines having distinct characteristics that aren’t just a matter of alleged differences in weight and handling that a chart claims when I’m picking it. The way, say, a tank drives, which is heavy and super directionally flexible, is wildly different from Meta Knight’s soaring shadow glider, and I think a lot of the fun will be in the trial-and-error of those. As for the expanded cast of characters, I only got to mess around with a few, but Bandana Waddle Dee with his spear flurry is my early frontrunner for favorite. (I wanted to love Starman, but I need some more time for him to grow on me.)
Like my NVC host colleagues have already called out about Kirby Air Ride (2003), City Trials is still the standout game. It’s also the most derived from Sakurai’s Super Smash Bros. directorial sensibilities, from its brawler nature down to the selection screen and slow-mo KO animations. It is, however, utter pandemonium, like the aforementioned meteors that you’ll need to avoid or sudden calls to zoom over to a highlighted area to fight in a dust-up, if you so choose. The five-minute countdown breezed by as I attempted to manhandle my gliders to collect power-ups, food items that were practically copy-pasted from the real world into the dreamy palette of Kirby Air Riders, and also wreck some other players. Was I excelling at any of this? Not really, but the game didn’t make winning feel like it was the priority (which I guess is quite different from Smash Bros., where loser characters look onto the winner with existential anguish). It was more important to simply have fun, and it’s easy to imagine anyone from grade schoolers to college kids and cool adults (ahem) turn Kirby Air Riders into a shouty party game.
The maximalism of Kirby Air Riders is its core charm; it feels brewed from impish, chaotic-neutral alchemy. Even Nintendo is calling this a “vehicle action game,” not a kart racer, which honestly seems apt – a silly genre distinction for a purposefully unserious game. It might not have been the sequel the people were clamoring for, but I’m glad that it exists.
