Short Shameful Confession: I never played Kirby Air Ride. My gaming dollars in October of 2003 went to Viewtiful Joe, and F-Zero GX had just been released that summer, and we had Mario Kart: Double Dash on the horizon in November. I was probably also still playing Wind Waker, and all the other ludicrously good games released in 2003. Oh and Jedi Academy had just been released, so I was almost certainly still spending a bunch of time with that. But these are all weak excuses, I’m sorry, I should have found time in the past 22 years for Air Ride because by all accounts it looks like it was great and I missed out. I will now attempt to atone.

Kirby Air Riders is a strange game. It’s ostensibly a racing game, but it’s more-so a casual party game that happens to be about racing. But also it’s not really casual, it’s incredibly chaotic and fast-paced and hectic, there’s always something exploding or flying at the screen or something to dodge or something to eat and you have to pay attention to all of it. But actually it’s super casual, because acceleration and steering and staying on the track and everything is handled for you, and these aren’t accessibility options, it’s how the game was intentionally designed, and Sakurai sounded legitimately displeased that they couldn’t get the controls down to a single button like in the original game. But really it’s got a reasonably high skill ceiling, cart machine choice matters, rider choice matters, and steering / drifting / drafting / plowing through mobs matters a lot because that’s the only way to really go faster than you do by default. It’s simultaneously all of these things. It’s a deconstructed kart racer. It’s a reconstructed kart racer. It’s casual. It’s technical. And it rules.

If anything, it is VERY clearly a game directed by Masahiro Sakurai. It isn’t one cohesive experience where you sit down and think “Ah, I will play Kirby Air Riders now” and press start and play game the way it was designed to be played. Like basically every Smash game, and even earlier things like Kirby Super Star, this isn’t just one game, or maybe one game with a couple modes, it’s a game framework with a couple presets, and you’re expected to fiddle around in menus configuring it to your exact personal preference. What stage are we playing? What rider and machine combo do you like? How many laps? Are we playing it third person or top-down like Super Off Road? Are we playing single player? Local Multiplayer? Online party? Online with randos? All CPU? Tournament? City Trial? It’s not quite as insane of a level of customization as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but clearly not for lack of trying.

I have three criticisms of the game:

  1. It is, at times, simply just too much to handle. When you start juicing your machine’s base speed and boost speed and turning speed you end up moving at such a rate that it makes F-Zero feel slow.

    Additionally, because of the way the game is, when you’re going so fast that everything becomes an incomprehensible blur of fire and explosions and high resolution .PNGs of food, it sort of doesn’t matter that you’re trusting Kirby to take the wheel because the game sort of plays itself. That incongruence doesn’t end up feeling good to me. I shouldn’t be flailing and succeeding.

  2. There’s a bunch of ways to attack, but the only one you can always do is a spin attack like in F-Zero GX. In F-Zero GX that was mapped to the Gamecube’s Z button, but here, due to Sakurai’s obsession with the most minimal button usage possible, it’s mapped to waggle the stick. My dude, I need that to steer.

    There’s accessibility options for it, though! …but it only lets you determine how hard you need to waggle to trigger the spin – or worse – mapping it to physically shaking the controller. But wait! There’s also “““fully re-mappable controls””” elsewhere in settings! …but it only lets you choose which buttons are mapped to the two functional buttons. I respect the absolute dedication to the bit, but come on, let me map any of these 12 buttons to spin.

  3. Despite the incalculable variety of gameplay options provided by the game, it somehow still feels shallow, and specifically feels too shallow to justify its $69.99 MSRP. Like, it’s good, but it just doesn’t feel like $70 worth of good to me. I don’t regret my purchase at that price point, I just would have felt better about it and would have felt easier to recommend it if it were cheaper.

So I’m putting this in the “Recommended When Cheap” category, which since it’s a first-party Nintendo game, basically means “Not Recommended” because we can pretty safely assume it will never be discounted.