Watch this Kirby Air Riders Direct with director Masahiro Sakurai. The presentation lasts roughly 45 minutes and offers an in-depth look at the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 game.
45 minutes is a lot. Do we see Sakurai present is on his desk again and showing gameplay?
Are we taking bets on him double fisting controllers again like he does with Smash Bros demos?
Feels like weird timing. I don’t know if this is supposed to help sales of Kirby and the Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition (Coming out August 28) or if it’s going to steal its thunder 🤔
Another thing that makes the timing feel weird to me is… Mario Kart just came out. I like Kirby but it just feels so odd to follow a big racing game as the Switch 2 release title with another racing game.
If you haven’t played the original, the reason it’s so beloved is because City Trial is vastly unlike any traditional racing game. It’s doing something entirely different from Mario Kart, they’re not really competing directly. They’re significantly more different from each other than the Kirby and Mario platformers are.
City Trial is terrific, if’s among the best multiplayer games on Gamecube. There’s a channel on Youtube, Kirby Air Ride Online, where people use it as an eSport.
The premise is, from 2 to 4 players (including possible CPU players) roam a big city space (but not too big) on fast vehicles for from 3 to 7 minutes. Throughout that space powerups are constantly appearing. Some are weapons or health refills, but the most common ones are Patches, each of which is a small but significant improvement in one of a vehicle’s stats. Players vie to collect these patches, and also to change their weak initial vehicle for a better one, which also can be found randomly around the city. Random events occur, which provide various opportunities and difficulties.
Players can attack each other by colliding, using “quick spins,” or those weapons. If a player’s vehicle runs out of health it’s destroyed, causing it to drop lots of its patches (around half) and leaving that player to find another vehicle. Patches cannot be collected without a vehicle, so the attacking player can quickly score a lot of powerups that way.
After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a randomly-selected event. Many are races, but some have you attacking enemies or each other for points. A few involve flying. One’s an outright boss battle. The winner of this event is the winner of the whole match. You’ve been collecting patches and selected your vehicle for this moment, but you don’t find out the event ahead of time. You might get a hint as to the event during the city portion, but the game is known to lie 10% of the time.
With all that randomness, City Trial can be very chaotic, and never plays the same way twice. Kirby Air Riders is unquestionably the Switch 2 game I’m most looking forward to!
Yeah, it’s weird that they developed 2 racing titles around the same time. But I’m expecting Air Riders to have more gameplay than just racing. Back to Forgotten Land being so close though. It’s just all very strange to me, we’ll see 🤷
Also I should add it’s really exciting to have Sakurai back on the presentations! His Smash videos were amazing and I watched every single video he released on his channel.
There are 4 kinds of directs:
- The normal one (Nintendo Direct)
- Partner Showcase
- Indie World
- Game specific
Counting this one, we have gotten all of them except the normal one. Let’s hope we get that one soon too.
It feels like they have no idea about all their first party release dates, so they’re scrambling around trying to figure things out 😅 Hopefully we’ll get a Mario Direct in September for Super Mario Bros.'s 40th anniversary.
Hype!
