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~ Estimated Reading Time: 13 min ~

Booted this up for the first time, and took a sigh of relief that I saw what I had wanted to see.
A 9th Gen game that doesn't look like sand.
It'd be easy to say this is the expected outcome, but honestly, I wasn't happy with how Mario looked for a long time.

I don't think I got Mario as a kid. Growing up in the late 2000s and early '10s, there wasn't much left to get. Something had slowly deteriorated about the mascot. Y'know how AI image generators start hallucinating even more than usual if you feed it other AI images as a source? I get the impression that at the time, Nintendo had gotten a little too comfortable in recycling their 3D models, and began to base the 3D models off the 3D models. The best proof I could find of this was a Miyamoto interview,
"Thankfully, we can now use a single model, and the third-party developers simply have to animate and provide movement for him. It’s become much easier.".
They believed that the character designs were so strong, there was no need to maintain them, to preserve their original goals between uses.
"[...]third-party employees involved in the developments have had both great affection and strict regulations about what’s appropriate for Mario. They actually make me look lenient!"
New Super Mario Bros. U borrowed models and keyposes from New Super Mario Bros. Wii borrowed models and keyposes from New Super Mario Bros. (which had borrowed and awkwardly flipped to a side-angle models and keyposes from Super Mario 64 DS). But you can't make something new exclusively out of old, despite the slow trickle of hardware improvement necessitating newness.

"Reconsideration" is the keyword on MK:W's mind. It's hard to not notice how almost every character has sharper shape language, colour choices, and just...pop more. They're the type of individual adjustments that you'd only think about after seeing marked down on a wiki - Sonic's quills sorta thing - but you feel them, don't you? I've played plenty of Mario spinoffs, but this is the first time I've felt charmed by a lot of these characters I've passively seen for years. Harkening back to Nintendo's key art from the 80s-90s, you can tell they've gotten closer to the original intent than the game of telephone they were playing previously allowed. I know everyone's still busy arguing if Donkey Kong's new look is better or worse, but what matters more than the quality itself is that it recognizes the importance of a design iteration matching its surroundings. I liked the rareware look at some point, but nowadays, he's kinda looking like a homunculus.

It's too focused on the past for "breathing new life" to be the right phrasing, but it's confident in looking Classic. What interests me though, is how thoroughly timed of a work it is even beyond that. The Karts themselves shifted towards a stylized 60s futurism cuts: rounded and bouncy, with accentuated bolts and pipes. Cleanly spaced decals, and warm neons. The costumes you unlock have some amazingly tacky 80s fashion going on: filled with puffy jackets and bright colours, the type of stuff you see in an RnB music video. DK Spaceport - with its 70s' diner colouring, and vinyl grading - is the first time it's come off like Nintendo likes "retro" as a broader aesthetic, and not as a self-sucking mechanism.

When this reined-in artstyle is used to texture Mario's world, the result is wonderful. I know I can write kinda cynically, so if you want a shorthand review from me, I'd just say "mkw is a good game because i smiled the widest smile each time they mario-ified a wild animal". shoutouts dinosaurs as always but the whale that creates a giant trickable wave is the most magical thing nintendo's done in like 10 years

They've done such a nice job at reclaiming Super Mario Kart's key musical influences. It's hard to do a justice just how intertwined not just Nintendo, but Japanese VGM as whole is intertwined with the at-the-time movements of J-Jazz-Fusion. The best I can say is, well, to listen for yourself! 8 had this over the top, brass and guitar symphony mixing in as many instruments as possible, but there's a deliberate shift to a more grounded but focused sound. Tons of refined genre-takes, the sorta tropes video games sometimes struggle to do authentically pulled off with finesse. Mario had been running with the cheesy Yellow Magic Orchestra-lite synths for over a long time, but this is the first time I've thought they were capable of sounding not just nice, but cool.

Why is this all happening now? Well, I'd imagine times are changing for Nintendo. This is the first time neither Miyamoto nor Koji Kondo's names weren't present in the credits scroll of anything Mario. The vet's are reaching retirement age. So we have a largely new body of staff working together with the least guidance and most control they've ever had, and they have to keep searching for themselves: "what was the Nintendo magic?". "What made Mario good?".
So they look into the past, and adjust accordingly. Yoshi's fatter and sleepy looking again. Things are looking alright. But they understand that Mario doesn't exist in a bubble, and study its surroundings as well. So it becomes a big period piece - absorbing all the pop culture the franchise creators had lived through. You can't just find the origin, you also need the origin of the origin: because these things come from somewhere. If you want to maintain a creator's mind for iteration, you must learn what informed their thought process.
And I'd say these recent pushes in the art direction have made Mario feel more fresh than it's felt in a decade or two; so when I look at the personality on display, I can think
Huh..maybe if I was growing up with a Switch, I would've thought Mario was a neat guy. Maybe I would've thought he was cooler than Sonic....

So glad I don't think Mario is cooler than Sonic.........

Though of course, I do have to talk about the game attached to all this, since these trends influence the final product in more ways than one.
To be specific, the rejuvenated philosophy Nintendo carries of openness since Breath of the Wild is a significant force behind Mario Kart World. Openness as in contrast to guidance; the Wii U era was filled with cut and dry formulas tightly-gripping its player's hands towards the fun. I remember Mario Kart 8 from that handholding - if you noticed geometry jutting out out that'd inspire your imagination to try and make a skip, Lakitu's taking you to jail. No imagination in this house. World on the other hand, has opened up room for you to move through each course with Freedom. That immediate first-impression makes it obvious just how conservative its predecessor was.

And these new tools - hopping, rails, and wall-running - enrich your movement with much more personal decision-making. Movement in Mario Kart is so silky smooth, it often can feel almost automated. Responding to other player's actions usually becomes the point of engagement. So it surprised me just how much positive and negative feedback there is to pulling off tricks; it's satisfying to even just pull off mashing stunts as a rail curves. You can tell this game has more nuanced physics systems than I'd expect from these guys, because when I started playing a minecart section in Donkey Kong Bananza, I got afraid that I'd fall if I pressed A during a horizontal turn.

And this time around, the world itself is what became Mario Kart World's hook. Something I've always loved about Super Mario 64 was just how much curiosity simply looking around could fill me with; "how do I get up there? what sort of tricks would I have to pull up to get over that gap?". MK's playing into that observational ethos - layering its world with dozens of hangout-y urban spots, for which you'll eventually get the eyes to notice are decked out in objects you can trick off of. Rideable radio wires, trees you could bounce off, fences you didn't notice were fences. It cemented its sense of freedom when I kept being surprised by how many surfaces were given collision, that they were so much more unafraid of creating inconsistent geometry that you'd only pull off in 1/5 attempts.

And that's where Free Roam comes in as a teaching tool. For a game with so many systems to get the hang of, in the especially chaotic and hectic context of Mario Kart, it's nice having a relaxed mode to feel it out. I suck at racing games! I've seen some calling it "empty", but there is something pure and intrinsic to simply moving around, gradually tricking off a world comprised entirely of techable structures. And the main distraction they did litter here and there - Missions - impressed me. They aren't necessarily hard, but they are Challenging; forcing you to think proactively about how to apply your tools in a way you probably hadn't before. It has a lot of that "I died 200 times, but it was fun!" trial and error; its challenges are often annoying in that nice way that sticks with you, permanently imparting something onto your playstyle. Honestly, the Missions are secretly my favourite platforming in a Nintendo release from the last 15 years.

I even feel the need to be a little defensive. I try not to be a hater, but like...that one journalist that loves Nintendo so much, their words got used as defense in one of their copyright legal battles, keeps tweeting about how bad this game is...because it doesn't track your 100% completion of Free Roam. But it's important that they choose to exclude extrinsic stats, so nothing will interfere with the casual pacing they want. They don't want you to binge-eat and rise numbers up, they want brevity. I don't mean to shut down criticism of Nintendo, fuck Nintendo, but Iisten!! The same people I've heard vocally pop off after waiting hours to unlock the dry bones fish....complain that they had to wait so hard to unlock the dry bones fish. They made a game with unlockables that actually take a while to obtain, because we all reminisced about finding 6th gen-era secret characters so fondly. They made you feel something, and you're mad at them. Let me be a lil petty.

But that's not to say there isn't anything about modern Nintendo that bothers me. It's easy for the collective shift in preferences the company's gone through to become a caging status quo.
I felt a dissonance grow as I continued the process of playing and learning. Or maybe I should say it's that learning and playing were distant from each other. Even though I gradually got the hang of tricking, I began to notice this wasn't translating to me not landing in 12th place every race.
I'd credit this to the lack of impact World's advanced movement truly has on playing it, especially on the new and controversial addition of off-road races. Which, with the way people are talking about it, you'd think have no sauce. But the more frustrating truth is how many good, but not accentuated interactions they've littered over them.
Tricks have to reward in a different way from regular Laps, because intermission tracks are so straight-forward, you can't make cuts ahead on them. But right now, tricks aren't actually fast enough to give intrinsic reward. It'd be reductive to imply speed is the only thing they can give you; space away from the chaotic pits of players is an advantage in-of itself. And even there are strategic layers to that; one of the coolest things I've had happen to me is when I hopped onto one of those breakable rails, someone rammed into it, and it bounced me right off the cliff-side. Just thinking about that, or those cars that give you coins when you hop onto them - there are all these ideas that aren't properly felt, because tricks were tuned so weakly. These huge chunks of gameplay - a whole 2/3 laps of each race - are balanced empty. This is especially true within the context of Mario Kart, which has always been a game where comebacks are massive-scale, to where the entire race is transformed in the last round. Intermissions never being the final round means they never define the climax of the narrative - their already tuned low-impact interactions cannot be pivotal to a race.

(To give credit, they actually dropped a balance patch buffing every form of trick in between writing sessions of this review. I don't get the impression they fixed my problems, but it's a good sign at least!)

If I were to define what makes Breath of the Wild and contemporaries less like a strategic imm-sim, and more like a toybox, I'd say it's the lack of weight to each individual choice. Or rather that, while they offer many choices of play, the harder styles of play aren't necessarily rewarded more graciously than the easier. I worry that Tricks too end up as an "Alternate Playstyle", one weighed equally to playing the game normally. That in a game so aggressively rubberbanded for the lower and higher ends of skill to be able to enjoyably play with each other, all these extra bells and whistles had ended up dissonant with its intended simplicity. In my least satisfied moments, I couldn't help but think that tech is incompatible with the curated experience of Mario Kart. That all the practice I had done wouldn't be felt.

And I still am happy with Free Roam, but especially when my interest in learning begins to fall through, "the most expensive practice mode on earth" is a bit of a fragile selling point, isn't it?
The game will always be haunted by the grimy undercurrent of its (over-)pricing, but I can't help but also think its expenses have been aimed in the wrong directions. Free Roam sure is using an AAA open-world to accomplish the same goal as one map of Tony Hawk. There are over a hundred off-road tracks, so "you'll never get bored of playing the same things", but it just reminded everyone how 3-Lap races are an example of beautifully recycling content.
I felt a little conflicted myself on even complimenting this game, knowing how the Switch 2's pricing during a time like this has pushed Nintendo into luxury item territory. So I feel it's important I tell you 🫵 that I do find the indie titles I've been covering more personally fulfilling. I'm not weighing by price, I do sincerely mean the steam sale grabs are directly better than the $500 investment. Limitations necessitate using your content to its fullest, after all.

It's definitely a game that reminds me that yes, I can have fun with toys actually. I'd have to admit I enjoyed my time with it more than most Switch games of the last gen. Simply existing in its carefully aesthetically-crafted cities, while pretty jazz music plays has brought up my mood recently. It's a good crowd-pleaser - one where I can sweat with all the fun tricks, and all the little 8 year-olds it's gonna pair me against can still be lined into 6th place. Its rollercoaster ride has been made with one path, and that one path was made to Satisfy as many people as possible. I just began to find its railings a bit overbearing at times. A far cry in tone from that Sakurai direct, where he kept saying things like "I very specifically made this mechanic work for this benefit, but you can ignore my design and turn it off in the Rules tab". That recent patch disabling 3-laps in some contexts just feels like another moment of Nintendo trying to guide you into following exactly their formula for fun. It seems that in order to allow for freedom, they just build a bigger cage around the sandbox. It seems that trying to inject newness into works embroiled in the old is more difficult than I thought.