Mario Kart World Review: How Do You Follow-Up One of the Biggest Games Ever?

It’s not often that I am (relatively) on top of the zeitgeist in video games, playing the new big-name release of the moment while also having a lot of detailed thoughts about it, so I figured I’d take advantage of it and get out my thoughts on ‘Mario Kart World’, since they’re weirdly complicated.

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way: following up ‘Mario Kart 8’ was always going to be a tall order. It feels easy to forget that, given how much the game has become a fixture of the gaming landscape, serving as the most recent mainline entry in the series for over a decade. It’s maybe also easy to lose sight of just how defining a landmark it was that landscape, too; the Mario Kart series has long been one of Nintendo’s blockbusters, but MK8 took it to absurd levels.*

Built with Kit

*It’s not essential to this column, but I love number-based trivia too much to pass some of this up, even if the data is a little less comprehensive than sports stats. MK8 was the best-selling game on two straight Nintendo consoles. On Wii U, it sold nearly 8.5 million copies, which still put it 2.5 million ahead of second place on the console. On Switch, it octupled those numbers, crossing the 68 million mark and landing over 20 million ahead of the second-best seller, the most recent Animal Crossing. It more than doubled the sales of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ and ‘Super Mario Odyssey’, the big new entries for Nintendo’s two flagship series. It sold roughly as many copies as every single new mainline Pokémon entry on the console combined (Sword, Shield, Scarlet, Violet, and Legends Arceus). It still regularly pops up on Nintendo’s monthly best-seller lists, despite being a decade old. And combining the two versions’ sales, it appears to be the fifth-best selling video game of all-time. There’s even a chance those numbers will go up for a little bit longer, since the most recent update seems to have been from the end of March.

Even setting aside the crazy objective stats for the more subjective evaluations, as a long-time fan of the series, I think it’s pretty easy to call 8 Deluxe “The Definitive Mario Kart Game”. Even when the original game was released, I was already inclined to that idea; the 32 base-game courses include many of the best tracks in series history, and I think the overall set is easily the best one all-around. The retro levels all feel improved from their original incarnations, the game always looked gorgeous and stylish, the new mechanics are interesting and allow for a whole bunch of exciting course designs, and the racing feels as fun as ever and balanced in a way that not every entry in the series has been. 

The later DLC and Deluxe version only turned things up a notch, adding another 16 strong courses that stood up to the originals, debuting the new 200cc game mode, and fixing some of the original short-comings (the weak battle mode, a thin roster). And the Booster Pass additions of 2022-23 were maybe not as universally strong as the ones that came before, but there were still some standout levels in there. And moreover, it was a full 48 new courses, doubling the tracklist in what was already the biggest game in the series and revitalizing interest in a game that was over eight years old at that point.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the final version of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe feels more or less like the perfect version of what the series had been doing up to that point. So the obvious question was always: where do you go from there? I think everyone who liked the series thought that. There was always going to be a next Mario Kart entry eventually, so what would that look like? 

A Pair of Petite Platformer Recs: Transiruby and Flynn: Son of Crimson

I have an idea for another fairly-large article in the works. However, the writing on it has been going slowly (in addition to some real-life delays), and I wanted to do something in the meantime. It’s been a while since I did my last round-up of smaller recommendations (my two-parter on 3D Platformers way back in November and December… wow, it does not feel like those were that long ago…), so why not another one of those?

Once again, I’m looking at platformers, but today we will be remaining firmly in the realm of two dimensions and red-themed names, with Metroidvania title Transiruby and kinda-sorta-Metroidvania-like Flynn: Son of Crimson.



Transiruby (SKIPMORE)

I’ve said in the past that the Nintendo Switch is a great platform for indie games, but this was even more true early in the console’s life. It was much easier for a small but well-made game to stand out in the eShop back when there just wasn’t as much on the console. One of the big beneficiaries of this was Kamiko (which you may recognize from waaaay back in my 2017 year-end round-up), a title by solo Japanese developer SKIPMORE that was released about a month and a half after the console launched. I had heard basically nothing about it when I saw it while browsing the eShop for new games to try. There weren't a ton of bigger games overshadowing it yet, it wasn’t expensive, and it looked solid, so I gave it a shot and enjoyed myself.

I hadn’t thought much about it lately, until I was browsing upcoming games and saw Transiruby. Once again, it looked like a cute little 8-bit Metroidvania. Of course, given the current crowd of the eShop, that wasn’t enough to just give it a try on a whim; so I looked into it a little more, at which point I went “Oh shoot, this is the Kamiko guy!”, which was enough to convince me (although for those who don’t have that past experience, there is also a Steam demo you can give a whirl to see if it’s your thing).

Super Mario Odyssey: Review and Game Design Analysis

Super Mario Odyssey is a burst of joy, in the purest form. I don’t know any better way to describe it than that.

In that vein, the closest comparison I can make to anything is the feeling of playing on a playground when you’re little, exploring each new part; there are the slides, there are the swings, there are the jungle gym, and so on, and here’s how it all fits together. Here, Nintendo has created the their own digital playground, much more intricate and detailed and interesting than the real world ones people are used to. And then, they went and did twelve more times.

The level design work in Odyssey is superb, a case study for anyone who’s interested in video games as a creative medium, with hundreds of things to pull apart. In my article on Splatoon, I alluded to my desire to see more games return to using well-constructed “hub worlds” in navigating to the levels. Mario Odyssey doesn’t do that, yet I hardly found myself missing them.

All of the care that normally went into designing those massive, connecting levels is instead here applied to each individual world, making each feel massive without actually making them large or cumbersome. The amount of things to do in each one is deceptive, and contributes to the illusion of feeling grander than it is; even the largest world could be completely be circumnavigated in less than ten minutes, but each is so densely packed with interesting challenges and exploration that it feels more massive (again, just like a little kid in a new playground).

Splatoon 2, Its Place Among 3D Platformers, and the Legacy of Super Mario Sunshine

I’ve been playing a lot of Splatoon 2 lately and enjoying it a bunch. One thing that I’ve done so far that I didn’t get to do as much in the first game though was play the story mode; I mostly just didn’t have time then, more than anything. Naturally, I decided to correct that with the sequel, and I found something interesting within: the level design is highly reminiscent of another game I had been thinking about recently.

I’ve had Super Mario Sunshine on my mind lately. There’s no specific reason, it’s just been a handful of small things that bring it to mind on occasion. It got a lot of flak at the time of release, some of which was due to changes it made to the beloved Super Mario 64’s formula, which is to be expected with Nintendo. They’re constantly tinkering with their franchises, and won’t release something unless they feel like it brings something substantial to the series.

I liked a lot of the new stuff, and unfortunately, there hasn’t really been a game since that quite capitalized on some of the things they introduced. The water/jetpack-thing that Mario wielded was one thing in particular that I minded a lot less than everyone else. The level design was also notably different than most subsequent 3D platform games. Sunshine built on Mario 64’s system of a hub world (Delfino Island in Sunshine, Princess Peach’s Castle in 64) with extensive connected levels, which was pretty ubiquitous to the genre at the time.

Sunshine seemed to almost build an entirely connected world; unlike in earlier games like 64, where levels were simply represented by paintings, you could see the levels in Sunshine from each other, way out on the horizons of the stages. Dummied-out data even reveals a planned train connected the world even more; were it not for size-limitations, the game might have been even more interconnected. But this aspect seemed to sort of dead-end with the game.

The one aspect of the game that many people at the time seemed to really like about Sunshine at the time though was the bonus levels. These were collections of floating platforms in a space-like void, stars in the distance, where you’d be stripped of your F.L.U.D.D. waterpack (for the first run-through, at least) to focus on precise jumps and maneuvering. It’s not hard to see how this fed into the design of the follow-up game, Super Mario Galaxy. Every level in the game was collections of planets floating in space, each focusing on jumping and maneuvering without the distraction of a waterpack.

Consequently, the main hub world of Comet Observatory was scaled back to a fraction of Isle Delfino, with a fraction of the areas to explore and tasks to navigate. This was something that the follow-up, Super Mario Galaxy 2, would take to even greater extremes, leaving something that was in total not even the size of the first section of the Castle from way back in Super Mario 64, with most of the navigation of worlds done via selection screens.

And this has sort of been the state of 3D platformers since. Super Mario 3D World got an overworld sort of similar to Super Mario World from way back on the Super Nintendo (maybe it's own topic one day, given my love of Super Mario World), but nothing quite like those original hub worlds of 64 and Sunshine.

And that’s where the Splatoon series and its story mode ties in, in my mind. These games seem to be going back to the days of Super Mario Sunshine and exploring a divergent evolutionary path from the Mario series.

The most obvious change is in the central mechanics of each. Given that people complained about the mechanic of an advanced water gun strapped to Mario, Nintendo apparently decided it was worth separating out into its own game, where it could be fleshed out and played with more extensively and without disrupting the core of the Mario series. In turn, that became a game centered entirely around the mechanics of a Super Soaker-esque water gun and tank strapped to your back, albeit with the ammo changed to ink to fit in with the squid theming of the new game. And, thanks to focusing on this mechanic, the game instead veered more towards the third person shooter genre rather than the 3D platformer.

But it didn’t totally abandon those roots. The level design in story mode is heavily indebted to the same bonus stages that inspired Super Mario Galaxy, as a set of floating platforms suspended in some sort of void that need to be navigated, the main difference being that this time the challenges are a little less based on deft maneuvering and more based on the this-time-included gun mechanic.

And of course, there’s the overworld system. Both Splatoon games moved away from Super Mario Galaxy 2’s primarily-menu based navigation. Instead, there’s a central hub world of a city plaza serving as the menu for each game, with the story mode getting it’s own set of “mini-worlds” in which you navigate to different levels by finding grates to travel through, and completion of a set of levels opens up new “mini-hubs” with their own sets of levels, much like Super Mario 64’s castle with paintings for individual levels and different sections of the castle with new sets of paintings to travel to. And in the case of Splatoon 2 at least, you can see other points from where you stand; the main square is off in the distance, as are the other “mini-hubs”. It’s definitely reminiscent of Super Mario Sunshine’s set-up. It's still not quite on the level of Isle Delfino, which was set up to feel like a real place, while the hubs in Splatoon (outside of the main plaza) are still technically just floating blocks in space, but it's definitely moving back in that direction after a long time away from that design.

It’s worth noting that the Splatoon games may just be a preview of things to come for Nintendo. This fall, they’ll release Super Mario Odyssey on the Switch, and while we don’t know the exact specifics of how it will play, it looks like it might take the design of Sunshine a step further, with small worlds serving as both the individual levels of the old games and the hub worlds. So instead of one major central area with a bunch of different “spokes” coming off it, instead we may get several interconnected worlds that are both their own “hubs and spokes”, with their own missions and goals throughout.

If so, I couldn’t be more excited; it’s been a decade and a half since Super Mario Sunshine, and things like Splatoon 2 seem to indicate Nintendo is itching to return to their old ways. I can’t see what big ideas they can bring back to the 3D Platformer; I've missed seeing this genre push itself in new ways.