‘Mario Kart World’ Is a Long-Awaited Refresh for Nintendo’s Seminal Racing Franchise
After over 10 years, Nintendo releases a full-fledged sequel to Mario Kart 8
It’s strange sometimes to go from covering heavy political topics to talking about Mario Kart. At face value, the subject probably seems trivial to a lot of readers. But part of my personal battle against what’s taking place in America right now is holding onto the things that I love, and not allowing them to be replaced by fear and despondency.
It might take another Nintendo enthusiast to understand the analogy, but what 2023’s Super Mario Wonder was to the stagnant New Super Mario Bros. series, Mario Kart World is to the karting franchise that’s dominated the video game scene since the early 90s. Or, in layman’s terms, it’s a refreshing change of pace.
Both titles represent the gaming giant’s willingness to innovate and defy long-established formulae.
Yet, where Super Mario Wonder emerged largely as a reply to disenchanted The New Super Mario Bros. fans who wanted more, there are few gamers who ever questioned the recipe behind the Mario Kart series. Nintendo’s willingness to experiment now isn’t a response to the demands of disgruntled players; it’s because the company is approaching the ceiling of what’s possible in a kart racing game. It wasn’t because fans had enough of the tried and true Mario Kart traditions that Nintendo was forced to innovate. It was because they’d excelled so much that improving upon itself had become almost impossible.
As one of Nintendo’s best-selling and most deeply competitive franchises, the changes Mario Kart World introduces are likely to be received differently by different types of fans. For loyalists, it may simply just be too different. Replacing the standard 3-lap formula with an interconnected world — different racetracks with highways weaving between them — it’s the single greatest revamping the series has undergone since Mario Kart: Double Dash (2003). The segments of freeway are also treated as laps, so there’s less sense of interruption between races.
The change is by and large implemented well. Despite replacing the variegated twists and turns of standard racing tracks with what are essentially straightaways, there’s enough variety in the scenery you traverse to never feel repetitive. There are enough obstacles for the kart-bound chaos to go unimpeded.
The game also gives you the ability to turn off the new feature and play instead with a more recognizable 3-lap structure. So far, in the limited time I’ve spent with it, I’ve appreciated Nintendo’s vision enough not to challenge that default setting.
Mario Kart World sits in an interesting spot on the gaming Venn diagram. It contains much of the appeal of Super Mario Odyssey, from the wall-jumping acrobatics to the open world sense of adventure. It offers the same fast-paced tricking and flipping between grind rails that defines the Tony Hawk series.
Mario Kart World also borrows from an earlier title that other kart racer fans might remember — Diddy Kong Racing. Just as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom perfected and expanded on the vehicle building mechanic introduced years earlier in Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Mario Kart World comes to us on a system that finally has the power to fulfill Diddy Kong Racing’s vision of a sprawling world traversable exclusively by vehicle. The net result is something that retains the same vibrant appeal of that antiquated Nintendo 64 title, but is closer to Forza Horizon 5 in its scope and technical prowess (not to mention players’ ability to perform an unreasonable variety of stunts in a decidedly unwieldy array of vehicles).
As a longtime fan of the Mario Kart franchise myself, it’s a slight breach of form to see something so different from Nintendo after all of this time, I won’t deny it. But inversely, it’s all of the time I’ve spent with the series that makes the changes feel so fresh and overdue. It’s a fun answer to the question, “What exactly does the world between the different courses look like?” What dirt roads, bridges, thoroughfares, and waterways connect the deserts, tundras, jungles, arenas, and meadows of this timelessly colorful kingdom? The answers the game provides are as happy and inconsequential as they are revelatory.
It’s clear that the developers had a blast experimenting with the change of form and imagining the transitions between tracks. The shift also opens the door to a better sense of pacing. There’s a logical geography to the placement of courses, so karters never instantaneously dart to what feel like opposite ends of the globe after races.
An analogy that might help fellow cinephiles appreciate the relationship between the different Mario Kart games is to consider the dynamic between the different Harry Potter movies. While the first two films established the world, the jumps between scenes prevented the campus from completely coming to life. It wasn’t until Alfonzo Cuarón oversaw the third film in the franchise, and he made the wise decision to show the locations between classes, that Hogwarts really developed a sense of mappable geography.
In Mario Kart World, as racers approach Peach’s castle from a distance, the roadways become increasingly regal. By the time they reach its front gates, the processional flourishes give way to what’s likely the grandest version of the castle gamers have seen yet.
From there, they reach Rainbow Road, another mainstay in the franchise that appears in varying forms throughout the game’s different iterations. And as the laps progress, the track culminates in what feels like a sweeping love letter to the entire series up to that point.
Underscoring the entire gaming experience is a soundtrack that pays homage to titles dating all the way back to the Super Nintendo.
Another one of Mario Kart World’s most significant additions is the “Knockout Tour,” a battle royale-style race where the last four characters are eliminated at the end of each lap. With 24 at the beginning of the race, it starts off as a hectic free-for-all before giving way to some of the most high-octane competitive racing the franchise has seen yet. In both the Knockout Tour and the standard Grand Prix, the doubled character count is more manageable than I feared beforehand. Given the bedlam that can occur in Mario Kart 64 with even 8 on screen, over 20 simply seemed like a step too far.
Mario Kart World is nearly perfect, but it isn’t quite a unilateral reason for most consumers to buy a Nintendo Switch 2 just yet. There are features that defined Mario Kart 8 Deluxe that are notably absent here. There’s every reason to believe that as time goes on and updates and downloadable content are gradually rolled out, it will become every bit the racing titan that the prior entry was. But despite this latest version’s varied modes, competing with the whopping 96 tracks of that prior iteration was no easy task. For years before this latest release, I wondered how Nintendo would even try to clear the sky-high bar they’d previously set.
To reinvent the wheel — at least partially — seems to be Nintendo’s answer. At its heart, Mario Kart World is still the racing game fans have known for decades. But it’s enough of a departure, and takes enough risks, that it stands proudly on its own and makes a memorable launch title for a gaming console poised to dominate the landscape for years to come.
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Damn, Ben, this sounds so damn cool! I might be a ways away from experiencing this world myself, but I can’t wait till I do! And bravo for capturing the magic in words — with no screenshots. You’re magnificent.