Kirby Air Ride | Unorthodox Fun

The past few years have been inundated with remakes and sequels to the media that defined my childhood and teen years, and it’s been a very exciting time! Seeing the likes of Super Mario RPG, Wallace & Gromit and Classic Sonic make such excellent comebacks has meant a lot to me, and they’ve served as a reminder of why I loved them in the first place.

But there was one sequel that always seemed like a long shot, that always seemed like an impossibility… and yet, against all odds and my better judgement, it’s happening.

It was one of the last trailers shown during April's Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, opening on a black screen before showing Kirby desperately trying to wrangle his inactive Warp Star. The quality and style immediately reminded me of Masahiro Sakurai’s work, but before I could speculate on what exactly I was looking at, Kirby's Warp Star had grown jets and blasted off into a familiar meadow, racing alongside some incredibly familiar vehicles.

This was Kirby Air Riders, a sequel I never expected to happen, much less as a big marquee game for a new Nintendo console! It would’ve come as a shock even if I hadn’t played the original, but my love of it only made the announcement hit that much harder.

Kirby Air Ride’s a game I’ve got an interestingly intimate history with. It was one of the GameCube games I was most excited to try when I got into the console back in 2020, but the high prices of PAL copies meant I had to settle for an American import and wait literal months for it to arrive. All that patience paid off when I completely and utterly fell in love with the game, sinking hours upon hours into everything it had to offer.

I’ve consistently returned to it since then, but it wasn’t until my most recent revisit, fresh off of Air Riders’ announcement, that I fully realized *why* I loved it so much. And after five years of adoration, I think I’m finally ready to put that love into words.

 

Like many of Masahiro Sakurai’s games, Kirby Air Ride is a significant deviation from its genre’s norms. Your vehicle will automatically accelerate no matter what, and the only way to stop it is to hold down A. Holding A for long enough will charge up a boost of speed that’s released when you let go of the button, allowing you to regain your speed after a drift and resulting in a unique sense of “squeeze and release”, to quote Sakurai himself. There are also a few elements shared and specific to each game mode, like floor panels activated by tapping A and enemies that can be inhaled or swallowed to earn copy abilities.

Building a racing game with so many mechanics around a single button seems incredibly baffling, but much like the Super Smash Bros. series also directed by Sakurai, this simplistic setup lends itself to so much player ingenuity and replay value, achieved in a myriad of ways by the game's three modes. I'll take you through them one at a time so you can get the clearest view of their unique strengths.

 

Despite being the game’s namesake and its central mode, Air Ride is often dismissed without a second thought. It’s understandable on the surface, as the pitiful course selection and sole vehicle you start off with give a pretty rough first impression. But if you’re determined to dig deeper and find something to love, you’ll discover an incredible amount of experimentation and replayability, which all starts with the vehicle you choose.

As you complete objectives and tick off boxes on the checklist, you’ll amass a varied roster of vehicles with different stats and characteristics. These traits might seem off-putting, debilitating and even hard to understand at first, but using those quirks to your advantage in conjunction with your knowledge of the course layouts and mechanics is where the true depth of Air Ride lies.

The Jet Star is fairly slow but can gain incredible boosts when airborne and upon landing, so you’ll need to take advantage of that if you want to win. The Swerve Star has amazing speed and acceleration but can’t turn without braking or gliding, so you’ll have to find the best times to switch direction. Meta Knight can’t gain boosts from braking but always wields a sword, so attacking enemies to keep your speed up is more important than ever.

These elements all come together to give Air Ride a unique sense of satisfaction and progression. Not only does it just feel great to improve and have a better grasp of the mechanics, but taking something that once felt so janky and awkward and turning it into a spectacular showcase of skill is its own reward. It’s not something games usually ask of you (especially Nintendo games), but the way Air Ride works it into its gameplay loop and your own improvement gives it immense staying power and a shockingly high skill ceiling.

 

While Air Ride hid its nuance behind a veil of simplicity, Top Ride is significantly more straightforward. It strips the basic gameplay down even further, offering a mere two vehicles to ride, seven flat courses to race on, and a bevy of items in place of Air Ride’s enemies and copy abilities. There’s none of the hidden depth or skill that made Air Ride so fun, and that was enough to make me disregard Top Ride for years. But since I was writing an article and going in-depth on the other two modes, I wanted to give it a fair chance. And while it’s still my least favourite mode by a fairly wide margin, shifting my perspective made quite a difference!

If you try to view Top Ride like a subgame in a mainline Kirby game, as a quick break from the typical action, it becomes much easier to appreciate. The courses lend themselves well to fast-paced and chaotic races, and their bite-sized layouts make them a blast to constantly replay in Time Attack or Free Run. There’s certainly some fun to be had with Top Ride, even if it’s slightly less fun than the rest of the game.

Whenever Kirby Air Ride gets brought up in the modern day, the reason is almost always City Trial. You’ll likely see why as soon as you hop into a match: you’re placed into an open city alongside three other Kirbys and given 5 minutes to prepare for a Stadium event that’ll decide the victor. You’re supposed to find your preferred vehicle and upgrade its stats with the patches you’ll find inside crates and around the city, but in reality, you can spend your time however you’d like.

You can hunt down the pieces for the two legendary vehicles, you can attack your opponents and disrupt their progress, or you can just take in the vibes of the city, maybe even hopping off your vehicle to explore on-foot for a while (not that I’d recommend doing that during a normal round, but you can if you want!).

City Trial is the culmination of everything that makes Kirby Air Ride such a special game. The experimentation and longevity of Air Ride itself is enhanced by the city’s open-ended structure, allowing for the kind of strategy and choice that results in a near-endless amount of replay value. It’s easy to understand why City Trial’s so beloved, and while I tend to go back to the main Air Ride mode more often, I always have a blast returning to the city.

The Kirby series is already known for having very whimsical and fantastical locales, and Air Ride’s interpretation is unique even among them. Each of the main Air Ride courses have some kind of logic-defying setpiece, whether that's the underwater city of Checker Knights or the raging rapids of Celestial Valley. It results in the spectacle you'd expect from a 3D racing game, while making for a fittingly ethereal and dreamy feel.

That aesthetic is complimented nicely by the soundtrack, notable for being the first Kirby game to use streamed music with live instruments. The orchestral sound gives each location a sense of majesty and awe, fitting their vibes and suiting the general pace of a race quite well. Some standouts include the bombastic Checker Knights, the sweeping City Trial themes, the lovely remix of The Beginner's Room from Kirby Super Star (played as an alternate song on Beanstalk Park) and the electric menu theme.

I wish I had some meaningful or philosophical way of ending this, but I honestly don't - just go play Kirby Air Ride! It's an excellent showcase of the ingenuity and thoughtful design Masahiro Sakurai always brings to his games, and I can't wait to see what he'll do with Air Riders! Maybe I'll be telling you all about that once November rolls around, but until then, get prepared by playing this game for yourself!