There is a whole developing competitive scene around Masahiro Sakurai’s hugely underrated racing/combat game starring colored blob-monsters, Kirby’s Air Ride. (Previously: about City Trial, Sakurai talks KAR, stats explainer video). It’s like F-Zero, but cuter, but also meaner. Its standout mode, City Trial, is possibly Sakurai’s greatest creation, yes more than Smash Bros., yes more than Kirby themself. If you’ve never tried it, it’ll be hard to picture. I linked to my previous explanation, but here’s a quick summary.
Up to four Kirbys (including possible computer Kirbys) roam around an open world map that’s not too big, but not too small either. They start out with weak star vehicles, but there are better/weirder/different replacement vehicles randomly scattered around the map. There’s also “patches,” each of which is a small but significant improvement to one stat, randomly placed too. For 3-7 minutes, everyone tries to get the vehicle most suited to their play style, and as many powerup patches as they can. But they can also attack each other, using powerups that are also, yes, randomly scattered around. There’s also random events that occur. And Legendary Machine parts to collect. After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a random contest. Surprise! You were collecting Glide powerups the whole time, but you’re in a race event! Or you got Top Speed powerups, but you’re in a battle event! You don’t know which event will happen. Everyone’s often given a strong clue, but it isn’t always accurate!
City Trial is a great spectator game. It’s fun watching human players zoom around building their machine’s power, and sometimes savagely tearing at each other with all the ferocity a cute blobular creature can muster. Each Trial is a little story to itself, its participants struggling to increase their power in the limited time. Which a single patch isn’t much, really good players can scoop up over 100 of them in the short period allowed, and machines rapidly advance from merely fast to pure manifestations of bewildering, near-uncontrollable speed. Then the contest is chosen, it’s over in less than a minute, and the next round begins, everyone back at square one. It’s so intense.
Kirby Air Ride was one of a very small number of games to use the Gamecube’s Network Adapter, meaning it supports LAN play, and through that function rabidly enthusiastic players have turned it into an internet-capable game. KAR, as it is amusingly called, has been further hacked to make it more suitable for competitive play.
The community has a homepage with details on how to get involved and downloads for their customized version and emulator, a Youtube channel with loads of great matchups, and a Discord. Here are a few matches to show you what I mean.
I post two complete matches below, here’s some things to watch for:
- The star each Kirby starts with is the Compact Star, which has good default turning and acceleration but little else. Particularly, its Defense is the absolute worst, and no number of Defense patches will improve it!
- Each stat except HP can get up to 18; HP tops out at 16.
- Stats from patches are multiplied by the stats of the vehicle the player is riding. A high vehicle stat means each patch will make the effect even greater!
- Players can hop off their star at any time. While not on a vehicle will point out the location of other stars within the field of view.
- When a player is attacked, they usually drop a patch, which the attacking player may be able to snatch away.
- If a player’s star gets destroyed, they drop a lot (although not all) of their patches onto the ground. Players can’t collect patches while not on a vehicle, so the attacker can scoop many of them up unchallenged!
- If time runs out when a Kirby isn’t on a star, they’ll be given a Compact Star for the event, which usually means they’ll lose.
- The Shadow Star (the purple glowing one) has the highest attack but low defense. The Wagon Star (like a pink cube) has very high health and defense, but can’t boost, so isn’t great for racing. Both tend to be strong choices.
- Patches can generate out in the open, but blue boxes can drop from one to four of them when broken open.
- Gray patches are power-downs.
- Scattered around the map in some matches are Legendary Machine parts. If one player collects all three parts of a Legendary Machine, they get it immediately, and it replaces the machine they had before. There are two of these, the Hydra, a big green monster with extremely high attack but that needs charge boost power to even move, and the Dragoon, a red/white wing with very high maneuverability, flight and speed. Completing either one usually, but not always, spells victory in a match; Hydra particularly can be stunlocked before it can move during the end-of-game contest, and worn down before it has a chance to react. There are rules to how Legendary Machine parts can appear: they always generate from Red boxes, and appear in certain parts of the map, at certain times.
- The patches also have patterns to how they appear. The probability of finding different patch types is a subtle clue for which contest will occur.
For examples, here’s what the channel thinks might be the most hectic competitive match yet recorded (7 minutes):
A match from a 2025 tournament, Dr.Narwhal vs Wrench55154 (best of five, so 33 minutes):
Here’s the Grand Finals of the 2024 City Trial Fall Classic, drcKarGaming vs. Infury Z (58 exciting minutes):
Here’s a weird double-turnabout that happened in one game (1 minute):
And here is Support PvPs’s two video series on combat in City Trial, the Art of PvP part 1 (6 minutes) and part 2 (7 minutes).
Sakurai says that Kirby Air Riders, the upcoming sequel for Switch 2, is looking like it’s going to be good. I can’t wait to see it!
