Set Side B

NOTE: In another world, Roguelike Celebration is going on today! A lot of people worked hard to organize it, and more worked hard to present at it, including some of the coolest people in indie gamedev, IMO, just to apply a little timely peer pressure. As I write this it hasn’t happened yet, so not a lot to say that I haven’t already, but I’ll say more about this once the talks have actually occurred. In the meantime….

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Here is the Direct itself (1 hour 2 minues):

I overall really like the direction the news of Kirby Air Riders is going, even if I have a few mixed feelings about it. There’s a lot of cool and funny new elements, but it also feels like Sakurai might be leaning a bit too hard into the Smash Bros. style. So many of the new features are note-for-note similar to Super Smash Bros, which I can’t just abbreviate to “SSB,” because that’s the same initials as this blog.

Like the fully-voiced opening theme song. The feature of Smash Ultimate that I hated more than perhaps any other part was that stupid theme song. It’s not that it’s a bad song itself, but every time I started the game up I was greeted by a song about the most overused tropes, not just in gaming, but in current-day media altogether: light and darkness. Oh, if my griping might start a movement to take pop culture back from terrible good-slash-evil narratives I would be a pleased whatever-it-is-that-I-am. I got the Adventure Mode out of the way very early in my time with Ultimate, I didn’t need to be reminded it existed at every startup. Air Riders has one of these songs too. I’m sure it’s nicely sung and produced, but it’s the opposite of what makes Kirby music great: bright, cheery, impressively scored tunes with an incredibly quick tempo.

Other features in both games:

• For starters, the interface, especially the menus, are extremely Smash-like.
• Amiibo support, in the sense that both games store machine learning parameters onto the figure’s 2K of flash memory to support trainable characters. Yes, figure players are back, the feature only interesting to me and a handful of others. I wonder how the game will utilize the approximately ½K of flash storage available to game applications this time?
• Uses a currency for unlocks, and a weird kind of fake economy. Smash Ultimate has gold and “SP.” Air Riders has “Miles,” which are essentially gold coins again. Is anyone annoyed that gold, a metal without a lot of industrial use, is still absurdly valuable mostly because of jewelry use and tradition?
• A very similar visual style. When unlocks happen, words splash across the screen in your face in exactly the same way familiar to anyone who followed the Smash Ultimate updates eight years ago.
• Sakurai says it’s different, but “Global Win Power” still looks a whole lot like “Global Smash Power.”
• On top of it all it uses the Smash Announcer, who unless my ear is mistaken (it frequently is) has been with the series since Melee, at least in English.

Not that the requisite griping is over, there’s lots of really fun things unveiled too. Like the inclusion of loads more Kirby characters, some of them pretty deep cuts. My favorites have to be Lololo and Lalala, who are direct references to HAL Laboratory’s early MSX hit Eggerland, known in the US as The Adventures of Lolo. Other than an obscure Windows release many years ago now, Lolo and Lala basically live on Planet Popstar these days, with no forwarding address left to the King of Eggerland.

Í’m struck by the fact that, by having so many varied villains who all have become Kirby’s friends over the years, Kirby’s adorable little universe has become one of the largest and deepest in all of gaming. Among Kirby’s friends are a mischievous penguin, a mysterious knight with a battleship, a lady robot entrepreneur, a mouse thief, a spacefairing alien, a spider person, a tricky clown, and more. Most of these characters were created after Sakurai left HAL and Nintendo, but yet are fully embraced by Air Riders, and I love that.

And there are so many weird little unnecessary touches. There’s a full lobby-like “paddock” where characters can congregate between matches, and they gave everyone full walking and jumping animations just for interacting within it. Sakurai says it took a lot of effort to make them, and I believe him. Also, it seems to be fully catered. Chef Kawasaki’s been busy, I see.

The best reveal was the new game mode, Road Trip. I’ve always liked Smash Bros’ weird side game modes, like Smash Run and Smash Board. There’s no one working in big gamedev who is as free with his thinking and design atoms as Masahiro Sakurai. He takes all these design elements and combines them in a way to create these little narrative engines. Road Trip fills the biggest gap of the original Kirby Air Ride, a game that, despite the greatness of City Trial, had absolutely no Story or Grand Prix mode, and so seemed a bit light. And indeed, there’s still no Grand Prix, or other structured racing-only mode.

Back to Road Trip, I especially like that it uses the patches from City Trial, so as you play you also create customized vehicles.

All of the tracks from Air Ride are returning in Air Riders, although it seems the original City Trial City isn’t. Also returning is Top Ride, Sakurai’s weird homage to, of all things, Atari’s incredibly ancient Sprint series. He’s never mentioned Sprint in a Direct, but it’s so obviously a riff on Sprint. Even if he’s never heard of Sprint (given the breadth of his knowledge of the history of video games that seems really unlikely), it had to have been inspired by other games that were inspired by Sprint.

Another of Air Ride’s signature features, the Checklist, is back. To explain: each game mode has a grid of boxes, each with some feat or objective to perform. While you can unlock them in any order, you aren’t told what any of them are at first. But after you stumble upon your first unlock, the conditions of the squares surrounding that one are revealed to you, so it results in a kind of progression. Some of the squares unlock features when opened, and as you clear the board you’re eventually granted a handful of free checkmarks, to help clear out the hardest challenges.

In Air Ride, the Checklist was the only thing providing continuity between play sessions. That’s less the case with all the things there are to unlock in Air Riders, but what with Nintendo’s stubborn resistance to implementing Achievement features, as about the nearest thing to that Nintendo’s ever published, they’re welcome.

Here’s a flurry of little things I noticed:

• A bespoke boss, a mecha version of our favorite emperor penguin*, called Robo Dedede. Say it quickly, it’s fun!
• A special kind of collectable called gummis. They seem to have no purpose except to pile up onscreen in a physics engine and letting the player sift through them like a greedy candy miser.
• A transforming vehicle, that transforms like a Transformer, metal bits shifting around into an alternate shape.
• For the first time in any Kirby game, you can be nice to Whispy Woods, instead of making the old tree cry.
• Some fun cameo characters revealed: Tortilding (from Forgotten Land), King Golem (from Amazing Mirror) and Computer Virus (Super Star), the funniest Kirby boss of all, where you fought it in a mocked-up JRPG-style battle.
• A track only named “?” in the Direct, which uses music from the Nightmare fight from Kirby’s Adventure (the first “serious” opponent the pink blob creature ever fought), and features the Heart of Nova in the background.
• For the first time really in a Nintendo game, it looks like they paid serious attention to accessibility! You can turn off screen-shake and move the camera so that motion isn’t so extreme. As time has passed I find myself more and more bothered by screen-shaking effects, though I’m not sure if that’s me, or just that they’re much more common nowadays than they were in the days of the NES.
• Once of the license designs shown off uses iconography from the Japan-only Kirby Cafés.

* I think the official line is that King Dedede is some kind of eagle, but he’s never shown any hint of flying like a real bird, and the idea of Kirby’s first major antagonist being a penguin with royal pretensions is too much fun to reject.