Mario Kart World Direct Roundup

The Mario Kart World Direct has aired today and given us some more details about the game, though most of it was already deduced by the fans out there from the existing footage. For example, you could spot the Big Donut battle stage, which had soft-confirmed Battle Mode. But it's still nice to have an official confirmation on a number of things, including the possibility to play your classic three-lap courses in Versus Mode.

As a Zelda player, I'm naturally intrigued by the Free Roam mode with all the little secrets that you can find everywhere. The P-Switches are essentially like your Korok puzzles in this, but there are also special medallions to find and the ?-panels. We don't know yet what they will do, but it's not like I care about the reward with these things, as long as exploring the world is fun.

The drive-thoughs for unlocking outfits are also a nice idea. It looks like this will be based on the different courses and regions, where you can obtain Sushi and with it the Happi outfits around the new Japan-themed course, Cheep Cheep Falls. However, this will mean that you will have to go everywhere with all the characters in order to unlock all their outfits, which might be somewhat repetitive.

Also, that the outfitted characters are simply appended onto the character select screen is... far from ideal. Well, it's nice that characters in the same outfit are right next to each other, making it easy to see what you are still missing. But it will blow this out of proportion in the end, where it would be better if you were to select the character first and the outfit second, like in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

But it looks like Mario Kart World is truly getting the good stuff from Mario Kart Tour that didn't make it into the Booster Course Pass. This includes the "new" items, however, where additions like the Feather, the Hammer, the Ice Flower, or the Coin Box did already exist in previous games, mainly in Tour. It's still a novelty for everyone who hasn't played the mobile game (including myself), but only the Coin Shell and Kamek are truly new from what I can tell. And it's unfortunate for the latter, because he has just joined the fun only to be demoted to an item right away.

While there was no clear confirmation on this, it really looks like the new weird character additions, like the cow or the dolphin, come from Kamek, though. In the Direct he transformed all other players into Chargin' Chucks on a road with Chargin' Chucks, which certainly was no coincidence. And many of the new additions are present as stage hazards, like the bats. I'm guessing that there will be the default set of drivers with your typical Mario Kart cast, but you'll get to unlock the outfits and Kamek transformations on top.

The most interesting change has to be the Charge Jump, however, which is activated by the drift button, but you charge it by going straight instead of drifting. This jump is then what lets you dodge attacks, grind on rails and even briefly drive on walls. The possibilities of this looked insane and this will add a lot of depth to the racing overall.

All in all, Mario Kart Tour looks great and like an absolute must-have for the Nintendo Switch 2. It won't make me buy the system at launch, though, where right now I'm not interested in becoming a "Nintendo Switch 2 Ambassador".

Also, on a side note, I find it interesting how Nintendo is pushing Rosalina as this snow princess, like it's their version of Elsa from Frozen. I do like her Aurora outfit, however, it's really beautiful.