It’s not often that I am (relatively) on top of the zeitgeist in video games, playing the new big-name release of the moment while also having a lot of detailed thoughts about it, so I figured I’d take advantage of it and get out my thoughts on ‘Mario Kart World’, since they’re weirdly complicated.
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Let’s just get the obvious out of the way: following up ‘Mario Kart 8’ was always going to be a tall order. It feels easy to forget that, given how much the game has become a fixture of the gaming landscape, serving as the most recent mainline entry in the series for over a decade. It’s maybe also easy to lose sight of just how defining a landmark it was that landscape, too; the Mario Kart series has long been one of Nintendo’s blockbusters, but MK8 took it to absurd levels.*
​*It’s not essential to this column, but I love number-based trivia too much to pass some of this up, even if the data is a little less comprehensive than sports stats. MK8 was the best-selling game on two straight Nintendo consoles. On Wii U, it sold nearly 8.5 million copies, which still put it 2.5 million ahead of second place on the console. On Switch, it octupled those numbers, crossing the 68 million mark and landing over 20 million ahead of the second-best seller, the most recent Animal Crossing. It more than doubled the sales of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ and ‘Super Mario Odyssey’, the big new entries for Nintendo’s two flagship series. It sold roughly as many copies as every single new mainline Pokémon entry on the console combined (Sword, Shield, Scarlet, Violet, and Legends Arceus). It still regularly pops up on Nintendo’s monthly best-seller lists, despite being a decade old. And combining the two versions’ sales, it appears to be the fifth-best selling video game of all-time. There’s even a chance those numbers will go up for a little bit longer, since the most recent update seems to have been from the end of March.​
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Even setting aside the crazy objective stats for the more subjective evaluations, as a long-time fan of the series, I think it’s pretty easy to call 8 Deluxe “The Definitive Mario Kart Game”. Even when the original game was released, I was already inclined to that idea; the 32 base-game courses include many of the best tracks in series history, and I think the overall set is easily the best one all-around. The retro levels all feel improved from their original incarnations, the game always looked gorgeous and stylish, the new mechanics are interesting and allow for a whole bunch of exciting course designs, and the racing feels as fun as ever and balanced in a way that not every entry in the series has been.
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The later DLC and Deluxe version only turned things up a notch, adding another 16 strong courses that stood up to the originals, debuting the new 200cc game mode, and fixing some of the original short-comings (the weak battle mode, a thin roster). And the Booster Pass additions of 2022-23 were maybe not as universally strong as the ones that came before, but there were still some standout levels in there. And moreover, it was a full 48 new courses, doubling the tracklist in what was already the biggest game in the series and revitalizing interest in a game that was over eight years old at that point.
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I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the final version of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe feels more or less like the perfect version of what the series had been doing up to that point. So the obvious question was always: where do you go from there? I think everyone who liked the series thought that. There was always going to be a next Mario Kart entry eventually, so what would that look like?
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