“Nintendo Kart” and the Problem with Nintendo’s Characters
With the recent announcement of Mario Kart 9 finally not being a dream, the phrase “Nintendo Kart” has popped up so many times on my feed in spaces like Twitter and YouTube that I’ve grown somewhat used to seeing it around.
The gist of it, for those unaware, is that because Mario Kart 8 already featured a host of guest characters (i.e. non-Mario characters) as playable in its roster, namely characters like Inkling and Link, this next installment in the franchise should pull a sort of “Smash Bros” move and add characters from every Nintendo franchise in a new type of racing title, colloquially called “Nintendo Kart”.
This is a debate that seems to hinge on the idea of crossovers as a big step forward for the video game industry, and while I do agree that crossovers like this can be fun and lead to a slew of cool and creative ideas to push the respective series in new directions, I personally don’t think this would be the ideal scenario for Mario Kart itself. In addition, I feel it would aggregate an already existing issue Nintendo seems to have when it comes to using many of its characters. Let me explain.
When the name of the game is literally “Mario Kart” chances are your first expectation is that there are a lot of Mario characters in it, right? I think that goes without saying, especially because that’s been the case for years. That of course does not change the fact that Mario is essentially the face of Nintendo, so bringing in characters from other Nintendo franchises would make sense on paper.
This is likely the reason many people find the idea of “Nintendo Kart” so attractive. Nintendo has a lot of different franchises under its belt that would make for interesting or creative tracks to race on, and since there are already characters like Isabelle and Link in there anyway, what’s the point of stopping there? Just go big and make an entire Nintendo-themed racing game instead of just limiting it to characters from Super Mario. Makes sense.
However, this may not necessarily be the best option for the series because of one, big reason: wasted potential. When you make something like an entire racing game themed around a particular series, it’s only natural to try and bring as many characters from that series in as possible to keep the roster diverse. We’ve already well-established that.
The problem with Mario Kart is that it’s not only hardly done that over the years, but Nintendo also seems to be actively avoiding it. This may come as a surprise to some people, but I’ve recently learned that King K. Rool, the main antagonist of the Donkey Kong Country series and is still technically a spin-off of the larger Super Mario universe, is not in Mario Kart… still.
Of course, Donkey Kong himself is, even Diddy and Dixie Kong (though they’re apparently not in 8 for some reason), but King K. Rool himself has never been in a single game. In fact, he hasn’t even been in Diddy Kong Racing, the game made specifically for the spin-off series he’s actually from.
Hopefully, this is starting to paint a bit of a picture for you, but let’s go a little deeper. Recently I came across a Tweet that was set up as a sort of iceberg exploration of Super Mario’s many different characters. It went into some pretty deep cuts, but it was essentially meant to illustrate how few characters from across the series are actually in Mario Kart, and it’s surprising to say the least.
While I don’t necessarily agree that deep-cut or extremely obscure Mario characters need to be in Mario Kart, it is still hard to deny that it’s odd that characters from popular spin-off series like Fawful, King K. Rool (again), or Professor E. Gadd have simply never been playable before.
Expanding the roster to include extremely obscure characters most people won’t recognize wouldn’t make sense, of course, but the spin-off games like Paper Mario, the Mario and Luigi series, WarioWare, and again, Donkey Kong, have a wide variety of characters to choose from that could easily be made into playable characters.
They made an entire racing game just for Donkey Kong alone. What’s stopping them from bringing over characters from that game, or making some kind of DLC expansion that includes newer versions of Diddy Kong Racing tracks with those characters added in?
While I can understand why people are into the concept of “Nintendo Kart”, considering Nintendo is already implementing guest characters like Isabelle and Link and will likely continue to, I think it’s best to keep these as “guest” characters and focus more on actually making Mario Kart true to its name.
I can’t be the only person who finds it odd that Nintendo has added characters like Tanooki Mario, Cat Peach, Baby Rosalina, and Pink Gold Peach (which is literally no different than regular Peach) to the game, but has still not added Pauline, Fawful, Professor E. Gadd (although they apparently almost did), King K. Rool, Toadsworth, etc. The list goes on.
In short, while I still do not think it’s necessary to add very obscure characters, I think Nintendo should focus first on making Mario Kart actually representative of the larger Super Mario franchise before even considering adding characters from other Nintendo series. And I mean actual characters, not Baby Diddy Kong or Bronze Luigi or something. They already have plenty of material to work with that, for whatever reason, they’re not taking advantage of, and I think this is something that can be said about a lot of Nintendo franchises.
Nintendo has just as many spin-off series for its various franchises as it does actual franchises of its own, and yet we don’t see a lot of characters used from them very often. I could go on about characters from series like Paper Mario, Kirby, and others that have rarely shown up outside of their respective games. While I can understand that popular characters take priority, it’s a shame to see good ideas not reutilized.
My hope is that Nintendo will take notice of how many people truly care about their spin-off franchises and take note of what they can do to make Mario Kart 9 into a true “Mario Kart” game and not a “racing Smash Bros”, but only time will tell.
Thank you for stopping by Nintendo Link! What do you think about Mario Kart 9? Do you think it should bring in characters from all over the Nintendo library? Or should they stick to a Super Mario theme? Let us know what you think in the comments!
