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The Switch 2 exclusive list is getting longer with the racing game Kirby Air Riders coming to the console on November 20th. Today, Nintendo offered a luxurious 45 minutes devoted to its cutest pink blob who, when you think about it, is really an eldritch horror of incalculable power. Here are the highlights from the Kirby Air Riders Direct.
Before even getting to the action of Air Riders, we were greeted with a smiling but tired sigh from director (and Kirby’s dad) Masahiro Sakurai. He explained that he was approached to lead Air Riders while he was working on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC, and that the new Kirby is a collaboration between his studio Sora and Bandai Namco.
Kirby Air Riders takes the original GameCube classic and modernizes it for the Switch 2. You can choose many more riders to play as instead of just Kirby including King Dedede, Banana Waddle Dee, and some cool-looking guy I just heard of named Knuckle Joe. The game also supports up to eight players in local wireless play or up to 16 players online.
And what will you do with those other 15 players? There’s races, point challenges, battle arenas, and good ole’ fashioned exploration. In Air Riders you can choose any number of racing machines, each with their own unique traits, and upgrade them to your hearts content. Is your paper glider machine too fragile? Spend some time exploring, gathering power ups to make it beefier. Then use your newly improved machine in a challenge designed to take advantage of your racer’s new stats.
Kirby Air Riders is the first game directed by Masahiro Sakurai ever since Nintendo’s tiredest soldier finished up work on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. In the interim, he’s been running a series of educational videos on YouTube sharing his experiences and lessons learned in game development while also, apparently, directing Air Riders.
That Kirby Air Riders is showing up now along with *inhales* Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star-Crossed World Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, has bolstered my Kirby Theory of Distress which hypothesizes that Nintendo releases a Kirby game whenever the world is in worse than average trouble. Kirby comes to save us once again in Kirby Air Riders launching on the Switch 2 November 20th.
In the meantime, Switch Online subscribers can get an early taste of the game’s soundtrack through the Nintendo Music app, which just added seven tracks ahead of Air Riders’ launch.