After negative previews of Kirby Air Riders at Gamescom, a reader is concerned that Nintendo’s lower budget Switch 2 games are all proving a disappointment.
When I saw GC’s less than glowing preview of Kirby Air Riders I was really hoping that maybe they were just having a bad day or didn’t vibe with the game for some reason. But then I saw the other previews and, while some of them minced their words or beat around the bush, the consensus seems to be that the game’s a dud.
The weird thing about this is that’s absolutely not a surprise, because the GameCube version was not well liked either (I won’t pretend I played it, but I watched footage on YouTube and you can see it’s very similar to the new game). So you’ve got weird decision after weird decision, with a sequel to game that nobody liked and wasn’t successful, that doesn’t seem to be improving or adding anything.
And that’s before you get into the comparisons with Mario Kart World and the fact that one of the main selling points of the original seems to be that you only used one button to control it. But now that’s not true and yet I don’t really understand why, because it seems to working the same basic way.
I can’t talk more about Kirby Air Riders because I haven’t played either of them but the problem for Nintendo, assuming I’m not the only one, is that I have no intention of doing so either. What really worries me is that this is becoming part of a pattern, especially as the next game they’re going to start talking about is Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment.
Now, I did play the last one (this is the third) and it was not great. I knew going in that it wouldn’t be amazing going but given it was based on Zelda: Breath Of The Wild I wanted to give it a go. I will not be doing that again and I can’t help imagining this is a problem for Nintendo, assuming that I don’t have really weird taste in games that’s not shared by anyone else – which as far as I know I don’t.
Given that all this follows Welcome Tour and Drag x Drive, both of which have taken a drubbing on Metacritic, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that there are now two tiers of games at Nintendo: the big budget, well known franchises that are as good as ever, including Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, and, hopefully, Metroid Prime 4.
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Then you’ve got the B-tier which previously could sometimes not be so good but usually were, or had some other redeeming feature, like being weird or experimental. But for the Switch 2 the B-tier is just… bad. Worse than that, it’s all games that looked bad as soon as they were shown off and then turned out to be exactly what was expected.
I think for me, the strangest thing is how they got picked to become games in the first place. Why are they making Kirby Air Riders or Hyrule Warriors or a really bland looking… whatever Welcome Tour was supposed to be? How did these ideas get past the initial meeting, as something that not only did Nintendo make but decided to have them out in the first six months of their new console.
Zelda is a big name and I guess Hyrule Warriors was an easy way to get a game out this year but the others… absolutely nobody was asking for this and it hasn’t benefitted Nintendo in any way.
What also worries me is what about the games that come in the middle? Things like Fire Emblem, which are low budget but well-known franchises that people like? I worry that, in Nintendo’s mind, that’s probably going to be closer to Kiry Air Riders in terms of how they handle it and I really don’t want to see the next game of that getting less than 50 on Metacritic.
I find all this quite disturbing because Nintendo is torching its reputation in the strangest way possible. Its big games are still amazing but its smaller ones, so far, all suck. And no, that was not meant to be a joke about Kirby.
By reader Onibee
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