Why Mario Kart Needs Change - Article
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 04 June 2014 / 8,207 Views
Okay, let's get this out of the way first: This is not a critique of Mario Kart 8. It's fabulous, okay? If you're on the fence about it, don't be; it's a wonderful game, and I really, really like it. So calm down, fellow Nintendo fans.
What I'm talking about is the necessity of changing from title to title - some kind of new gameplay mechanic or play style is absolutely necessary for each new title in several genres, and racing is one of them. The same thing goes for one-on-one arcade-style fighting games (you know, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Soul Caliber, all that). The necessity for change comes from one of the core reasons that we game: the great feeling we get from mastering a new skill.
There are plenty of successful franchises - a few JRPG series come to mind - that never change their core gameplay mechanics and are still wildly successful, but that's because they provide new stories and new worlds to explore, which is what fans of the series really want. There's not even, to my knowledge, any story behind Mario Kart (not even the shams of “stories” behind the Mario Party games), so let's explore what keeps us coming back to the series.
For the sake of comparison, let's give ourselves a gap of several games. Compare Mario Kart Double-Dash!! for the Gamecube with Mario Kart 8 for the WiiU (Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart DS, and Mario Kart 7 for the 3DS came between them). Double-Dash!! was, in my humble experience, a nearly-perfect game. It got everything right: tight controls, awesome local multiplayer, and a solid single player experience. Since then, we've lost the two-driver system, the character-specific items, the arena battling, the super-tight drift controls, and the manual drift-boost (stick wiggle in DD!!, based on several automatic factors in 8). So why have we lost all of that?
Well, it's been changed because change is what makes it interesting. And I'm not talking about the changes of novelty, like new characters (but how cute is Lemmy?), I'm talking about the changes in how we play. If your skill set didn't need to change from game to game, you wouldn't learn anything new, and that's a problem. Gaining mastery of new skills is what makes this game fun! It's the constantly tweaking and changing how we play to shave fractions of seconds off of lap times that keeps us coming back. If you could master DD!! and be just as good at 8 the second that you picked it up, what would you have to play for? Sure, now there's a robust online experience (and if there's anything the continued fanbase of Super Smash Bros. Melee teaches us, it's that solid multiplayer can carry a game for years), but multiplayer isn't enough. We gamers need to compete within ourselves (which is often disguised as competing against the game itself) sometimes, to grow our skill sets and push our own limits.
In order for that sort of appeal to continue to be present for us gamers, there's a necessity for change. Yes, how things are can be awesome but eventually we still need change. Even if it's not necessarily for the better - if it's of equal quality but different, it's still worth doing because it gives us something new to master; it helps us feel like we're extraordinarily good at something impressive to behold, and that's something we often crave from games because we can't get it in our non-virtual lives - at least not as quickly and easily.
So basically what I'm saying is please stop kvetching about the track-based battle mode in Mario Kart 8. Yes, the arenas were good, but that's no reason to say that they didn't need to change.
Editor's Note: This is an editorial piece and does not necessarily represent the views of gamrReview or its other writers.
