Kirby Air Riders

All good foxes know that chaos reigns. And when talking about the aesthetics of chaos, there’s one important word – a crucial concept, really – that must be discussed beforehand. A technical, deeply academic, almost inscrutable term that can confound even the analytical German mind of Theodor Adorno, who (an AI told me, so it must be true), gasped in bewilderment the first time he heard of it. I am, of course, referring to what some cats – who are not dogs, nor foxes – like to call “Bluglglgl.” Kirby Air Riders embodies Bluglglgl throughout its entire design. Kirby Air Riders is Bluglglgl in videogame form.

Okay, hold on for a second. You suspect I’m talking nonsense, I know, so I’m totally aware that what I’m about to ask you is the impossible, it’s something that even my ex wasn’t able to do: don’t leave. Trust this kind stranger who admittedly has no sense left in his poor head, but can sometimes – only sometimes – make a good point. In the Halibut Dictionary of Literary Terms, after all, Bluglglgl means “to be happy within uncertainty” (HALIBUT, 2024). It’s about the ecstatic feeling of freedom that can emanate from the lack of control, from the act of letting go. If you’re familiar with Kirby Air Ride for the GameCube (Air Riders is its sequel, of course), you can already guess where I’m going with this. But I bet a cup of coffee that you are not familiar with it. At all. So, let me explain.

To call Kirby Air Riders a kart racer is like calling a nuclear warhead an object encased in metal: you’re technically right, but you know, you may be missing out on a lot, too. In Kirby Air Riders, we indeed partake in races while riding something akin to karts. Still, if I show a clip of one of its main modes, called City Trial, to a Mario Kart enjoyer, there’s a good chance that they’ll have a visceral reaction to it, a primitive feeling of revulsion at the sheer, unmitigated chaos unfolding before their innocent eyes. They’ll think: “No, this can’t be right.”

Chaos. In Kirby Air Riders, we can sense it even on the controls, which are extremely simple at first glance, very inviting even, almost as alluring as the light coming from an anglerfish. But don’t be fooled, you’re swimming in very deep waters here. Kirby Air Riders is often called a one-button game: the karts accelerate by themselves, you see, which leaves us with the simple task of using a button to drift while steering them with the control stick. Occasionally, our special gauge fills up, too, so we – unfortunately – must also press a second button to activate it. It sounds simple, right? Maybe even too simple. Well, watch out for the anglerfish of chaos.

First, the fact that our karts move on their own doesn’t simplify things, but makes them much, much more complicated. Just imagine yourself driving your own car down a beautiful mountain at sunset, through some steep curves as the autumn leaves fall from the surrounding trees, until you reach a roaring waterfall. Beautiful. Now imagine that your car is always going forward as it’s constantly accelerating. You have almost no say in it. You’re inside that anglerfish now, my friend. You don’t even need the other karts on the track trying to damage yours, or the fire-breathing enemies on the way, or an oversized hamster smashing your car to bits while running over it to become overwhelmed by the experience. Don’t worry, though, because Kirby Air Riders has got all those other things, too.

I told you that the main button makes you drift. I didn’t lie, but that was not the whole truth either. Those fire-breathing enemies? Well, that button sucks them right up and makes our character fire projectiles, which we do… with the very same button. Yes, we drift, we suck up enemies, and we activate their “copy abilities” by pressing the same thing. And if we drift for a while, it also gives us a turbo boost when we release it. It’s a context-heavy button, in other words, so we’d better be fast at analyzing it on the fly, or it’s the anglerfish of chaos all over again.

Our vehicle is not a simple one, either: the “karts” here are not like in Mario Kart, where they just have different stats and sizes. No, they each control very differently. There is one that we can’t steer without drifting, for example, while another doesn’t drift at all, it simply comes to a halt when we try the maneuver, and lets us choose our next direction while standing still… during a race. There’s a vehicle that gets faster the more we use that turbo boost we get from drifting, but gets slower the more we forget to do that. So, imagine that you’re on a big straight line with no place to properly drift. How do you proceed now with this “kart”? Well, use your imagination, be creative, the world is a chaotic oyster.

There’s a machine that attacks others automatically and even robs their copy abilities – each time we hit an enemy or other racer in Kirby Air Riders we get a significant boost, so you can imagine how violent these races can naturally become –, while another is allergic to the ground and urges us to find ramps that allow it to fly swiftly over everybody else, avoiding the all carnage below. It’s amazing, really, how much variety Air Riders has got regarding its most fundamental mechanics: when we swap karts, we basically must relearn the whole game from scratch because the way we control our vehicles and interact with the environments has changed.

A final point about the controls: we attack people and creatures not with a button, but by tilting the control stick left and right, making our kart give a spin attack. This means that attacking while steering is quite hard: we usually have to choose which action – driving or making our friend mad because we got a boost by hitting their car – is better at the moment, always analyzing that sweet, beautiful context (hint: the right answer is always making your friend mad). We can map the attack action to shaking the controller, but only Wii kids will do that – and steering while shaking is still difficult, so the crucial choice the controls lead to is still preserved. After all, if the attack action were mapped to a simple button, there would be no downside to the action, so we would look around the track and see an endless barrage of spinning vehicles coming at us.

There are four game modes in Kirby Air Riders. The first is… Air Ride, the most approachable one. We race on beautifully rendered tracks reminiscent of Mario Kart, but with a more roller coaster vibe: there are even times where we get on rails to wind down and observe either the sheer spectacle of the surrounding set-pieces – one has the sea part before the racers as if Kirby were Moses, and has the rails section happen on top of a raging whirpool – or the beauty of the environments around us – such as that autumn mountain –, before the next descent makes us dive right back into the chaos of racing again.

These tracks are also intricately designed to accommodate most vehicles, giving each one an edge during different sections: some are better at curves, others at straight lines, some fare better at flying, while others at tight sections where they can hit everyone with a single spin attack. Tracks, then, try to offer a moment for everyone to shine – some still have the edge in specific ones, but the advantage is just that, an edge. These races can be exhilarating, too, as the sense of speed is great, and they are undoubtedly Kirby Air Riders at its most manageable: we can, for the most part, understand what we’re doing here. Savor these moments.

Then we have Top Ride, where we race on miniature versions of the main tracks in a top-down view. They are much quicker affairs than the standard races – we can even make it so that the whole track appear on the screen at all times, short as it is – and precisely because of that, they can get much more frantic: most of the time, racers will all be cluttered together in a murky mush of explosions, and spin attacks, and electric shots, and rolling metal balls, and bombs, and… Because you see, we have to deal not only with enemies, copy abilities, specials, and the common spinning attack in each game mode, but also with “Mario Kart items” scattered around the tracks, too, which can even transform us into wheels or other more hostile things.

So, here it’s where Kirby Air Riders starts to get more like Kirby Air Riders: in Top Ride, we start to lose control of things, we start to get confused, we start to lose sight of even our vehicle on the track, and our strategy can quickly go down the drain after our opponent turns into an UFO at the last lap and hits us five times in a row, allowing others to get the lead.

So far, so Mario Kart. But this is when we get to City Trial, the mode where Kirby Air Riders is at its most honest, at its most chaotic – the place where we must be one with Bluglglgl.

The pitch, true to form, is deceptively simple: we roam an open city area for five minutes, collecting power-ups scattered around, to face off against our opponents in a random, and usually very brief, minigame at the end. I know you’re wondering now if it makes sense to spend five minutes making a build for our machine just to play a 30-second minigame. Surely, it is anticlimactic. But here is the catch, my inquisitive friend, Kirby Air Riders’ secret sauce: winning is far from being the point in City Trial. The point is precisely the build-up, not the climax. Because the point… is Bluglglgl.

This is not a game about beating your friends or random people online and feeling proud of getting first place against all odds – a game that instills in you an intoxicating sense of achievement. No. Do you remember that time in Mario Kart when you got hit by a blue shell near the finish line, then a kart pushed you over the edge and, as soon as you got back, you got hit three times in a row by red shells, got run over by a Bullet Bill, and then received a text message from you boss notifying you that you had to cover for Timmy the whole weekend? Imagine an entire game built on what you felt that very moment: that powerlessness before the incoming pain, when you realized you had no say on any matter. You would lose the race and cover for Timmy, and there was nothing that could be done, especially since nowadays guillotines have become frowned upon.

Kirby Air Riders so laughs at our hubris, at our attempts to control the uncontrollable, of finding order in the chaos. It will frequently pull the rug from under us in increasingly funny ways: we can try to build a fast machine, catching lots of power-ups that increase our maximum speed, but the game allows us to increase it too much, to the point where we can’t control our vehicle anymore and we’re left ping-ponging around the map… while collecting even more speed power-ups. We can build a machine that flies with more ease and has great speed while doing so, but our opponent has just retrieved three parts of an item that turns them into a giant boss that can level up the entire city. The game has suddenly turned into a raid boss battle where that player is the boss, and our machine… well, at least we can say it flies really well.

Even the little moments are chaotic: there was this time when I had just spotted an offense power-up and was driving toward it, when an item that hugely (I can’t emphasize it enough) increases the vehicle’s speed spawned right in front of it, giving me no time to steer away. So, three seconds later, I found myself on the other side of the map, madly bumping into every wall and building, haplessly trying to maneuver my kart while realizing that one of my opponents had not only just turned giant but was also coming right at me, shooting lasers. In other words, the fun in Kirby Air Riders comes from this comedic sense of escalation, where things go from strategic to slapstick comedy in a matter of seconds.

And the game expects us to join in on the chaos, to go after our opponents for no other reason than the fact that it is fun to mess with their plans. It has that impactful freeze frame from Smash Bros. when we destroy their machines; it shows the pictures of everyone that we hit when we threw an item backwards, so that things can get personal between us, and sometimes it even puts up a cam of the giant spiked ball we threw in the city to display its impact in all its glory. Kirby Air Riders wants us to revel in the chaos we help sow.

To make matters even more intense, random events happen frequently in City Trial. Portals can open anywhere, and usually in front of other portals. So, there was this one time when I got that cursed item that hugely increases speed right as I entered one of these portals, which led me to experience firsthand what Loki felt in Thor Ragnarök, when he fell from one portal to the other for hours without being able to get away. And I could swear one of them even led me to the moon, but I blazed through the next portal so fast I couldn’t even process what was happening.

And there are many such random events: a fog can appear out of nowhere to hinder our sight, there are sudden boss fights where we must decide whether to help kill it or take advantage that everyone is grouped together in the battle to unleash hell on them instead, and sometimes we can even look up to the sky to see giant spiked metal balls raining down at us, for Karma catches up fast with the wicked. All the while, a melancholic ballad that urges us to “See glittering oceans, flora, lush and green, Creating a work of art as you hit full speed” may be playing in the background.

But here’s the thing: we’re not supposed to get angry when all this bullshit happens. Games like The Last Remnant also remove our control from things, but turn everything into an infuriating exercise in frustration when they still expect us to overcome all that and… win. Kirby Air Riders, on the other hand, just expect us to laugh at the bullshit. We’re supposed to have fun before the absurdity of it all. We have no control, no certainty about anything anymore: giant spiked metal balls are raining down from the sky, most cute animal videos are now AI, and one US President may have performed oral sex on another or on a horse, and that’s not only okay, but hysterical. You get it now? Bluglglgl.

Fiction makes much more sense than reality, you see; it has rules, themes, and structure. One of its many allures is precisely the fact that it tries to find meaning in life, giving order to things: it studies characters, recontextualizes events, and helps us understand the human condition. Reality, on the other hand, is not subtle; it has no contract with verisimilitude. Things in real life don’t make sense. They’re bizarre, illogical, sudden. We can’t understand a person as we can understand a character. You may believe you know everything there is to know about the loved one sleeping on your bed, but the next day, they’re complaining that the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings are too long. No, control is an illusion.

The power of games like Kirby Air Riders, then, comes from Bluglglgl, from finding happiness amidst that chaos. It comes from the constant friction between our desperate attempts to reattain control – as we get better in the game and start to plan, strategize, and build our machines with a goal in mind – and the game’s frequent reminders that, just like in real life, a wrecking ball will appear out of thin air to demolish our hopes and dreams. And we’re supposed to laugh alongside it: it’s freeing, really. Just imagine that you can finally loosen your grip on your life, let things just be for a couple of hours, without a worry in the world, with the assurance that everything is going to be ok – even if they are most definitely not – because this eldritch fluffy pink ball that sucks up his own friends to rob their abilities has got your back. It’s liberating.

Finally, we arrive at the game’s final mode: Road Trip. This is a single-player campaign with a story full of richly rendered cutscenes where we always choose one of three missions to tackle – taken from the other game modes, such as normal races, top-down races, boss battles, and such – and boost our stats after each victory. There are many different paths to take, leading to distinct stages, each with its own set of missions – and there’s even a secret ending to get, where things escalate to ridiculously epic proportions.

But what could a story in Kirby Air Riders be about, you wonder? Well, of course it’s about a sentient clockwork monkey-paw-style comet that grants twisted wishes to people: an inorganic life form just dreamt of being able to move around – as it’s standing still on the very same spot for centuries and you gotta admit that sounds boring – and this giant galactic clock is like, “okay, great, let’s see how I can use this wish to justify the creation of an army of spider robots and the eventual destruction of the world.” But first, they build tons of vehicles and hand them to everyone but that inorganic life form. They’re a dick like that.

The story is a whole lot of nonsense, in other words, but one that the game, of course, plays with a straight face. The tone is serious, almost solemn. And after everything you’ve just read, I believe you understand why I wouldn’t have it any other way. Kirby Air Riders, after all, is a game for folk who are totally, hopelessly mad, folk who know that all good foxes are right. Chaos reigns, and that’s okay. Become mad, too. Embrace Buglglgl. You see, we’re all happy down here in Popstar, racing with Kirby. We’re all free. And, with the proper machines, we can all float, too.

December 05, 2025.