OnePotWonder
Inkling Fleet Admiral
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2024
- Messages
- 871
- Location
- Marooner’s Bay
- Pronouns
- He/Him
- Switch Friend Code
- SW-2068-8904-6306
This is by far and easily the deepest I've ever seen anyone dissect any Mario Kart game. That's probably the reason people tend to overlook the issues. The double items and the sheer number of available tracks to play on also carry the game's reputation a lot, since those mainstream features are what grab players' attention and keep a hold of it. While it is overrated, it's for understandable reasons.I was thinking about the Mario Odyssey post earlier. The points there are understandable except for it being the single most overrated game ever which sounded like a bit of hyperbole on paper. It makes sense with the reasons given in the post, but it got me trying to think of a game that I'd call more overrated. I quickly came to the conclusion "oh wait I don't play any video games." I still think Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Mega Man 2 are my answers of the ones I've played. Mega Man 2 I have less to say about and doesn't feel like as hot of a take since a solid chunk of the Mega Man community has moved to something like 11, 9, or 6 being the best so I'll just talk about MK8D.
Base gameplay of Mario Kart 8 consists of literally just hold forward, hit a turn, drift (or don't if you don't know how), then continue holding forward. That might sound like an oversimplification of racing as a whole but compare this to previous Mario Karts that had little things to optimize as you went along. Mario Kart DS and 7 had their own forms of snaking, as did Mario Kart Wii unless you had a bike in which case there are several of these things, and even base Mario Kart 8 still had firehopping. MK8D by comparison has absolutely none of this.
In 150cc you can release your drift into some tighter corners with offroad to cut them a bit faster but this has never felt great to do and there are very few spots like this that you would be able to pick up on without explicitly going out of your way to look for them. Like...this game should not force me to dig through internet stuff to find out how to optimize a mechanic that feels awful to learn in order to find more appreciation in a game I find awful to play to begin with. The thing with the other stuff was that you can do them anywhere and messing them up means you don't go any slower than had you not tried them to begin with. There is no incentive not to try and learn them.
The new anti-gravity mechanic is lame and adds basically nothing to the game outside of serving to make the maps for each course a bit funny lookin. Can't really say much there, but I can tell you that the game removes anything interesting you could do with gliders and doesn't do anything to fix how horrible underwater sections feel. Pretty clearly all just meant to be marketing gimmicks that they gave little to no care to.
The new items that weren't in 7 mostly suck. They feel awful to use and even worse to play against. The Fire and Boomerang Flowers all just exist to compound the issue of the middle spots feeling horrible to be in by adding even worse unreactable nonsense to deal with, the Piranha Plant locks you into it way too long for how weak the effect feels to use, and the Boo often feels explicitly worse than the other items you could get in the places you usually get it in. The Super Horn isn't bad though. I like the idea of a quick, burst radius kinda deal and I like how situational it is for actually blocking the Blue Shell as opposed to needing to be burned on a Red Shell or something.
Speaking of both of those things, the sheer amount of Red Shells. If you're playing the game in first then it becomes obnoxious. All you end up doing is cycling through items to get a Coin as your first item in case of a Boo, a defense item as your second one, and then...waiting. That's it. Using either of those two items is way too risky because of the abundance of Red Shells. No using any of the items you get in more interesting or thoughtful ways.
When you do get to use items from first though...why on earth would you give 1st place access to Bob-ombs?? Dropping a bomb backwards is the single most difficult-to-avoid setup in previous Mario Kart games and is also the most punishing because of how long you take to recover from Bob-omb damage. It was already a problem that being in first can be way too oppressive with how much chaos there is in the middle spots. Maybe this is a buff to compensate for Red Shells being a nerf? Then in that case, why would you choose to both buff and nerf first place at the same time in the most obnoxious way possible on both ends?
I'm not sure how I feel about the whole "distance from first place" thing they have for items. I've seen several games where the person in dead last just gets bullied like crazy because other people are getting Stars and Golden Mushrooms in 6th place for some reason, but this is also the game where sandbagging is at its strongest. That much is probably because of the game having double items which in itself I don't entirely mind. There is, or at least was before they patched it, an interesting dynamic where you want the double item box in a set, but you think the player in front of you might want it, so you'll need to react on the fly and change your direction to hit a box you think the guy in front of you won't. But then they made the item boxes respawn like instantly so even that's gone. Whoops.
Some of you may say that I'm looking at this game too deeply as if it's a competitive and that it's just a party game that you goof off with friends with. I do not enjoy any Mario Kart game as a competitive experience. Maybe some of them are better than others if you sink a ton of time into them but I genuinely would not know which. Every single thing I just listed save maybe the last point serves to make the game less enjoyable even as a more casual game. I have picked up Mario Kart DS or Wii on my own time just because the mechanics are fun to screw around with but only begrudgingly pick up MK8D when other friends are already playing because it's the only option they want to play.
The game's graphics, music, and visuals to each track are all pretty good for the most part, but those things have not been bad for any previous Mario Kart game other than Wii or DS's graphics being subpar. The visual stuff definitely isn't the reason so many people prefer this game to previous ones though because a lot of the DLC tracks look very strange. Not bad, but definitely of a much lower quality than the base game's tracks. This was a big thing people got up in arms over on the internet before so I'll just say the artstyles are not consistent between the base game and DLC and the texturing and stuff is way worse in the DLC. Either way I'm entirely willing to put up with a game having decent or even bad graphics for its time if the rest of it makes up for it.
Which, to that point, 96 tracks. That's a lot. It's not like it matters though. You're not going to honestly sit down and tell me that you ever felt like 32 tracks was too few in any previous Mario Kart game. Nobody is going to sit with their friends through 32 Mario Kart tracks, play one repeat and tell everyone "dang we already did this one this is boring." It's technically better to have more but it's never going to mean anything.
The big, genuine merits I see in this game are 200cc and the custom item rules. 200cc genuinely fixes how most tracks feel too empty and lack little things to optimize because the game's just going so much faster that you don't have time to think. It's actually a lot harder to have good racing lines because of how much harder it is to not go flying off of the track. Doing tricks becomes something you need to carefully think about the risk of as opposed to the admittedly nice thing it was before that just existed for the sake of game feel. Custom item rules I don't have much to say about but adding more customization and allowing for more wacky scenarios will always be a flat-out plus for a game like this. It's a bit unfortunate that not all groups of friends will want to play with either of these, especially in the former case, but I'm never going to complain about either of these being added.
A lot of people complain about the game being unbalanced compared previous Mario Kart games but to be brutally honest, I don't like that opinion. There will always be an "optimal" character or vehicle in every Mario Kart game. There's even one in MK8D that you'll see people spamming a lot if you go online! This has zero effect on the game in a more casual sense though. Even in something like Mario Kart Wii, I know of a local group that has several dozen people who play the game more casually. They like the Dolphin Dasher the most and there are several people who have successfully used Karts despite them being worse than Bikes at a serious level! Imagine if those people just picked Funky Kong and the Flame Runner and then went on Twitter to complain about how unbalanced the game is. That would be an embarrassing opinion to have if you were within that group.
That's all to say that I don't understand why MK8D game is so beloved in the first place. Maybe people see something in the gameplay that I don't but if that's the case I've never heard anything beyond the graphics and music being better. Maybe people just don't think about or care about the differences between this game and previous Mario Karts so the graphics and music end up being the only deciding factor they have.
It's all just a bit disappointing to me. The differences between each new Mario Kart game are starting to get ironed out in a way that's steering (pun!) the series into having really boring gameplay. A while ago everyone online was begging for a new Mario Kart 9 and I never understood that. It's just going to feel the exact same as MK8D but add some big pointless gimmick like so many modern games do, a few other items that don't do anything interesting, and it'll end up having all of the exact same strengths and weaknesses of MK8D. Maybe some things change, like the Coin item and Red Shell, but all of the bottom lines will be the same. There will be no reason to prefer it to MK8D which will sting because MK8D in itself is not even a good game. Just a painfully average one that makes me wish I was playing something else, but I'll put up with sometimes because it's what everyone else is playing.
I would call Odyssey more overrated because the main appeal is its open world, and said open world only cheapens the experience of playing the Mario game. You can't even beat the game by only playing through the main story quests; you always need to collect at least a few randomly scattered moons to reach the next area, and gathering those moons, for lack of a more deliberate term, sucks.
The whole "play the way you want" fad is a massive joke; I want a coherent game Nintendo, not a charcuterie board of gimmicks.
Odyssey feels like the Goo Tuber of the mainline 3D Mario series. Here's hoping the next 3D Mario is the Snipewriter.