By Director Mr. Sakurai, Kirby Air Riders: Development Insights — Part 4
Join Kirby Air Riders director Masahiro Sakurai as he shares insights into the development and details behind some of the game’s modes and features.
Check out the rest of the interview
Part 4: Road Trip
We didn’t have Road Trip in the initial design planning stage, but players would surely want some more elements that can be enjoyed in single player, so…
I know they’ll have fun playing City Trial and Air Ride, but I felt as though repeating a few minutes of gameplay isn’t quite enough for a modern title.
However, there were no additional gameplay elements we could add. When considering how to pull together existing gameplay elements to keep players playing long-term, the only real option was to give them a series of challenges. Win in a race, or win in a battle. That’s all there is to it.
I did, for instance, consider adding a mode where a whole lot of characters would attack one by one as rivals, each getting their moment in the spotlight, or perhaps using a system like the events in City Trial to give players specific tasks to achieve.
But clearing them one by one the entire way through would become tedious, so I thought of framing it as a journey, letting players choose from three branching paths, and even adding larger branches that would create a variety of different worlds. After exploring these ideas in depth, I felt as though I could put together the basic game for Road Trip.
The problem then was the story… Why do the Riders ride?
A story centered around the machines
In a typical racing game, you simply race around the track a few times. Surely there’s no way to make a story out of that? It’s not the kind of world where the rivals would naturally converse.
But, I did, indeed, come up with something.
For this story, I made it about the machines themselves, not the characters. Zorah, Nova, and Gigantes are all machines. It’s not the usual story one hears. Each player chooses their own Rider, and it’s precisely for that reason we couldn’t have the story revolve around them, since the Riders have no idea what’s coming. Plus, this is the Kirby universe. Making it seem as though the chosen Rider has some sort of intention of their own would be quite challenging to pull off.
As elements of the game, Leo and Gigantes were actually part of the initial concept from the design stage. The idea was to add a huge, mountain-like machine, and a legendary, animal-like machine.
We had Nova’s course as well, so we had an image of what Nova would look like. Some boss battles were also included. I mixed all of those game elements in my mind, and that became the story. That’s all!
A brief story overview
The story centers on Zorah, who was flung into space by accident. He wound up in his current form after pulling machines, minerals, and meteorites from his surroundings towards him.
Zorah does not possess malicious intent, and neither does Galactic Nova, for that matter.
It was the same in Kirby Super Star, which he first appeared in. He’s a machine that simply receives requests as external commands, and then does everything in his power to grant them.
In other words, the incident that occurs midway through Road Trip implies the involvement of another malicious force that seeks to dominate, or even annihilate, Planet Popstar.
…And well, there are all kinds of scenarios which I hope I will have the chance to share publicly someday.
How route characters were selected
There are route characters that appear midway in Road Trip.
These were developed by the design team, who worked together to come up with various ideas and concepts.
They were designed with a sense of unpredictability, or not knowing what to expect. What will happen when branching characters are mixed together in response to an obstacle blocking the player’s path? I think that’s one of the things to look forward to.
Additionally, it’s important to create a link to the next stage. Like having a rainbow bridge that connects to a stage in the sky.
The obstacle, the stage ahead, and the unexpected solution. Route characters are selected so that these elements mesh together.
We also deliberately spread out the series the characters came from as best we could. We noted down which titles the route characters appeared in so that it would feel like a collection of references from various places, and made sure to balance it out by choosing something else whenever we already had a lot from a particular title. Given the long history of the Kirby series, I thought it would be good to include characters from across as many generations as possible to give it a festival-like atmosphere.
