Kirby Air Ride, much like Sakurai’s previous game, seems to defy categorisation despite being broadly a racing game. Yet it was precisely this kind of pigeonholing that worked for Melee and seems to hinder Kirby. One can look at Air Ride and struggle to ascertain the game’s genre or even its control scheme, whereas it is immediately obvious what kind of game Melee is when you see Mario roundhousing Pikachu in the face.

Despite this diffusion of genre, the game itself is often pathetically simple: use the A button to drift around the course and hope that unpredictable stage hazards or Mario Kart–esque shenanigans don’t prevent you from taking first place. Despite prefiguring the Mario Kart series’ later embrace of a more bombastic style—with roller-coaster tracks and ramps designed for airtime—the gameplay of Air Ride feels particularly tame and under-iterated. The developers had an idea and committed to it, caveats and all, and the game’s extra modes feel so experimental and slapdash that the whole experience comes across less as playful excess and more as an existential pile-up of half-matured ideas—far removed from the involving, purposeful abundance that defined Melee.

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