Mario Kart 7

Mario Kart 7 is a bit of a turning point for a series that needed a more stable identity after the immensely successful Mario Kart Wii formula fell victim to the market, as consumers slowly but surely rejecting motion controls in favor of traditional control schemes. Nintendo handed the reigns to Retro Studios, whose previous Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country Returns titles resuscitated their respective franchises, to guide the most popular racing series on earth into the next generation. What we got was a mixed bag, and a bit uninspired, overall.

Let's start with the basics - MK7 does very little to shake up the core of the series, opting to make a number of smaller improvements that add up to a neat package. The first and most obvious is the implementation of aerial and underwater stage sections, each controlling differently than the base driving. While interesting, because of the new stage verticality allowed by these setups, its major contributions to the series are spectacle and an adventurous feeling on certain raceways, which is admirable but ultimately minor. The new coin system encourages players to collect up to 10 coins to increase their maximum speed, with coins being lost to hazards and items throughout the race. This is my favorite new mechanic, because it allows for more decisions by the driver within a race. Stages will often have two similar paths through one area, one offering coins and one offering items, which gives players an interesting question of what they need more to maximize their odds of winning. Finally, the karts are now built from randomly selected unlockable parts, earned after collecting a number of coins in your races, which gives the player way more options to fine-tune their playstyle. The differences in stats are pretty minor, but they do compound, and can make for some fun combinations.

What I can't shake is the feeling that a LOT of decisions and experiments left material on the table. In order:
- Coins disappearing for a limited amount of time after collection like item blocks give precedence to players further ahead than the rest of the pack, ultimately making this game more forgiving for frontrunning than previous entries and conversely much harder to come back from behind. "The pack" from 3-8 get slammed with items constantly and it's difficult to keep a hold on your coins and collect the items necessary to make a run at the same time.
- The only new major item the game introduces, the Tanooki Leaf, is awful. Given primarily to top-4 positions, it stays active for a period of time where you can spin the tail at other nearby drivers and manually time a block on incoming attacks. This is somehow inferior and more work than simply holding a shell or banana, because of the time limit, the nee for manual input, and because the item remains in your item slot throughout its duration, preventing you from picking up more useful defense items. Thankfully, it was immediately removed after this game - MK8 outright replaced it with the much more useful Piranha Plant.
- The coin unlock structure is a bit of arbitrary padding, as you can only get a maximum of 40 per grand prix if played perfectly. As the cc increases, it's much harder to finish races with 10 coins, so the thresholds getting larger as you move of the difficulties exponentially increases the distance between unlocks.
- For some reason, every single character unlock is from the 8 cups in 150cc, leaving very little reason to start from the lower speeds as in other games. There are also no unlocks from time trials or other game modes, which feels like a big missed opportunity after MKW's cool time trial ghost system.
- A lot of the parts are unappealing visually, which is unfortunate after the flamboyance of the previous 3 entries in the series, and even worse their are different-colored versions of identical parts that pollute the overall pool of parts as the thresholds between unlocks grows larger.
- The retro courses are largely untouched outside of some coin placements, which is a weird decision given how much room for experimentation the underwater/flying sections could've added. The retro tracks feel more like a MKW port than a completely new game.

On a more basic level, the presentation is a bit too cleaned up for my tastes, and seems to lack any sort of distinct art direction like the previous titles outside of MKDS, which is its closest comparison aesthetically. The selection of racers is odd, and a huge downsizing of the roster from the Wii entry. By itself, that's fine, but reducing the number of racers from 12 to 8 makes the tracks feel downright empty, especially when playing on MKW tracks in the retro cups. I think the curation of retro tracks is by and large well done, with a couple of duds from the N64 game that don't really hold my interest, and the new tracks are mostly high-quality, if difficult. The increased emphasis on flying and verticality makes getting hit with items in midair extremely punishing, and ultimately that's down to luck and circumstance. The rubberbanding is back in its usual incarnation, but more annoying is that the karts that will outpace you at their top speeds have visible parts from your collection, and very often are made of slow ones, which is annoying. It feels like your opponents play with a different set of rules in this way. Finally, the segmented 1-lap tracks were consistently highlights, especially the Wuhu Island-themed ones, and I genuinely think they're a great direction for the series. It allows the player to feel like they're exploring a full space rather than follow a loop away from the main attractions of the setting.

In all, I hope I communicated what makes MK7 so difficult to pin down. It is a competent and interesting game in the series to study, as the number of small tweaks and experiments add up to a pretty fresh experience, but ultimately none of the ideas were pushed or considered enough to call this a worthy evolution of the series. It's more of a stepping stone from MKDS/MKW to MK8 than it is a necessary play in and of itself. Worth checking out for the original tracks alone, but then again nearly all the best ones were ported to later entries anyway.