In the process of finding oneself, experimentation is necessary.

Have the confidence to be the monster under someone else’s bed

My track record of analysis in most regards remains firmly anchored in the realm of proven standard, though I would be remiss of authenticity if I wasn’t honest about how utterly baffled I am at what plagues me at the moment. Perhaps there is not a single element of burden perplexing my better senses, and the reason the identification process remains so obscured to me is the overwhelming abundance of ire flooding my every moment of consciousness; a truly lamentable state of being.

At the very least, I am aware that I am oscillating between hostile estrangement and embittered exhaustion in contemplating Mario Kart World (MKW) over the past several days, as the longer I spend with the title, the more incensed I become about its existence, and all that it entails. I’ve detailed why that is to some extent in addressing what I’ve referred to as “Problems Of Scale”, which ended up being a snappy enough summation of one of the more distinct articulations I’ve mustered, as MKW was basically created upon the mandated notion the series needed to go “big” to win, when “bigness” never had anything to do with the stalled march of progress in relation to Mario Karts domination. I pointed out a similar issue when Nintendo dropped a ball in a similar manner with the release of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, as those games ended up falling victim to being “breath of the wilded”, by being given this expansive open world element the series was never known for, and I argue after the fact, what ended up being a weakness in design with said titles, and an element of openness Pokemon games never needed in the first place.

Nintendo isn’t the only camp within the gaming realm that has made this mistaken conclusion, and they will likely not be the last to do it, either. Hell, even though I’ve reappropriated Breath of the Wild’s name to mean needless expansion to reference the implemented design in games that don’t need it, while simultaneously acknowledging it works well with BotW itself, this problem existed even before that particular Zelda game came out, though this similar issues was still a Zelda game having similar “Zelda game” like issues. All of this happened during the GameCube era, when Nintendo was already fumbling spaces “bigger than they could handle”, when they committed Hyrule Field to form within Twilight Princess. Even younger, naive, unabashed fanboy of all things Zelda me, looked around scratching his head riding Epona through Hyrule Field thinking to himself “Damn, there’s like nothing here.” I want to say I’ve even written about this notion, at least in passing before, at some random moment during ATE’s 1.0 phase, in how many companies make the mistake of building excessively too outward, too broadly, instead of building inward, or with depth in mind, by making more to explore in an internal sense than an external one, but I can’t for the life of me remember which article it was. My point being: this is not the first time this has come up, and seeing it now, once again, affect another game in Nintendo’s brand, Mario Kart World feeling totally bloated and “spilling too much over itself”, is a damn shame to see.

Which, once again, in finally getting around to extrapolating more definitively on my point about MKW feeling “too wide”, which was a purposefully chosen phrase to underline the absurdity of the whole thing, I think it affects the whole game top to bottom, left to right, in most ways imaginable. This is further underlined with the juxtaposition of Mario Kart Tour (MKT), in spite of what ever silly inane proclivities adorn its mobile outing format, and I adamantly argue that these proclivities in no major way impacts the title in any robustly negative manner, further exposes how much better MK works when paired down instead of blown up. The more I consider how overwhelmingly obvious this all is, the more I wish there were a responsible adult in the room to say “no” at least one time during the development of MKW, and just reined the whole thing in to a rational level of scale.

Part of why I think I’ve heard no one really go on about this, is I imagine, very much related to post-launch blindness, and this syndrome is further exacerbated by that “new console smell” wafting through everyone’s nostrils, as being treated to the first new Mario Kart in five years is going to have a lot of people champing at the bit, but throw in a new Nintendo console to boot and too many of those who are emotionally invested in the idea of Nintendo are already signed, sealed, and delivered fans with unwavering devotion, throwing flaw and fault directly to the proverbial wind.

That’s why among the myriad of ways MKW suffers greatly from this great widening, or “Breath of the Wilding”, if you will, leads me to being more fascinated with the notion of process in mind to allow this all to happen; an enablement that allows Nintendo to kind of slip under the radar on this, as I think people fall in love with the notion of nostalgia representing the signifier of value they fell in love with, recreating the impassioned feelings of the past “through the new”, and it is the entire process that ends up conjuring this triangulated sense of romance that embodies love in the obsessed, in becoming the signifier that grants power beyond possible failure to the objects acting as signifier for the enamored agents involved. Almost like being taken with the notion of the facade of the real instead of the real of the real, infatuated with the phantom of ideology, the “structure of the concept” behind an ideology like capitalism, in a really strange twist of irony, the theory of structuralized thought ensnaring ones flirtatious obsession, by compelling them beyond more than the spirit haunted by the specter of ideology. So not even the vessel possessed, or the demon that’s possessed the vessel, but the idea of the act of possession being what enchants those that gaze upon it, the process relative to the experienced observer being made party in real time to memories now relived as if never having been in the first place.

There is yet much more I have the ability to discuss in regards to a further breakdown of MKW, and if my passions compel me so, I may continue to dive into the game further later this week, on my days off, and within the final moments of 2025. Whatever I choose, will most certainly come after my last “Words of Wisdom” to close out the year, around this time tomorrow. See you then.

-Pashford