2025 is a great year for racing games! Everybody’s talking about Mario Kart World right now, but the new Kirby Air Riders is also coming out sometime in 2025. It’s directed by Masahiro Sakurai, and it’s actually the first Kirby game he’s directed since the original Kirby Air Ride on GameCube over 20 years ago. Though Kirby Air Ride was met with mixed reviews on launch, it’s since become something of a cult classic. It’s beloved for its addictive City Trial mode, and the crazy part is that the entire game was developed in three and a half months. According to Sakurai, Kirby Air Riders has been in active development since April 2022, which means it’s had over three years to cook. In other words, Kirby Air Riders might be a bigger game than we realize – which makes sense, given it’s had over ten times the development time of the original game!
Right now, we know very little about Kirby Air Riders. We only know of four returning Air Ride Machines so far, and the only character we know for sure is playable is Kirby. We don’t know any of the courses, and we haven’t even seen a real gameplay trailer yet. That won’t stop us from speculating, though! Ideally, Kirby Air Riders would beef up its beloved City Trial mode with a plethora of new content. In the original Kirby Air Ride, City Trial always took place on the same stage – but it was a really big one with plenty of secret areas to discover and tons of space to fly around. In Kirby Air Riders, it would be neat to see several City Trial stages that you could either choose between or play on at random. Not every stage can be based on a city, though, so maybe the mode will be renamed?
We can’t forget Air Ride mode, though! It’s the main racing mode of Kirby Air Ride, and the original game has nine different courses to choose from. We’ll almost certainly see more than that in Kirby Air Riders, but it doesn’t necessarily need as many courses as Mario Kart to hold its own. We’d imagine City Trial (or its equivalent) will be the main thing bringing people back to this game to play with friends. The original Kirby Air Ride’s controls are fairly simple, so we’d guess that the developers might add some new moves to add a bit more depth to racing – maybe something like Mario Kart World’s new jump trick could help out here by opening up alternate routes.
Next up, we have to talk characters. In the original Kirby Air Ride, you can play as Kirby, Yellow Kirby, Red Kirby, Blue Kirby, Green Kirby, Brown Kirby, Purple Kirby, and White Kirby. King Dedede and Meta Knight are unlockable characters, and they can’t use the game’s Copy Ability system. As you almost certainly know, Masahiro Sakurai is also the director of the Super Smash Bros. series, and he tends to refrain from including modern Kirby characters and representation in his games. Kirby, Meta Knight, and King Dedede are all Sakurai’s characters, and the stages are all from games Sakurai was involved with in some way (Dream Land, Fountain of Dreams, Green Greens, Halberd, Dream Land DB, and the Great Cave Offensive). It goes a little further than that, though: the three Kirby series Assist Trophies, Knuckle Joe, Chef Kawasaki, and Nightmare, are also from games Sakurai was involved with.
That all being said, it isn’t like Sakurai has completely ignored all modern Kirby games. Kirby’s new Final Smash is the Ultra Sword, plus Super Smash Bros. for Wii U features a Magolor trophy and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate includes several Spirits from Kirby games that Sakurai wasn’t involved with – Queen Sectonia, the Robobot Armor, Elline, and Prince Fluff being just a few of them. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate also includes C-R-O-W-N-E-D, Fatal Blooms in Moonlight, and a few tracks from Kirby: Planet Robobot and Kirby Star Allies as well.
The big question here – will Kirby Air Riders include characters other than Kirby, King Dedede, and Meta Knight? We could certainly see Marx or Knuckle Joe or another character Sakurai was involved with, but will we see Magolor, Taranza, Susie, Elfilin, or any modern Kirby characters? Sakurai doesn’t completely ignore modern Kirby games in the Super Smash Bros. series, but it’s safe to say he heavily leans towards his own creations. That’s understandable and all, but it would seem odd for Kirby Air Riders to exist in a bubble where it pretends that none of the modern Kirby games have happened yet. But given how central to the game Copy Abilities were in the original, it is possible that we’ll only see Kirby plus a few guests. Overall, though, there’s really not much precedent for this – like we mentioned earlier, Sakurai hasn’t been director of a Kirby game for over 20 years now.
There’s a lot to love about the original Kirby Air Ride, and it’s very possible that Kirby Air Riders surpasses it tenfold. With all that extra development time, we might be looking at something truly special – and we’re bound to hear something about it this summer, since it’s slated for release in 2025. Kirby Air Riders could certainly use a good deal of additional depth compared to the original game – be that in the form of new mechanics, more complicated courses, or otherwise.
What do you most want to see out of Kirby Air Riders? Do you agree with any of our predictions or suggestions? Feel free to let us know in the comments down below. You can check out the first trailer here and read more about Kirby Air Riders at the official website, but we’ve still got next to no concrete info.
