How to unlock every character in Kirby Air Riders

Kirby Air Riders includes a total of 21 unique racers, and you only start with four of them at the beginning of the game: Kirby, King Dedede, Meta Knight, and regular old Waddle Dee. All of the missing characters are unlocked via tasks on the checklist, and you can actually press the + button to attempt uncleared challenges immediately. That’s super convenient! With that helpful tip in mind, here’s the easiest way to unlock each character in Kirby Air Riders. There are some Road Trip spoilers here, so keep that in mind before you continue.

Kirby Air Riders unlockable characters

As mentioned before, each character is unlocked via the checklist. There are at least two ways to unlock each rider – if you clear a tile but already have the character it gives you, you’ll receive a new color palette for them instead. You can also scan Kirby or Super Smash Bros. series amiibo to get character colors – we got the gray Kirby costume when scanning a Kirby series Kirby amiibo, for instance. In the interest of convenience, we’ve narrowed down the easiest unlock method for each character and listed them out below.

• Bandana Waddle Dee: Play a round of City Trial and destroy two item boxes within 30 seconds of the start of the game. This should be pretty easy.
• Cappy: Clear City Trial without getting any of the gray, stone-textured power-down items.
• Chef Kawasaki: On the Mount Amberfalls course, there is a section with onigiri off to the right. Eat one of them and you’ll unlock Chef Kawasaki.
• Daroach: Win a Top Ride match after lapping 1 other rider. You can set the CPU difficulty down and use something like the Winged Star on courses with lots of jumps to get far ahead of your opponents.
• Gooey: Play Top Ride on the Air course, and purposefully run into the tornado on each lap. Then, make sure you win the race at the end.
• Knuckle Joe: In Road Trip, all you have to do is power up all your stats to at least 1. That’s super easy!
• Lololo & Lalala: Play Air Ride on the Crystalline Fissure course, and finish it within 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
• Magolor: Very specific unlock conditions here, but you have to send the same rider flying 2 times with the Drill Driver item. Easiest to do if you have CPUs on low difficulty, or if you have a second player put down their controller so you can attack them twice.
• Marx: Play a round on Air Ride Free Run, and finish a whole lap without dropping below 19 mph. The Chariot is a solid machine to use for this challenge.
• Noir Dedede: Get the true ending in Road Trip.
• Rick: Enter the shop in Road Trip 3 times in total.
• Rocky: Use a total of 30 items in Top Ride mode.
• Scarfy: Play Air Ride on the Waveflow Waters stage, and defeat an enemy Scarfy without triggering it to transform into its angry mode.
• Starman: Play Top Ride on the Crystal stage, and complete all four laps in first place.
• Susie: In Air Ride mode, perform a perfect landing 5 times in a single race. You can increase the lap count if you’re having trouble.
• Taranza: Technically, the easiest way to unlock him is to win a Short Race in City Trial, but Short Races don’t happen in every match. The most consistent way to unlock him is to play the Beanstalk Park stage until you’ve traveled for 5,469 yards. You’ll need to unlock the stage first, however – you can do this by playing a race on Mount Amberfalls and staying in the lead for 60 seconds straight.
• Waddle Doo: Play Air Ride on the Floria Fields stage, and finish the course without crashing into a single enemy.

As a reminder, Kirby Air Riders isn’t getting any DLC according to Masahiro Sakurai. That means Elfilin is rather strangely excluded from this game, though it makes a sort of sense – Air Riders entered development in 2022, which is when Kirby and the Forgotten Land first released. In any case, if you want to learn more about Kirby Air Riders, you can read up over at Nintendo’s official website.