Why I Love Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Mario Kart has always been my go-to game for multiplayer. It's the only one I have any interest in competitively, it's the only one I actually say I'm any good at, and they're probably the games I've sank the most hours into across my entire life. While I grew up with Mario Kart Wii and have a lot of fondness for it, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is far and away my favorite game in the series due to just how incredibly refined and definitive it feels.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the first of many Wii U ports we would get on the Switch, but more than any other, I really like this one just kinda usurped the original in every way. Aside from the Wii U Gamepad map and the stamp achievements, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe polishes and fixes every gripe one could have with what was already one of the best Mario Kart games.

Mario Kart 8's steering is honestly perfect. I know MKWii's physics is more exploitable and broken, but driving around in MK8 feels incredibly natural and smooth. You can bump off walls depending on your trajectory rather than coming to a full stop, your car flows from drift to drift really seamlessly, you can precariously hang your car off of ledges without falling, and Deluxe even introduces a third drift level that lets you boost incredibly far. But it's not just me who loves MK8's fluid controls, it also makes this the easiest Mario Kart for me to introduce to people unfamiliar with video games. I have a ton of friends who don't play video games but love Mario Kart 8, and I didn't even mention all the accessibility features like smart steering that allow me to cast the net even wider. Mario Kart 8 also has the most varied traversal due to not only bringing back the gliding and underwater mechanics from its predecessor, but by introducing antigravity which lets you drive on walls, ceilings, and corkscrews, which allows for more wild level design and strange shortcuts. And it's not just for show either, since going into antigravity turns your vehicle into a hovercraft that can get a boost by colliding into other vehicles.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe also has one of my favorite item games in the franchise, at least on a strategic level. If I want pure chaos and item variety, I'd go for Double Dash, but Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the first that actually feels like it's properly built around having 12 players in a race. Double Dash is chaotic and owns it by making most of its items telegraphed projectiles that you need to try to avoid, Mario Kart Wii often floods the first place player with Spiny Shells and Lightnings they can do nothing about, and while base Mario Kart 8 introduces the Super Horn for dealing with Spiny Shells, it also hands you useless coins as items at the worst possible time. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, on the other hand, allows players to hold up to two items at the same time, which mitigates the coin issue and introduces a level of strategy by putting double item boxes on the longer paths. This makes trying to stay in first place more engaging than ever since you have to scramble for resources and weigh your options to make sure you're well-equipped for whatever the players behind you have to throw at you.

The track design in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is also fantastic, densely-packed with memorable setpieces, satisfying shortcuts, and tight turns. There's a really impressive consistency to 8's nitro tracks, with hardly any weak points. Even the typically underwhelming Mushroom Cup bursts out of the gate with tracks like Thwomp Ruins, and from then on, there's really no brakes in the action. From the sprawling Toad Harbor, to driving down a waterfall in Shy Guy Falls, to driving through an airport in Sunshine Airport, to the flashy Electrodrome, to Mount Wario which stands out as the best sectioned track in the series, there are so many highlights here. The retro tracks are also incredible, the selection not being quite as strong as in 7, but the HD visuals and many gameplay additions means every track gets completely reimagined and remade. The Lightning Cup in particular is pretty much perfect containing fantastic remakes of four of the series' best tracks. And on top of that, Mario Kart 8 even added four DLC cups with their own fair share of incredible nitro and retro tracks, like the jaw-droppingly beautiful Wild Woods, the charming Zelda and Animal Crossing tracks, the absolutely bonkers F-Zero tracks, and an adorable reinterpretation of Ribbon Road.

As far as content goes, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is also truly impressive, especially as of 2024. With 48 tracks and a whopping 48 characters out of the box, five engine classes including the absolutely nuts 200cc that every game should have from here on out, a kart customization system with 10,000+ combinations, and all the expected modes ranging from Grand Prix to Time Trial to VS to Online Play, this really feels like a definitive Mario Kart experience. The icing on the cake was the Deluxe exclusive Battle Mode (we don't talk about base 8's battle mode) which contains an impressive five gameplay modes and a bunch of pretty neat arenas, really rounding out the package. I also just need to give special mention to the crossover elements in Mario Kart 8. I already mentioned how the game has tracks based on Zelda, Animal Crossing, and F-Zero, but you can also play as Link, Villager, Isabelle, and Inkling which is just really cool and makes me wish for a full Nintendo Kart crossover one day.

If this was it, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe would've already been this high on the list. It's been such a big part of my life for a decade now and I still pull it out constantly when friends are over, but since apparently that still wasn't enough, we recently got a DLC pack with 48 tracks borrowed from Mario Kart Tour along with eight new characters and some pretty sick new features like the ability to fully customize the item selection. I'll be the first to admit that the new tracks in the Booster Course Pass don't look half as good as the rest of the game and I wish Nintendo took the time to make them more visually polished and cohesive, but that doesn't change the fact that we still got many of the series' best and most iconic tracks like Coconut Mall, Maple Treeway, Waluigi Pinball, Wii/3DS Rainbow Road, and DK Mountain ported to 8 pretty faithfully. We even got some pretty neat re-imaginings like the more tightly-paced Choco Mountain and Kalimari Desert remakes, and the flashier Waluigi Stadium and Bowser Castle 3 remakes. And even the Tour tracks have some real gems like Ninja Hideaway, Vancouver Velocity, Singapore Speedway, Merry Mountain, Yoshi's Island, and Squeaky Clean Sprint.

While the Booster Course Pass did look a bit underwhelming, that's still not to discount how good the rest of the presentation in Mario Kart 8 is. This was the first HD Mario Kart and Nintendo really took advantage of it to give the tracks so much extra detail, vibrancy, fidelity. To this day, this is still one of the best-looking Mario games ever made, it's so clean. There's so many charming little details on the sidelines of the track ranging from posters for fictional Mario themed businesses, references to other tracks connecting them to each other, and NPC interactions like that Yoshi that sings Totaka's Song. Speaking of music, Mario Kart 8's soundtrack was performed almost entirely by a big band and it shows, this is one of the richest jazz soundtracks (and smoothest sax solos) I've ever heard in a game. Pretty much every track is a banger, though special mention goes to Mario Circuit, Shy Guy Falls, Mount Wario, Bone Dry Dunes, N64 Rainbow Road, Wild Woods, and of course, Dolphin Shoals and Big Blue. While I don't believe it was also done live, the Booster Course Pass has some serious bangers too, like Tokyo Blur, London Loop, Singapore Speedway, Moonview Highway, Piranha Plant Cove, Bowser Castle 3, and especially Vancouver Velocity, which might just be my favorite track in the franchise. Either way, this is easily the best and most vast soundtrack to a Mario Kart game, and stands up there with games like Galaxy, Origami King, and Dream Team as one of my favorite Mario soundtracks period.

In my book, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a perfect Mario Kart game. It knocks everything out of the park. It controls perfectly, its item balancing is arguably the most fair given the amount of players on the track, the track design is nothing short of stellar, the sheer amount of content it offers feels never-ending especially with the Booster Course Pass, it looks and sounds like a bajillion bucks, and it's accessible enough that you can put a controller in front of anyone and they've be able to give you a run for your money within just a few races. This is the greatest couch co-op game of all time in my opinion, and is absolutely deserved of being as much of a best-seller as it is.