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[Rant] Mobility: Mario Kart Tour Is Nintendo’s Latest Foray Into Childhood Gambling
Mario Kart Tour has picked probably the worst week to launch in the history of the septic tank that is mobile gaming.
This prior week of September 22 of 2019 the year of our lord, has gifted mobile gamers with something many of us could only dream of. Both iOS and Android users were treated this past week to the respective launch of Apple Arcade as well as the Google Play Pass, and in both cases users are still on their free trial. The services offer access to hundreds of games combined, in Apple’s case exclusive titles, free of microtransactions and predatory mobile shenanigans, and for what it’s worth high quality games for the mobile platform.
Then Nintendo sauntered in with Mario Kart Tour like a man with no self-awareness walking into a feminist AA meeting donning his unclean wife-beater, carrying a Pabst, blowing a big fart and then asking which one of the lovely ladies would like to take him home and make him a sandwich. Mario Kart Tour is a depressing game to look at, not only because it is a low-quality facsimile of the real thing but because of the knowledge that mobile expectations of workmanship are so low that people will eat up the shoddy, low-effort design and spit out lots of moolah into Nintendo’s open pockets despite the readily available, higher quality, also portable version of Mario Kart being a step away.
Mario Kart Tour isn’t here to give you an enjoyable experience, that is literally not what it was made for. It has one goal and makes that very clear from the opening second of the game: Money and gambling. Lots of money and lots of gambling, especially for you children. The first thing you do in the game is “fire the cannon,” which is Nintendo’s kid friendly way of saying “open this loot box you [expletive deleted].” You open a loot box to determine your first character. You open a loot box after your first race. After three races and a short tutorial, what do you do? Open a loot box. And the game doesn’t let you drift away from the loot boxes either. In typical mobile tutorial fashion, it will lock every other section of the game until you relent because dammit you’re going to gamble and you’re going to like it. Otherwise you’re going to have no game, you indescribably cheap cretin.
There are 20 characters at the moment in Mario Kart Tour and you’ll need to unlock them one by one using (you guessed it) loot boxes. Odds of unlocking characters varies from the “normal” 5% to the “super” .26%. Yea, if you wanted to play as any of the standard racers like Mario, Peach, DK, Toad, Bowser, etc, you’ll be looking at 1% odds on the loot boxes. Because this game isn’t about fun, it’s about maximizing profits off of FOMO, compulsive collectors, and children with mom’s credit card. The same goes for your cart and the umbrella, which also unlock via loot box and have non-cosmetic effects like giving you more items per box or increasing your combo boosts. If you wanted to know why Dry Bowser has a .2% chance of unlocking, see how many levels choosing him as a character nets you bonus items.
Nintendo has also already started dabbling in time-limited loot box drops. Tomorrow (10/2) is the last day to get Pauline, her yellow taxi, and fare flier cart piece. Each one has a 1% chance of dropping in loot boxes. It will absolutely not be in the next limited loot box. It may be available at some point in the future, then again it may not. If it does reappear, it may have a higher chance of dropping and it may have a lower chance. Nintendo will never tell, because shut up and buy more currency.
Rarer goods also grant more opening bonus points, and others just straight up grant you 2x and 3x combo points. That’s important because Mario Kart Tour is less concerned with your place and more concerned with your points. Grab up those hot racers and vehicles and you’re basically a good way to a perfect five star rating before the map even begins.
Mario Kart Tour is deceptive from head to toe. First of all the game tricks you into thinking that you are playing against other people. You aren’t, the online mode isn’t in the game yet to play multiplayer matches with people around the world. You’ll kinda figure this out on your own pretty early, but Nintendo went to some lengths to hide the fact that you are playing solo. For starters every other racer has a genuine Nintendo usernames (a lot of Japanese letters). When you launch a map it actually goes through the process of mock filling up a lobby. As a result, you’re often needlessly put together in matches with many duplicate characters. I can understand that online, but in single player? What a joke.
Matches now consist of two laps instead of the Mario Kart industry standard three, presumably because some cynical boardroom meeting looked at cynically collected data and cynically suggested that two laps was the perfect amount of time to keep mobile gamers’ attention and three laps was just way too long.
You might be thinking the same thing that I did when you read “Mario Kart Tour” and “mobile game,” and that’s “haha I bet this game plays itself.” It does. By golly it does. Mario Kart Tour has auto-acceleration and auto-turning. I have set my phone down and came back to find that my character almost always made it in the top 3. It’s fine, the controls in this game are rotten garbage anyway. I can’t count how many times I saw my cart drifting sideways in defiance of most laws of gravity. It’s like your car is being pulled on an invisible rope behind and invisible car. It never feels like you are actually in control, more like an invisible hand gesturing the racer toward more gold coins.
Then you have the membership, which is why I brought up the Apple Arcade information earlier. Mario Kart Tour wants you to pay $5 per month for its membership, the same cost that will get you access to hundreds of better quality games. What do you get for your $5 gold pass? You get extra rewards from racing in tours, you get extra badges from gold challenges, and you get access to 200cc. Yep. 200cc is locked behind a subscription. By the way, I played through a few races on 200cc and didn’t touch the phone screen. I came in fourth nearly every time.
If you’re looking for guidance on whether to spend money on Mario Kart Tour you just need to look at another one of Nintendo’s egregious cash farms: Miitomo. When the news came that Nintendo would be shutting down that gacha game, what was the company’s response? A big middle finger pointing at their no refunds policy. Who doesn’t salivate at the prospect of a Mario Kart game that Nintendo intentionally produced to feel like a crap Chinese knockoff, that you’re expected to lay down more money for than the price of a Switch console, that Nintendo will throw up a big f*ck you and remove access to all of your purchases for once the game no longer rakes in the enormous monthly average revenue they expect? I already have my wallet out but it’s being dropped into the furnace.
I have no trust in Mario Kart Tour. There is a weekly ranked cup that grants rubies depending on your overall score which should offer unlimited replay (keep your score up, be the best guy) but I don’t trust it. I got to #1 rank with no effort on the cup, the other people are just first names (Anna, Jose, Clara). Are they real people? Did I get roped into a group with 20 people who all have first names as their usernames? Does Nintendo hide the usernames and post first names? I don’t know. I don’t think I’d trust Nintendo that these are real people and not just another cog in the bullshot machine if they managed to show me government identification from each player in my crew.
Is anyone in a group where the first place has 13,944 points? Because that’s me. Please tell me you are real.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
Mobility: Knights Chronicles, Or How I Played the Gacha Game
This week I played Knights Chronicle.
I’m not entirely sure how to go about this week’s Mobility impressions piece, because it wasn’t presented to me in the normal way that I usually look at game updates. Normally when a developer/publisher reaches out to someone like myself to cover new content, what usually happens is they’ll provide a press account or provide access to a beta/PTS version of the game in order to preview said content. That didn’t happen here.
Knights Chronicle just dropped the RWBY collaboration event a few days ago, and the update introduces five new playable characters from the Rooster Teeth anime series:
- Ruby Rose
- Weiss Schnee
- Blake
- Yang Xiao Long
- Cinder Fall
As part of the update, Cinder Fall is easily obtainable through the in-game event dungeon. The rest are held behind loot boxes.
And that’s where we get to the meat of this impressions piece: Knights Chronicle is a gacha game, so in addition to my crystals earned in-game, I was given a small stipend of (premium currency) to draw heroes and hopefully, MAYBE, get something from the event. Each draw costs 200 crystals, roughly $20 in currency, and pulls 11 random heroes from the giant pile with a few guaranteed to be rare quality. I might have the opportunity to talk to you about things related to the event that I’m supposed to be talking about. Maybe.
Yang Xiao Long is also free, which makes three locked behind loot boxes. Pretty good, all things considered. Unfortunately my luck didn’t quite stick and after roughly $160 worth of hero summons, I had yet to obtain another hero. Roll another set and boom! There is Ruby Rose! So at this point I have yet to unlock Blake or Weiss Schnee, and who is to say that I ever will within the next couple of weeks? Obviously that assumes that my drive to continue grinding crystals holds up. I’ve spent some time reading the Reddit for Knights Chronicle and found people who have spent 4,000+ crystals (over $300 worth) in order to get the whole set of five. I’m not going to do that.
The characters themselves are quite powerful, so if you are a heavily invested fan of Knights Chronicle, you’re going to want to get in on this action. Cinder Fall’s leader skill increases fire allies’ attack by 40%, and her passive gives heavy bonuses to heroes with Fall Maiden(s) and at level 60 gains the ability to resurrect. Yang has a 60% chance to assume a stance that will let her counterattack, inflicting 200% additional damage if the caster was also counter attacking. Ruby Rose also has an ability to avoid fatal damage, while Blake summons ghosts to mitigate damage and Weiss Schnee stacks damage on damage.
You may notice that I haven’t actually talked about the gameplay of Knights Chronicle, and that’s because this game doesn’t have a whole lot going for it. The goal in the game is the same as it is with any gacha game: Collect heroes, pay money to get better heroes, and then look at your cute anime heroes. The gameplay portion where you set your team of five heroes through multi-tier encounters where you gradually level up their ability to do more damage and take more damage, to beat monsters that can also do more damage and take more damage, is ancillary, and only serves to reward you with more cute anime heroes and heroines for your collection to look at and reminisce about that time you spent $100 to get the shiny version. It’s like video game baseball cards, but you probably won’t be showing them to your kids in 20 years.
It would have been nice if Knights Chronicle had offered players some method of obtaining the whole set of RWBY by playing the event, because to players outside of the whales this whole thing is likely to come off as another example of the exploitative mobile market. This isn’t to say that Netmarble shouldn’t be able to monetize the games as it wishes, but the characters are the whole point of this events, and the whole notion of having a light at the tunnel where players can take part in the event, put in some cash of their own, and if they are dedicated enough come out with all of the heroes even if the ridiculously low odds don’t work out, which is the purpose of the event. Rather, when you have an event where you can spend hundreds of dollars worth of currency on a limited pull and the game still sticks its middle finger up and says “no you can’t have this,” and then graciously holds out its hand for more money.
That seems more likely to just convince people to quit. In fact, the longer this event goes on and the more obvious it is that the remaining characters are out of reach, I can feel my enthusiasm dropping like a stone. It’s cynical and it knows it, for a game that is deeply focused on that small minority who will pay hundreds to thousands of dollars on singular events so they can build a collection of .gif files of their favorite waifus and husbandos. Who needs to care about what I think when these whales will gleefully troll users out of the customer base in order to feel like their SSR-ranked Weiss Schnee is more exclusive and thus makes them a more special person, even though they put $500 of their real money for the third time this year into something that will probably be gone by 2022.
Nothing I say in this article is going to convince people to pull in one direction or another. The person who refuses to play these games because they view the gacha mechanics as manipulative and built by companies that will gladly ring you dry for nearly nothing in value and then hold out their hand for more, they aren’t going to suddenly start playing because I said the RWBY models are better quality than they are in the anime. On the other hand, the guys who could have put a down payment on a new car with all the money they’ve sunk into gacha games aren’t going to have a change of heart because I pointed out how alienating the event is.
I have no idea how to end this impressions piece, so I will leave you with a word of wisdom: Don’t pre-order games.
MMO Fallout 