A Brief Rundown of the various Mario Kart Tournaments: Part 3
The next tournament was Mario Kart Wheee, or Wii for short. It was the first Mario Kart tournament to allow bikes as a vehicle option, and the first to have vehicles built for midair tricks. Only the most showoff-y of contestants performed tricks prior to this tournament, and they rarely ended well for them. Now, anyone could do tricks safely and speedily!
Missions were initially planned for this tournament as well, but the tournament organizers couldn't find any organizations willing to partner with them for it, so it was unfortunately canceled. But like the DS tournament, Wii also had retro tracks!
After Wii, a few people started making their own unofficial Mario Kart tournaments, most notably Pac-Man, someone from another dimension. He designed the "Arcade" series of Mario Kart tournaments, called such because of Pac-Man's roots. There were three Arcade tournaments, being 1, 2, and DX.
Soon enough, though, a new official tournament would come around. Mario Kart 7, the 7th official tournament, bringing back speed coins, and introducing building your own karts, underwater driving, and gliders. Gliders were a game changer in so many ways. It's one thing to watch people drive across the ground, but seeing them race through the air is truly something else. Makes me jealous of paratroopas!
Mario Kart 8 was next! Sorta. It's kinda difficult to talk about the 8th official tournament, because it sorta happened three separate times.
I'll start with the easy stuff. It introduced antigravity sections of tracks, where they'd twist and turn and confuse anyone who hasn't taken a class on advanced gravity. It was really cool!
Problem was, not a lot of people tuned into this tournament. A lot of people have given their reasons, and the most common one I've seen was the lack of a proper battle part of the tournament. There were no unique battle courses, only regular tracks. Rainbow road even didn't make a proper appearance this time, and the organizers had to build a space station around what parts did manifest in order to make a proper track.
That's not the end of the story, though. A while after everyone thought the 8th official Mario Kart tournament had ended, portals to other realities started popping up, including to the quiet village of Animal Crossing, the "fresh" and musical land of Inkopolis, and the storied Kingdom of Hyrule.
With an audience for Mario Kart that was now bigger than ever, the tournament organizers decided to launch Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: a rerun of the Mario Kart 8 tournament. Now with an overhauled Battle side event with a whopping five types of battles, across eight arenas dedicated for battling, one of which was from Inkopolis!
They also had four new cups alongside the eight from the original 8th tournament, being the Egg, Crossing, Triforce, and Bell cups. Those middle two cups were themed around two of the worlds the aforementioned portals lead to, with the final tracks of each cup taking place in those worlds: Animal Crossing and Hyrule Circuit. They even invited several people from Animal Crossing, Inkopolis, and Hyrule to participate in this tournament!
That's not even mentioning an all-new bracket of races: 200cc. The fastest Mario Kart races to date were held in this bracket, and they were so cool!
All in all, it was a massive success, especially compared to the original 8th tournament.
There was another unofficial tournament after 8 Deluxe, being the Tour tournament. It was mostly about racing through one of the other worlds the portals had opened up to, this one being an astonishingly normal place called Earth. Apparently they only have one sapient species there, humans. Weird. Very pretty architecture, though, from what I've seen from videos and pictures.
Well, Tour was mostly unofficial. Apparently the official Mario Kart organizers were so impressed by it, that they decided to make an encore to the 8 Deluxe tournament, called the Booster Courses. 48 returning courses from the SNES, 64, Super Circuit, Double Dash, DS, Wii, and 7 tournaments, along with many from the Tour unofficial tournament, across 12 new cups: Golden Dash, Lucky Cat, Turnip, Propeller, Rock, Moon, Fruit, Boomerang, Feather, Cherry, Acorn, and Spiny.
It was truly a spectacle to behold. One last hurrah for the the greatest comeback story in Mario Kart history.
And lastly is the Mario Kart World tournament, the most recent tournament, and one that's still ongoing. It dialed down the focus to just this world, but it still does so many new things.
For one, for the first time since the Mario Kart DS tournament, there's a third type of event: In addition to the classic Cups and Battles, there's also Knockout Tour, where racers who don't place high enough are knocked out of the current rally. There's eight Rallies: Golden, Ice, Moon, Spiny, Cherry, Acorn, Cloud, and Heart.
Not to mention that in the main cups, they now have 24 racers on the track at once. That's twice as many as any prior tournament!
I understand that many people don't like the World tournament due to how it doesn't have a lot of stuff the other tournaments did. I really do. But I still love this tournament, a lot!
That's about all I have to say about the Mario Kart tournaments for now. I hope this little history lesson was informative!
