Did Mario Kart World Fix the Annoying Character-Unlocking Flaw?

Mario Kart World is an amazing game, but it has a glaring flaw when it comes to unlocking characters. In previous games in the series, you could unlock characters through your own racing skills, but in Mario Kart World, certain characters can only be unlocked by chance. Some characters only unlock if another racer uses the Kamek powerup, and you happen to change into the character you need. As you can imagine, this makes unlocking characters a pain. Well, it looks like Nintendo might have listened to the complaints.

How You Can Unlock Mario Kart World Characters Now

Screenshot of Mario Kart World, Courtesy of Liesel Booker

According to The Gamer, Mario Kart World‘s latest update includes quite a few quality-of-life improvements such as displaying P-switches on the Free Roam map and increasing the likelihood of lap races in online play. However, the most welcome change might be that they added another way to unlock those obscure characters you need to complete your collection. In Free Roam Mode, highjack a UFO, and if you see a character you need, abduct them, and you’ll get an option to turn into that character, permenantly unlocking it. The UFO frequency in Free Roam Mode has also been increased.

How Much Does This Improve the Experience?

Of course, there’s still some element of chance here, since abducting a character requires bumping into it when you happen to be driving a UFO. Still, it’s less frustrating than hoping someone uses the Kamek item and hoping that you turn into a specific character. At least this way, you feel like you’re actually doing something to unlock characters instead of just leaving everything up to fate. Still, I don’t know what was wrong with unlocking characters through winning races like in the previous games.

Conclusion

Nintendo can be weird sometimes. I’m not sure what they were thinking when they left character-unlocking up to luck in the first place. Perhaps it was to make the characters more accessible to less-skilled players who might not be able to win races on the higher speeds, but leaving the unlocking up to chance just leads to frustration for all players. At least now, you have more control over your own fate. Have fun with those UFO abductions.

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