An hour-long presentation dedicated to Kirby Air Riders? After we had a good 45-minutes dedicated to the game a few weeks ago? Even Masahiro Sakurai himself seemed somewhat stunned by the idea of the second whopper of a Nintendo Direct focusing on the rather imminent Switch 2 game, as the famous Japanese developer jokes about the premise to kick off the show. But he then did follow-up by revealing that it was necessary to deliver such expansive coverage to truly ensure fans know what to expect from this project.
To this end, Sakurai began this presentation by answering a question many fans had on their minds, namely that Kirby Air Riders will support the fan-requested Top Ride mode. The smaller-scale and faster-paced mode will be available to hop into, with a multitude of options to put to good use.
You can tweak which CPU racers you face, how hard they are to race against, which 'vehicles' they compete upon, and then select different tracks and choose the perfect amount of laps too. You can then race in quick rounds where items are on offer to cause havoc and upset the established order, and better yet, you can even take this all online to compete with friends over the Internet.
Sakurai also revealed that while the Top Ride mode does play from a top down perspective as expected, the game does support a Diorama mode, where the perspective shifts to an almost isometric angle to shake things up further.
Needless to say, Kirby Air Riders seems to have a lot in its wheelhouse, and more is being revealed as we speak in the Direct that still has 45 minutes (yep, 45 minutes!) or running time left.