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Around one week ago on Thursday October 23rd a Nintendo Direct presentation for the Switch 2 exclusive kart racing game Kirby Air Riders was published on YouTube.
Usually I try to do reaction livestreams for Nintendo Direct presentations, but I skipped last week’s Kirby Direct. It was the second hour long Direct for a game that I felt I already knew quite a lot about, and I’d already booked in to get some tattoo work done that day. I foolishly assumed there wouldn’t be anything too directly newsworthy for me in this particular showcase video.
It turns out, in many ways the presentation marked a particularly notable step forward in accessibility for a first party published Nintendo game.
I’ve been publishing weekly episodes of Access-Ability for around five and half years now, and one constant in that time has been the relatively weak accessibility support seen in Nintendo first party published titles. Their major console producing competition, Xbox and PlayStation, have made huge strides forward toward standardisation over the past five years, with other major publishers like Capcom, EA, and Ubisoft stepping up to emulate many of the more ambitious accessibility developments seen across the rest of the industry.
Nintendo by comparison has failed to keep up with many accessibility efforts being seen to become standards elsewhere such as accessibility store tag support, offering high contrast visuals, having dedicated accessibility menus, and providing presets for common disability support categories.
This is why it initially came as such a surprise when I learned that, around 52 minutes into the second Kirby Air Riders Nintendo Direct, game director Masahiro Sakurai started discussing the game’s options menu, and specifically the contents of the game’s dedicated accessibility menu.
Starting from the top, this is to my knowledge the first time that we’ve seen a dedicated accessibility menu offered in a first party published Nintendo game. The word accessibility is used for this menu, and it’s illustrated using a specific design of stick figure that’s used as a common recognisable symbol to denote that accessibility support for disabled people is available.
Additionally, this is the first time that accessibility features for a Nintendo published game have to my knowledge been officially revealed prior to that game’s launch. I’ve long noted that Nintendo is lagging behind their competition in settings messaging and making contact with accessibility focused game reviewers, and this is exactly the kind of step that I’ve been hoping to see happen for a Nintendo first party release for some time.
But, before we dig into the contents of the accessibility menu, I want to talk a little bit big picture about how we perhaps got here, the assumptions we can make, and why some people are understandably cautious about suggesting that this signals a company-wide step forward for Nintendo.
Sakurai, the director of Kirby Air Riders, has been pretty open about his development process, and his physical health, over the past few years. After development on Super Smash Bros Ultimate concluded, Sakurai spent some time producing videos on his own personal YouTube channel in which he talked about aspects of his design philosophy, as well as his experiences creating past games. If you’ve not checked these videos out they are well worth a watch.
Putting the contents of these videos together with publicly available development timeline information we can paint a fairly reliable picture of the events that likely led to the accessibility support seen in Kirby Air Riders, and Sakurai’s choice to give it prominent placement in a Nintendo Direct.
Game development on Super Smash Bros Ultimate took a physical toll on Sakurai’s health. He’s a very hands-on game director by all accounts, and ended up damaging his hands by constantly balance testing characters before release. He’s talked openly about the fact that he at times had to play the game one handed due to pain he was experiencing while holding a controller.
Kirby Air Riders began development in April 2022, and around that time Sakurai started publishing a number of videos about game development that focused on accessibility efforts seen in titles released in the prior few years. Perhaps most notably there’s a video in which he explores and discusses the accessibility support found in The Last of Us: Part 1 Remastered, but also around the same time he also publishes videos on other aspects of accessibility such as text size and motion sickness reduction.
While I don’t have any special personal insight on Sakurai, it does seem like around the time this game was entering development Sakurai took an interest in accessibility efforts in the video game industry. Some have assumed that this was a direct response to the issues that Sakurai himself was experiencing coming off the end of developing Smash Bros, which to me feels like a reasonable assumption for people to make. At the very least the research he did very clearly led to the types of accessibility support that he implemented in his next game, and he made an effort to make the game accessible to those who might need to play one handed, something that he’d had to do a little while prior.
This is, I think, at the heart of why many in the accessibility space are cautious about celebrating this as a big step forward for “Nintendo”. For many this appears to be very specifically a Sakurai led push for improved accessibility in his own titles. That is in and of itself something worth praising, and presents at the very least a high likelihood of Sakurai’s future projects making similar accessibility efforts, but it is unlikely that this signals a top down strategy or ethos change coming from Nintendos Executives.
While I get that caution, I personally fall on the more optimistic end of things in this case. I think that seeing this ground broken in a Nintendo first party title, and spotlighted in a Nintendo Direct, is both exciting in a vacuum but also does have the potential to impact larger change at Nintendo. I think if this game is well received and gets positive praise for its accessibility efforts, or even just positive buzz is seen for mentioning accessibility in a Nintendo Direct, that might help swing the needle on accessibility efforts more broadly at Nintendo. If nothing else this game getting praised would show that Sakurai understands the basics of accessibility, and is someone that Nintendo’s teams could seek input from if they want to follow suit.
It’s not by itself a turning point for Nintendo at large, but I get so few chances to enthusiastically praise Nintendo software for positive accessibility moves, I’m taking this one as a win and a big step in the right direction.
Like, look at this one image for a moment. Look at all of the Kirby characters excitedly looking at settings icons, with accessibility at the centre. Text size, cognitive access, on screen markers, camera controls, brightness, vision options, and control customisation all coming together to make up the circle around accessibility, and these Nintendo characters are happy about it.
Symbolically, that feels like a big deal to me.
Anyway, I’ve talked enough about the big picture here, I should probably discuss the actual settings options that were revealed during the Direct, and not just the fact that the accessibility settings menu was there.
Kirby Air Riders players struggling with gameplay speed in single player content can alter their game speed. Doing so doesn’t prevent you from earning the rewards for in game challenges, so you can turn down the game speed just long enough to complete a tricky challenge and get its reward, then return speed to normal if you want.
The default control scheme for Kirby Air Riders uses very few default buttons, but buttons can be remapped from the game itself rather than players needing to use the Switch 2’s system level remapping tools. Settings profiles are able to be saved with unique names to easily set up custom controls when needed.
Sakurai also details in the second Direct how someone might go about remapping their controls to play the game one handed on a single Joy-Con, showing a degree of thought has been put into keeping the number of inputs required to play as low as possible, and able to be done simultaniously with one hand, without conflicting with each other.
While we didn’t see every possible sub menu in the accessibility menu, or full scrolls through each sub menu, we did see enough to get a pretty good look at many of the settings that this game will offer.
In the Display sub-menu players can increase their text size, apply colourblind filters (I know that’s a flawed approach but it’s still more than I typically see from Nintendo), preview images to see what a changed setting will look like while still in the menu, alter the size of their HUD, alter their HUD Opacity, and turn on “Outlines”.
While “Outlines” was not shown off during the Direct, from context I believe it is likely to be bold outlines around the edges of characters to increase their visibility, similar to the outline options seen in Super Smash Bros for 3DS.
In the Visual Effects sub-menu players can add on-screen markers to their display, place a Kirby icon as a centre screen reticle, and change their field of view to help mitigate motion sickness. Players can also turn off camera shake, and disable camera tilt when banking on curved tracks. All of these changes can be previewed in a test arena from the menu, rather than needing the player to jump into core gameplay to experiment with them.
There’s also an example shown of accessibility presets, in the form of a Visual Intensity Limiter in the visual effects menu, which will customise a number of the visual accessibility options automatically.
Now, I can’t say at this stage what the full extent of this game’s accessibility support will be, or whether it will all feel good in practice, but everything about this short presentation has me feeling like this game is very much on the right track. The game’s first Direct talked at length about the importance of keeping the game’s inputs mechanically simple, there’s examples of presets to help get more in depth settings quickly dialed in, and there’s no shying away from the word accessibility in how the game presents these options. That is all fantastic.
To me, it’s the little things giving me hope on this release. For one, I don’t know if I have ever seen any video game actually include the accessibility stick figure iconography on their accessibility menu. That’s the kind of choice that gets made by someone who doesn’t just have a surface level understanding of the subject, but has made the effort to do more broad research on the topic. That’s not something you’re likely to do if you’re just phoning in bare bones settings to try and tick a box. That to me looks like someone who cares about accessibility in game design.
If anyone from Nintendo is watching this video or reading the article version of this, I hope you pass this feedback up the chain – Sakurai really seems to be making exciting strides forward for accessibility in a Nintendo first party published release, and I would love to see your other game directors and development teams learn from his clear enthusiasm on the subject.
I hope Nintendo goes out of their way to get review copies of Kirby Air Riders in the hands of accessibility focused reviewers and critics in the coming months, ideally with enough lead time for those who may need longer to play and write up their impressions as a result of their disabilities.
For Sakurai, I hope this is the start of a forward trend in his future games. Everything shown here is really promising, and I would love to see this be the start of Nintendo having a prominent accessibility advocate in a position to make accessibility efforts widely supported in their games.
For now it’s hard to say much else. I’m now deeply excited to see Kirby Air Riders release, even if I’m going to hold my breath on this signalling a direction change broadly at Nintendo for now.
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