Mario Kart World's Free Roam Is a Breath of the Wild Adventure, Not Forza Horizon

When Mario Kart World first loaded on the Nintendo Switch 2, the open-world racing mode felt like a letdown. The natural comparison was Forza Horizon, Playground Games' polished franchise that has defined what open-world racing looks like for a decade: a map crowded with icons, each one a mission or challenge, each completion unlocking new vehicles or currency to spend on more vehicles. The loop is clean, the progression is visible, the path forward is always marked. Mario Kart World seemed to have borrowed some of Forza's features—the rewind button, the open world itself—so it seemed reasonable to expect it would work the same way. It didn't, and that felt like a failure.

But the game's Free Roam mode doesn't actually function like Forza Horizon at all. The map exists, but it shows only character locations and specific race tracks. The challenges—P-Switch trials, Peach Medallions, ? Block Panels—are scattered across the world with no markers, no guidance, no hand-holding. When you find them or complete them, you get a sticker that barely registers on the side of your vehicle. There are no currency rewards, no unlock chains, no sense of climbing a progression ladder. After an hour or so, the mode felt hollow enough to abandon.

Then, on a trip earlier in the month, the game clicked. The right comparison wasn't Forza Horizon at all. It was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo's 2017 revolution in open-world design was built on a simple principle: remove the barriers, let players go almost anywhere, let them climb almost anything, and trust them to find their own path. The destination matters less than the journey. The game doesn't tell you how to reach the top of the mountain; it gives you the tools and lets you figure it out. When you do, the reward is the view and the knowledge that you found a way no one told you to find.

Free Roam operates on that same philosophy. If you want structured objectives, you can play Grand Prix, Knockout Tour, or Battle Modes. Free Roam is something else entirely—a space designed for immersion and discovery. The game encourages you to learn techniques like wall-riding not because a mission requires it, but because mastering them opens up new parts of the world. You're not hoping a mission will take you somewhere interesting; you're trying to find a way there yourself. The reward is the Medallion or the P-Switch, yes, but more fundamentally it's the knowledge that you reached somewhere you weren't sure was reachable. Once that shift in perspective took hold, the mode became genuinely fun—the kind of fun that comes from exploring a colorful world and finding surprises in its corners.

This design choice signals something larger about Nintendo's direction. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet were the first Nintendo games outside the Zelda franchise to adopt this approach, removing the rigid structure of traditional Pokémon progression in favor of player choice and exploration. Now Mario Kart World is doing the same. Donkey Kong Bananza, coming to Switch 2, is embracing it as well—players can climb and destroy almost anything, turning the world into a playground rather than a course to complete. The pattern suggests this isn't an experiment. It's becoming Nintendo's design language for the Switch 2 generation. How Mario, Pikmin, or Kirby games will eventually adopt these principles remains to be seen, but the trajectory is clear: Nintendo is taking the lessons it learned from Breath of the Wild and applying them across its entire library. The open world is no longer a container for missions. It's a space for wonder.