Rider's Spirits

Are you a fam of Mode 7 racing games? Do you still have nostalgia for Super NES classics like Super Mario Kart? Are you a fan of reading Japanese instruction manuals that haven’t been translated to English? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are the target audience for Rider’s Spirits, a thirty-year-old Super Nintendo game that is only now getting a release outside of Japan. This is a 16-bit racer with a cast of wacky characters, tiny levels to memorize and enough Mode 7 effects to send you right back to your childhood. Does all that add up to being a hidden gem or just another Mario Kart wannabe? That’s what we’re about to find out when I review Rider’s Spirits from Ratalaika Games.

Our story begins back in the early 1990s, when Hiroshi Hamagaki and Tomo Kimura decided to leave Sega and form their own company. That company was Genki, and for nearly two decades, this famed Japanese developer brought a wide assortment of racing games to everything from the Super Nintendo to the Saturn to the Xbox 360, including the GP-1 series, Multi-Racing Championship and the long-running Tokyo Xtreme Racing franchise. One of their early titles was 1994’s Bike Daisuki, or Rider’s Spirits, as we’re going to call it in this review. This was a cartoony motorcycle racing game on the Super NES sporting a wacky selection of characters and over-the-top power-up items, all of which seemed to be inspired by the popularity of Super Mario Kart. Sadly, publishers opted against bringing this surprisingly-competitive racer to either North America or Europe, leaving it to sit in relative obscurity for three full decades.

Now, just in time to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, Ratalaika Games has decided to shine the spotlight on this cult classic and finally bring it West. For less than six dollars, gamers around the world will have a chance to play a long-lost Mode 7 racing game made by one of the true masters of the genre. It may not be the flashiest re-release of the year, but this game will definitely scratch that 16-bit itch.

As a racing game, Rider’s Spirits is almost a carbon copy of Super Mario Kart on the Super NES. We have a choice between eight colorful riders, all of which fit into four character types that will determine their speed, handling, acceleration and so on. Instead of Mario, Luigi and the Princess, we get a military hero named Mash, a leather-clad biker named Baran and a pink-haired anime girl named Papaya. You’ll choose one of these racers to complete in three increasingly difficult cups, each with their own stages and trophies. If you’ve accumulated the most points across five different races, you’ll come in first and unlock the next cup, where an even tougher group of stages await.

Even though you’re racing on two wheels instead of four, this still looks and feels like a kart racer. The only notable change is that you can lean left and right with the shoulder buttons, and instead of jumping, our riders can bust a wheelie to help them speed around corners. We’re also given three turbos at the start that can be used at any point during the race. That’s different, but just barely.

The one big shake-up in Rider’s Spirits is in how the game handles power-ups. Without question mark boxes or coins to pick up, I spent the first hour or so thinking that there weren’t any power-ups at all. But then I would see another character throw a grenade or I would get temporarily blinded out of the blue. Those must have come from somewhere. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that you have to zip into the optional pit stop in order to collect one item per round.

With so few opportunities to pick up offensive and defensive items, this limits how many weapons are flying around the screen at any given time. Perhaps that’s a good thing, because some of these items can have a real negative impact on your chances of coming in first. Getting blinded in anything other than the first or second lap is essentially a death sentence in this game, forcing you to try the stage all over again. This is especially true in the higher difficulties, where you basically have to run each race perfectly to even stand a chance of winning. On the other hand, you can cycle between three different items in your inventory, something you certainly couldn’t do in Super Mario Kart.

There are a couple of alternate modes, including a time trial and endurance run. The time trial is exactly what you expect, but the endurance mixes things up a tiny bit. Here you’ll race as a team, swapping between the two bikes whenever one is about to run out of gas. There are no power-ups or items here, just pure racing. It’s not perfect, but I actually prefer this to the standard grind prix mode.

As a re-release, this package is unsurprisingly barebones. We get a lot of the usual trappings, like the ability to save and load your progress, as well as rewind time while you’re in the middle of a race. We’re also given a bunch of video options, such as stretching out the display and changing to CRT mode with an arcade glow. Probably the biggest “extra” added is a photo gallery that shows off the box art, cartridge sticker and instruction manual. While I like that we get clean scans of the Japanese manual, I do wish they would have gone that extra step and translated it into English. Or, at the very minimum, featured this information somewhere else. Just between the different item descriptions and character attributes, there’s a lot of information in the instructions that would be handy to know. It’s no wonder it took so long for me to figure out something as simple as where to pick up the items.

Beyond the barebones package, there are a lot of things about the original game that left me a little cold. While the cast is fine, I found the tracks to be lacking. They are small and completely forgettable. Worse yet, they start to look the same after a while. Aside from the actual layout, Tokio City and Letroit City look identical. The same can be said about a number of other locations. It’s also annoying how the computer-controlled characters will cheat throughout the race, especially in the higher difficulties. For example, they never need to swoop into the out-of-the-way pitstop to grab a weapon, and they’ll always be right behind you, no matter how fast you go. That’s really annoying.

I also found myself frustrated by some of the visual issues. I don’t know if it’s that the Mode 7 graphics don’t pair well with a 4K television, but a lot of the tracks have a messy look to them. It’s also disappointing that you’re really only using half of the screen when racing in single-player mode. The top half is used up by the rear-view mirrors, but I’m not a huge fan of the way they’re implemented. If you don’t like that look, you can switch to a design where the camera inexplicably circles your bike. Somehow, this is even more annoying than the rear-view mirrors.

That said, I am happy that this game was finally released in the United States and Europe after thirty years. While I’m a bit mixed on how well it holds up as a racing game, I still like the fact that it exists. And at only six dollars, it doesn’t feel like anybody is being taken for a ride here. This game is definitely worth a look for its historical value, but I’m in no hurry to recommend Rider’s Spirits.