Mario Kart Wii Vehicles
If you have ever played Mario Kart Wii you know that there is a lot of pressure to pick the optimal vehicle to win the race. Pick too small of a vehicle and you’ll get bumped off of the track. Pick too large of a vehicle and you’ll surely be too slow, right?
I haven’t played Mario Kart Wii in more than 10 years, but I have always wanted to come back and study the statistics of each vehicle to see what patterns could be found. I’ve wondered if it is possible to reverse engineer the method used to generate the vehicle statistics. Maybe we can find some formula that says if the vehicle is a large kart and the speed is X then the acceleration will be Y.
Understanding the stats of each vehicle and how each statistic correlates with every other statistic should allow us to find outliers in the dataset and even help us find the best vehicle to use.
Looking at the Data
The stats for all of the vehicles can be found quite easily online. mariowiki.com is one such site that lists out the statistics for all of the vehicles. One thing to note before jumping into these numbers is that each character modifies the statistics of each vehicle a bit. For example, Funky Kong & Daisy add 4 to the vehicle’s top speed.
Let’s start off with understanding the stats a bit more, quoting the mario wiki here:
Speed: How high the top speed of the vehicle is. This does not affect off-road travel. Negatively correlated with acceleration. It is also the only stat where no vehicle goes below twenty.
Weight: How heavy a vehicle is. With a higher weight, the player can knock lighter characters away by ramming them. Weight also affects the angle that a vehicle goes over a jump at, with heavier vehicles jumping at a lower angle. Finally, heavier vehicles bounce less upon landing from a jump.
Acceleration: How quickly the vehicle’s top speed is achieved from a non-moving position. Negatively correlated with speed.
Handling: How tight the vehicles can normally turn. Usually opposes the drift rating.
Drift: How tight the vehicle turns while using the drifting maneuver. Usually opposes the handling rating.
Off-Road: How much speed the vehicle retains when off the track. A low rating of this can slow the vehicle significantly. Also, vehicles with a high off-road stat slide less when driving on ice. There exist several types of off-road surfaces which vary in intensity.
Mini-Turbo: When using the manual drift option, how effective a mini-boost will be. While all vehicles can perform a blue spark mini-turbo, only karts can execute an orange spark mini-turbo. Has no effect on the standing mini-turbo.
These definitions already hint at some correlations found between the statistics. Let’s see if we can find more.
In the above figure I’ve shown the correlation between speed and the other 6 attributes. There are some good patterns we can see right off the bat here.
- All of the stats (except for weight) are negatively correlated with speed. Drift is a little iffy in terms of the correlation but we can see that there are several lines that definitely follow a negative correlation.
- The size of the vehicle cleanly determines the weight of the vehicle (see chart below), and if you look closely you’ll see that the bikes generally weigh less than the karts of the same size.
- In acceleration, drift, off-road & mini-turbo we can see a bunch of tiny lines forming. This is interesting enough in and of itself, but on even closer inspection, each of these little line groups usually has a large kart at the top followed by a large bike, then followed by medium kart & bike, then finally a small kart & bike. If the line group doesn’t have the full rainbow, the line groups usually at least contain a kart & bike pair of the same size.
From these observations we can state that, in general, karts & large vehicles tend to have a higher top speed than comparable bikes & small vehicles at the cost of karts & large vehicles having worse acceleration, handling, drift, off-road & mini-turbo.
It’s not obvious from just looking at this figure, but after playing with the charts and filtering for specific groups of lines I noticed that certain groups of lines stay together throughout all of the graphs. I’ve labeled each group of vehicles and you’ll see that they form a semi-straight line throughout all of these graphs.
Now I know that some of these groups only have two vehicles, which you could consider cheating because two vehicles will always form a straight line in every dimension. The reason I was okay with two vehicle groups is because all of them consist of a kart & a bike of the same size. The pairs are also always the same distance apart, each dimension having a difference of 2 or 3 units. The only exception is the offroad-special group, which isn’t a true group — they are only grouped together because they are both special.
In fact, many of my groups like turbo, speedy, & offroad are just multiple of these bike/kart pairs that happen to line up. These line groupings begin to paint a picture of how the devs may have picked the numbers for most of the vehicles.
- They created most of the vehicles in bike/kart pairs, with nearly identical stats across all dimensions for each pair.
- Some bike/kart pairs were chained together. By “chained” I mean that the fastest vehicle in a pair receives the stats of the slowest vehicle in a different pair bumped down by a couple of points (small vehicles chaining behind medium vehicles and medium vehicles chaining behind large vehicles).
- There are a couple of vehicles that seem to borrow stats from two different groups, which means they don’t fit in any one group perfectly. These are the offroad-special bikes (Zip Zip & Phantom), which are similar to the other offroad vehicles, but each does their own thing. The other unicorn is the Jet Bubble that seems to be a mix of the Standard Kart M & Standard Bike L.
Let’s try it out!
That was a lot of observations thrown in your face, but I hope you are beginning to see that the way the developers picked the numbers is fairly straightforward. Let’s take a look at an example and pretend that you are one of the developers trying to generate the statistics for some new vehicles.
We’ll say that you just created the small off-road vehicles, the Magikruiser and Tiny Titan. You need to come up with some statistics for these vehicles.
Let’s start with picking the weight. The weight is usually within 6 units of the standard bike/kart. We want these to be off-road vehicles so they should be on the heavier side. The Magikruiser doesn’t look much heavier than the standard bike so we’ll give it a +3 weight. The Tiny Titan looks a lot heavier than the standard kart so we’ll give it a full +6 weight.
We already have some medium off-road vehicles created so we can base the rest of the statistics on those.
Our small kart should have a slower top speed than the medium bike with better statistics for all of the other attributes.
Likewise, our small bike should have a slower top speed then our small kart with better statistics for all of the other attributes.
I believe that the developers used this method of setting the statistics of vehicles relative to other vehicles because it best explains why you get these lines of vehicles forming throughout the 6 dimensions.
At the very least, it helps us think about the vehicles in terms of groups, where each group is a line of vehicles that follow this pattern of bike/kart pairs, slower top speed, better everything else.
The next obvious question is how did the developers decide the position of entire groups? Are some groups positioned better than others? I think the best way to understand this bigger picture is to walk through each group and take a guess at what the developers’ intentions were with each group.
The Babies
With a literal Booster Seat as one of the vehicles and the Daytripper looking more like a fancy carriage rather than a racing vehicle, I don’t think the developers intended this group to be speed demons. Quite the opposite — the developers probably intended this group to be good for beginner players with very forgiving controls.
Starting off with the good news — this group has the very best handling in the game. The bad news is that handling counts for nothing to experienced players who use drifting to go around every corner in a map.
The Bit Bike & Booster Seat have the 2 slowest top speeds in the game. Their offroad & miniturbo is actually pretty good. The Bit Bike has the same off-road as the Dolphin Dasher and the same mini-turbo as the Mach Bike. But with such a slow top speed, it would be a challenge to win with any of these vehicles.
The Off-Roaders
The Off-Roaders is one of the more oddball groups. Their most uniting feature is that they all have bad drift. The developers probably wanted this group to feel big and bulky, making up for their bad agility with their ability to take off-road shortcuts. All of them also need to be unlocked except for the Wario Bike and Offroader.
Speaking of the Wario Bike and Offroader, they apparently don’t even have very good off-road. The Offroader was one of my favorite vehicles as a kid, so it makes me sad to know that its name was a lie.
The Zip Zip and Phantom are special. You can see that they don’t follow the standard slope for drift or off-road, but they also don’t fit very well if you try to group them with either of the other groups. My guess is that they inherited their stats from a mix of vehicle groups, instead of following a single line of inheritance like most of the vehicles.
The Phantom holds the record for the worst drift in the game, and the Magikruiser holds the record for the best off-road.
The Standards
As you would expect, this group has the most average, well-balanced vehicles. If my memory is correct, you are forced to use the standard vehicles in the battle game mode. I’m sure the game developers wanted these vehicles to be the most well balanced and planned to use them as a base for building out all of the other vehicles.
You’ll notice in the chart a weird clumping around 50 speed that seems to break the pattern of straight lines. This clumping is caused by the Jet Bubble not following the standard pattern. Its statistics seem to be chosen as a mix of the Standard Bike L and the Standard Kart M.
The other outlier is the Piranha Prowler, which is the heaviest vehicle in the game and whose statistics seem to be an extra large extension of the Standard Kart L.
The slowest three in this group also seem to be an extension of the Standard Bike S. The Quacker and Cheep Charger hold the top two places for best acceleration in the game, of course coming at the cost of a low top speed.
The Mini-Turbos
This group of cars are some of the most prominent outliers, notably breaking the trend for the mini-turbo stat. They have very good drift & mini-turbo for their speed. However, they do not have very good acceleration, handling, or off-road so I imagine that the devs intended these for advanced players.
The Flame Runner & Flame Flyer have the worst acceleration in the game. The Bullet Bike & Mini Beast hold the top two spots for best drift & mini-turbo.
The Speedy
For this last section we have the vehicles with the fastest top speeds in the game. All of these need to be unlocked. They have okay drift, but all of their other stats are pretty bad. The developers probably intended these to be the most attractive vehicles, wanting players to get excited about unlocking vehicles with such a high top speed. They didn’t want these vehicles to become too overpowered though, so they are given bad values for all the other stats.
The Spear & Jetsetter hold the records for the highest top speed, worst handling, worst off-road, & worst mini-turbo.
How does my analysis compare to others?
I was curious how my analysis and categorization of the vehicles compares to how professional players categorize the vehicles in the game.
I avoided looking at anyone else’s analysis of Mario Kart Wii vehicles while doing my analysis to avoid biasing my results, and wow was I surprised at what I found when I finally looked at other people’s analyses.
It turns out that I had ignored two of the most meaningful statistics that professional players care about — inside drift and weight. Not only that, but professional players don’t care about acceleration, handling, off-road, or mini-turbo.
I’ll let them explain why this is, because I won’t be able to do their reasoning justice. However, this does mean that since we only care about 3 dimensions for the 9 bikes that have inside drift, it is a lot easier to plot the potentially good bikes.
Spoiler alert, among the Mario Kart Wii community the Flame Runner has the overwhelming consensus for being the best overall vehicle in the game. The Mach Bike usually placed as second best, so at least I can give myself a pat on the back for having both the Flame Runner and Mach Bike in the group that I predicted would be the best for professional players.