Yabuki was then asked about the lack of any characters from other games in Mario Kart World, to which he explained that the development team felt that adding non-Mario characters to a game built heavily around the idea of a Mario-themed world would have felt out of place.

“As developers, it would have seemed incongruous to us to add characters from other games into this universe,” Yabuki said (via machine translation). “And it didn’t seem necessary, given everything we could already do with Mario.