Mario Kart is a series that most people have played at least once in their lives. In fact, Mario Kart 8 deluxe is currently Nintendo’s highest grossing game ever made, and Mario Kart World was sold to over 90% of Nintendo Switch 2’s across the world.
However, if there’s one thing most Mario Kart players can agree on, it’s that the blue shell is one of the worst things to ever be conceived by man. This post is meant to disagree with those players, and show the reason why the blue shell is the necessary evil of Mario Kart by addressing every argument against it.
This is a common complaint for the blue shell that is somewhat true, but still ultimately false. On one hand, the entire purpose of the blue shell was to prevent people who are in first from getting too much of a lead to where players can’t catch up. However, this argument assumes that “getting into first place” is the only skillful play that exists in Mario Kart.
Mario Kart is not a traditional racing game by any means, and has party game aspects mixed into it. Therefore, a skillful player will consider all the potential outcomes of whatever they’re trying to do. This is exactly what professional players do in their games to minimize the amount of blue shells they have to deal with.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4-_VxkcU9rE
This also leads into another point about blue shells that people dislike
This argument is best disproved by the strategy of “frontrunning.” Basically, frontrunning is how any other traditional racing game is played: Get into first and try to maintain it until the end of the race. The opposite of this is bagging, in which the player gets into lower places to try to make a comeback with items.
However, out of the two of these strategies, frontrunning is overwhelmingly the strategy that generally works more, which wouldn’t be true if the blue shell truly made first place a bad position. This also doesn’t take into account the fact that blue shells can only show up every 30 seconds, and since Mario Kart maps generally take under 3 minutes to finish (and because of RNG), this means that generally speaking only about 2, 1, or sometimes even zero blue shells will appear.
Besides that as well, if the blue shell didn’t exist, first place would simply be too safe. It’s already one of the safest positions (arguably the safest) because at most first will only have to worry about the occasional red shells from second place, and the blue shell already has many ways to dodge or mitigate it such as
Using the super horn
Dodging it with a mushroom
Dodging it with a boo (less common)
Mitigating the hit with a boost pad after the hit
Falling off the map instead of getting hit (which is faster)
This is true to a certain extent because that’s what the blue shell was designed to do. However, making a comeback because of first place getting is absolutely not only a thing that happens with blue shells, and if a first place player is hit by a blue shell, at most it will generally allow second, third, or maybe fourth to pass the player. The blue shell isn’t some instant win button that makes it so that a player can instantly pass first place, and once again, most of the time blue shells don’t occur more than twice a race, so it’s not a consistent means of making a comeback either.
One point that is also neglected when discussing blue shells is the fact that they indirectly balance bagging as well, which is a comeback strategy. When a player bags, that player is generally hoping for
A lightning (shock)
A Bullet Bill
Triple Mushrooms
A star
Or even a golden mushroom
A blue shell is not on this list, and only hinders a player who wants to bag. Therefore, if a bagger gets a blue shell, it ends up being bad for them because they can’t use it to boost forward. Generally speaking, people make comebacks with boost items, not blue shells.
It is true that getting hit with a blue shell can be frustrating, however, what is infinitely more frustrating is when a game is unwinnable because of first place being so far away and only having to worry about red shells, which they can easily defend. It’s not an easy thing to admit, but the blue shell is absolutely a necessary evil of Mario Kart, and that needs to be recognized more.
Shortcat talking about blue shells: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4-_VxkcU9rE