Mario Kart 8

Toad Harbour takes place in a sunny seaside town, complete with a shopping centre, a tram station, and a marina filled with sailboats. There are multiple routes to take, and racers will tear through the docks, open-air markets, and side streets as they jockey for first place. It is bright, cheery, and lively, with plenty of Toads watching from the sides, making it feel like an actual lived-in location in the Mario world. The background music on this track, which incorporates acoustic guitar and steel drums, really captures the laid-back feeling of a casual drive through a beautiful resort town.

Toad Harbour was clearly inspired by San Francisco, as evidenced by its steep hills and the trundling trolley system, which mirrors the city’s famous and historic Powell-Hyde cable car line. Mario, Luigi, and Wario all have cable cars coloured and patterned after them in this course (a Luigi one can be seen in the image above), and each has some Toads as passengers and a Koopa Troopa as the driver. But, unlike San Francisco, Toad Harbour also has a massive statue on an island just off the coast that is an obvious nod to the Statue of Liberty in New York City – except the statue is of Princess Peach, and instead of holding a torch, she’s holding a Fire Flower in her lowered left hand and a Super Star in her raised right.

There are many interesting signs and shop fronts to keep an eye out for in Toad Harbour as you’re zooming and skidding around the streets. See if you can spot a Yoshi’s Egg Market shop, a Coconut Cafe, and banners with a picture of a Dolphin wearing a pair of goggles, advertising the Super Marine World Dive Shop (this is a reference to Super Mario World, the game that Dolphins first appeared in). There’s also a poster advertising Shy Guy Metals, which is presumably the business responsible for the mining operations seen in Shy Guy Falls and Wii Wario’s Gold Mine. Several large Toad Toy Store buildings appear in Toad Harbour, which collectively appear to form a superstore, and one of the walls has an anti-gravity section, allowing players to drive up and along it.

I talked a bit about Toads a few weeks ago when I revisited Toad’s Turnpike – but there’s still more to say. Toad was first playable in Super Mario Bros. 2. This Toad – presumably the Toad, the one we are most familiar with – is stated to be the Mushroom Kingdom’s chief guard (although if he is, he doesn’t seem to do a very good job, considering the number of times Bowser has kidnapped Peach). Despite his small stature, Toad is the fastest and strongest of the four playable characters in Super Mario Bros. 2 (the others being Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach), but his weakness is his poor jumping.

In most subsequent games, Toad and his brethren assumed supportive roles. In addition to providing Mario and Luigi with helpful items to use on their adventures, Toad can often be found racing go-karts and hosting Mario Parties. For a long, long time, only one title featured Toad as the main protagonist: an obscure 1994 SNES game called Wario’s Woods. This was a puzzle game, very similar to Tetris, where the player controlled Toad and had to destroy the monsters in each level by lining them up with a bomb of a matching colour. With every level beaten, Toad would pursue Wario further into the forest until he could eventually confront and defeat him, thus breaking Wario’s spell over the monsters and restoring peace to the woodland.

This largely forgotten entry in the Mario series’ extensive catalogue was Toad’s only chance at the limelight until a certain Toad Captain finally got his chance at stardom. A minigame first introduced in Super Mario 3D World for the Wii U, ‘The Adventures of Captain Toad’ is a series of puzzle-based courses that Captain Toad must successfully traverse to obtain a green star. It was this gameplay that inspired Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (also for the Wii U) and its Nintendo Switch rerelease. Many of the levels are made more complicated by the fact that Captain Toad cannot jump – he’s weighed down too much by his heavy adventurer’s backpack.

Next time, we’ll be racing through a spooky, crooked building inhabited by cackling Boos: Twisted Mansion.