Kirby Air Riders is officially out, and all hell has broken loose in the game’s Machine Market, where players can design and sell their own customized rides for in-game currency. The customization options allow a high degree of freedom, which players have taken full advantage of – recreating anime characters, Pokémon, memes, and, of course, certain “forbidden” imagery. The chief example is this immensely popular custom Flight Warp Star, repainted to look like Chef Kawasaki wearing a micro bikini (courtesy of the Japanese playerbase).
There’s an update to this story: Chef Kawasaki “micro bikini” ride deleted from Kirby Air Riders Machine Market, immediately replaced by succubus Chef Kawasaki
Why would someone make such nightmare fuel, you ask? Well, Chef Kawasaki wearing a micro bikini has been a running joke among a portion of Japanese Kirby fans for quite a few years. The headcanon seems to have resulted from fans looking at Chef Kawasaki’s standard attire – naked save for a single apron – and thinking, “Isn’t that kind of lewd?” From there, things escalated into putting Kawasaki in a micro bikini, with the earliest such image dating to March 2020, created by Pixiv artist Mafuyu.
Not only that, but the meme also gave birth to a fangame called Chef Kawasaki’s Micro Bikini Karuta. This derivative card game was released in 2022 physically and on the digital platform BOOTH. It was basically a modern version of traditional Japanese Karuta, but using cards featuring Chef Kawasaki in a micro bikini, striking various risqué poses. Although it saw great popularity in its early days, the game eventually got taken down due to a request from Kirby developer HAL Laboratory. Given that the fangame was being distributed commercially, the ban hardly comes as a surprise, but the news did leave a lasting impression on the domestic fandom, causing waves on Twitter at the time.
Case in point, the custom Chef Kawasaki micro bikini in Kirby Air Rider’s Machine Market is already selling for an exorbitant amount of Miles, and fans theorize the price was driven up due to players being convinced the design is destined for deletion. It’s doubtful whether Nintendo will actually go out of its way to respond to this though, given that their main qualm with the deleted fangame was the fact that it was sold commercially. In any case, the micro bikini Chef Kawasaki remains among the most expensive rides on the Machines Market.
Kirby Air Riders is out now on Nintendo Switch 2.
