While still a good wave, I don’t think it’s quite as good as the last one. First of all, I do quite like the new playable characters added this wave! I’m so happy Kamek finally gets a chance to shine in a mainline Mario Kart game, and having Petey Piranha reunite with King Boo brings a tear to my eye. However, if I were to nitpick, to my eyes, the character models look just a tad bit lower fidelity than the characters for the base game, specifically with Kamek and Wiggler. It’s not incredibly jarring, but my ADHD will never let me not notice the slightly more apparent polygon edges on their character models. Regardless, Wave 5 still has some good tracks included. Squeaky Clean Sprint was a surprise hit for me. It’s very creative and full of charm. Other classics like Daisy Cruiser and Moonview Highway are done well here thankfully. However, starting with Koopa Cape, this is where I have some issues. Fist off, with Koopa Cape, ignoring the changes made first in 7, I think the camera can be pretty awful sometimes, specially with the pipe section and the half-pipes. It’s still a fun track, but it’s not perfect Imo. Besides, it looks a bit play-dough-y visually. Speaking of play-dough visuals, Athens Dash has some really rough visuals. The background trees and buildings look straight out of something like Mario 64 if I’m being honest, and really stick out to me in a bad way. And on Athens Dash, there is one turn in particular which is really bad and almost impossible to see coming on your first playthrough. Not a bad track but I think it isn’t a great one either. And of course, we can’t ignore the tragedy of Sunset Wilds, de-emphasis on “Sunset”. Like, why bring back this track if you’re going to end up gutting it of what made it special in the first place? At least with something like Sky Garden, it could just be chalked up to a difference in interpretation. With this, it’s straight up removing a gimmick that helped the track stand out. Fingers crossed this gets updated in the future. Finally, there’s LA Laps and Vancouver velocity. While I think the latter is very good, the former is a bit on the eh side in my opinion, especially with that one section where you drive through the oil field. On the whole, I still think it’s a solid wave, but it’s really brought down by the stinkers imo.

Also, I just wanted to rant really quickly. With the announcement of Daisy Circuit for Wave 6, it really helped me realize how oversaturated Wii has been in this DLC. Yes, I do agree that Wii has a strong selection of courses, but there are plenty of standouts from other games that could use some love. Luigi’s Mansion, Airship Fortress, Wario Coliseum, these are all tracks that would’ve been awesome to see. But no, another circuit track from a game with an already high number of tracks included. I just hope this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.