Nintendo is rushing to remove user-made designs shared within Kirby Air Riders that feature fan-favorite character Chef Kawasaki dressed in a micro bikini.
Kirby Air Riders allows players to create and customize their own in-game rides using basic shapes and stickers, something that has quickly led to all manner of user creativity — and several designs that feature the beloved chef in beach attire.
Chef Kawasaki has been a fan-favorite among the Kirby community for years, and there's a running joke that, underneath his apron, Chef Kawasaki is otherwise naked. Alternatively, fans have suggested, the character could just about be hiding a micro bikini underneath the straps of his cooking attire — something now depicted in mounds of fanart that we will not embed on this website.
エアライダーのオレマシン市場にあるコックカワサキのマイクロビキニ柄、すぐ消されるだろうって皆思ってるからか値上がりも早くておもろい 初日の朝にしては高いだろ pic.twitter.com/DjMbKGcO91
— モリソバ (@Sobatake397) November 19, 2025
Is Nintendo a fan of all this? Seemingly not. As if to make its position clear, Nintendo has now removed several Chef Kawasaki micro bikini designs from Kirby Air Riders, as they began topping the game's list of most popular fan-made rides.
Automaton reports that two widely-downloaded Chef Kawasaki micro bikini riders have already been made unavailable by Nintendo, while a third — with a slightly larger bikini and succubus wings — rises in popularity and looks set to test Nintendo's limits for what it will allow.
This isn't the first time that Nintendo has acted to shut down the spread of Chef Kawasaki bikini artwork. In 2022, it swiftly stopped the proliferation of a fanmade card game, Chef Kawasaki’s Microbikini Karuta, which featured numerous fan-drawn images of an eyebrow-raising nature. (The game's creators had also begun selling the game for profit — another big Nintendo no-no.)
The latest game from Super Smash Bros. series boss Masahiro Sakurai, Kirby Air Riders launched this week exclusively for Switch 2. A spin-off of the Kirby series where players race around circuit-based tracks on glider-like machines, it is a long-awaited sequel to 2003's Kirby Air Ride on GameCube.
"Kirby Air Riders' unconventional controls can get in its own way sometimes, but they don't stop it from being a fun, frantic action racing game with an almost unreal amount of stuff to do," IGN wrote in our Kirby Air Riders review, awarding the game 8/10.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
