BODY: On October 30, Nintendo announced that it is canceling the in-progress Kirby Air Riders event Trick or Treat!, because it confirmed a bug that temporarily freezes the screen during play, according to AUTOMATON.
Kirby Air Riders is a racing game, the sequel to Kirby Air Ride. Riders such as Kirby, King Dedede and Meta Knight, each with different abilities, race on their own Air Ride machines. The controls are simple, but the play is strategic, for example attacking rivals to speed up.
Trick or Treat! was a City Trial event that started at noon on October 29 and was scheduled to run until noon on November 3. Players collected event points to earn Halloween-style items, such as a ghost hat for their rider. The official account described it as a mode where attacking rivals makes more items appear, and where players can eat sweets to recover after taking damage. In practice, a single hit made players lose all the stat boosts they had built up. Players posted videos of the stat-down sound effect repeating, and a result screen with only four abilities. Some called it chaotic and fun, others said it was fun only at first, and some wondered whether losing everything was an intended rule.
The insider take
Nintendo's cancellation notice mentions only the screen-freezing bug, not the lose-everything rule. AUTOMATON says the rule may have been the intended design, but that is unknown. Many users reported heavy slowdown, and the article suggests that because all stats drop at once, more items would remain on the field, which may have raised the load; that is the article's own possibility, not something Nintendo said. This is the game's second event cancellation, after a race-themed City Trial event in December 2025 that was canceled over a bug carrying race-only rules into the normal City Trial. The article says the event for earning these rewards is planned to be held again. After the first cancellation, a rewards event followed five days later with rules changed to ones with no past problems.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).