The first Kirby game that I can remember playing is “Kirby Super Star” on my Super Nintendo — stuffing my face with cookies and cream ice cream, playing the eight Kirby modes all night long, and having the time of my life. So when I started this Kirby Khronicles retrospective, I knew going in that when I hit the SNES games, I would have to battle my nostalgia.
And for the most part, the SNES games hold up tremendously. I definitely enjoyed them more when I was five years old, I couldn’t see all of the faults in games back then, but it didn’t diminish what “Super Star” and “Dream Land 3” do well. No modern games look like they do they’re stunners. Especially “Dream Land 3,” which is like looking at a painting come to life.
“Super Star” is an oddity with six miniature campaigns coupled with two mini-games. One of them is an abridged remake of the original “Kirby’s Dream Land,” but here re-titled “Spring Breeze” because you beat the smiling tree and then it’s over. It’s also got the racing game “Gourmet Race,” a mini-“Metroid” clone called “The Great Cave Offensive,” a Meta Knight story, and Samurai Kirby (which would continue long after 1996 as a fan favorite).
The graphical overhaul from the first Game Boy title to this is one of the largest in gaming history. “Super Star” still looks magnificent today, and there are so many improvements between the eight different modes that it’s hard to list them all let alone remember. There are actual honest-to-goodness health bars now, more moves for each ability, and you can create little helpers to simulate co-op play. Hell, when you make a clone, you give them a little kiss on their forehead to refill their health. Mwah!
What other games let you give your little dudes a special hug like that?
I think “Super Star” is more than the sum of its parts because hopping from mode to mode provides a perverse little thrill. The massive upgrades from the handheld titles are so immediate, and it’s important to remember that this game represented a shift in all future development of Kirby games. Kirby would, for a few years, transition from a portable series to a console one, and that’s when it became a reliable Nintendo franchise in their stable.
The jump button is to puff and float, not the up on D-Pad anymore. There’s better underwater movement and attacks now. One hit doesn’t automatically knock your ability out. There’s so much here to love, and yet it was “Dream Land 3” that caught my attention more on this replay because of the art style alone. It doesn’t have the little hats for Kirby to wear, but the transformations are much quicker, and this game revolves around the animal companions.
Sadly, they’re not great, but man do they look incredible.
Playing as the hamster, owl, bird, and the others are ultimately just slower versions of Kirby. It’s fun at first to find out what your powers will do when riding each animal, but after a while, I began to just stop using them completely. After that, the game quickly flattened out, but it was an enjoyable time nonetheless. Kirby is nothing if not consistent.
Except “Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards” which sucked. It’s boring, way too horizontal, sparse, and totally skippable as a game. There are some cool boss battles, I liked mixing the powers when I was a kid, but this game does not hold up in any way. By far the worst Kirby game I’ve played and is easily one of the worst in the franchise.
Image credit: “Kirby Super Star,” HAL Laboratory
Video Game Town 