Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, it’s finally happening, the Kirby special episode. I think it’s our second, like, series-based kind of best-of episode of the year, following that super loose, uncharted one. How are you feeling about dedicating the entire episode to the little pink blob man? I know in the background, it’s been some very serious work for you. Yeah, no, good, I’m looking forward to it. Unlike the other sort of series we’ve gone super deep on, I have a sort of weird relationship in that I came to it all much later, and it’s a series I sort of dismissed for a long time. So I’m a bit of a fake phony fan. Oh, no, what’s that term? It’s when people come later to a band. Isn’t there a name for them? Fairweather fans, is that it? Yeah, I guess, you know, I was about to say Johnny Come Lately, is that a term? Yeah, that too, I mean, whatever works. So yeah, I’m not going to pretend that I’m like hardcore, you know, have been playing for 30 years, have all this under my belt. A lot of this is in the last few years, so it’s not like an ace attorney for me. I’m not as precious about it as I am Zelda. You’re right. But I do dig it. That’s good, yeah. So if you thought those episodes, you consider more of a nine or a ten out of ten. Just set your sights to a seven and then your expectations might be blown away. To you, the listener, maybe that’s the way to put it. I was talking to another writer this week and they were saying that Kirby could only ever be an eight, maybe. Maybe the best ever Kirby game could never be higher than an eight. Maybe he hasn’t got the capacity to truly ever give us a 10 out of 10 thrill. So maybe this episode will prove that. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So how are we going to break this down? Matthew’s done the plan for this one. Every time he does a plan, he gets better and better at it. It’s more and more impressed by the detail. Nice man. Yeah, it’s good. So section one is all about Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which is obviously released on Switch. According to the Amazon chart, seems to be doing very well. I think that all first party Nintendo software this generation, people just can’t get enough of this stuff. But also just been fairly hyped, I would say, for a Kirby game. Probably the most hyped Kirby game I can really remember, aside from maybe Epic Yarn, which was more about the visuals here. Here, though, it feels like it’s had a groundswell of interest. So Matthew, I suppose to kick off then, because you’ve played Kirby the Forgotten Land, and I haven’t, I’m getting it for my birthday from my partner. Let’s talk a bit about the history of 3D Kirby games and why it’s taken so long to get one. Maybe you should kick us off with this one. This is the first 3D game after 30 years, and people may be wondering why that is. There’s definitely been a bit of chat around this game. On the developer side, there was a very good sort of developer interview about this came out a couple of days ago, which is kind of the spiritual successor series to Whatta Asks. Obviously, sadly, not hosted by Whatta, but they’ve got a similar energy. Like there’s laughter involved, and lots of people chuckling, and it’s all filmed in one of all the photos of the interview come from one of those totally nondescript Nintendo meeting rooms. They always make it look like a very, very boring place to work. Yeah, they were basically addressing this and talking about like, A, the kind of challenges of making a 3D game, and a lot of that comes from the fact that they have tried to make 3D Kirby games in the past, struggled. They have a lot of failed projects. This will come up a couple of times in this episode, I imagine, that there’s this sort of quite famous stretch where there’s like 10 years with no console mainline Kirby game. They’re handheld games, but they… and it wasn’t they weren’t making them, it’s just they kept making them and not quite landing them and cancelling them, and then something kind of big happens, which which kind of like sort of tightens up and kind of revamps the series. But one of those games, they basically worked on three in that period. And the second one was a full 3D Kirby game. And you know, there’s a little screenshot you can see of it in the interview. And you can find these things doing the rounds. And it kind of looks sort of similar to what Forgotten Land ends up looking like. It’s sort of an isometric kind of sort of top down thing, you know, very like linear, you know, it’s clearly going to be quite a linear level design. It’s not like a big open world 3D game. It’s not like a Mario, or whatever, which is what Forgotten Land kind of ends up being as well. You kind of get the impression that because they had those troubles, like Hal almost gets a bit scared of 3D games. Like the director of this even says there are people now in Hal who are like, Kirby’s kind of a 2D game and should probably always be a 2D game. And I think that’s kind of interesting that there are some people are like, no, we can do it. You know, we’ve got to set our sights on this. And there are others who are like, we’ve been burned by this before. Let’s not poke the 3D bear. So I did them reading on these three cancelled Kirby games. Matthew compiled a Kirby reading pack for me. It was like way beyond parody, but incredibly useful. So yeah, this comes up in the water, doesn’t it? There is like, superficially, you look at it and go like, oh, that’s like the first seed of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, like 20 years ago, you know? Which is kind of amazing. I think it’s just because he’s like got the hat and the sword ability right. So you just look, it’s quite a simple 3D surface, like it’s not a mind blowing looking kind of level he’s on. I suppose it was like super early on anyway, but they just, I think they particular, they scrapped that one in particular because they felt like they couldn’t get the game quality up to the level they wanted it to. And then the other ones seemed like they felt a foul of like different elements. It was kind of, it seemed like a bit of a poison chalice for a while, you know? Yeah, though I actually think the three games they failed to make, they kind of have made since. Right, yeah. One was like a four player co-op game, which they’ve made several times now. One was this 3D one, which they’ve obviously now made, and the other one was sort of defined by like a weird art style. It was like a pop-up book, which you could sort of say Kirby’s Epic Yarn is sort of occupying that space in terms of like where the key factor is, the aesthetic rather than like a mechanic. Yeah, that makes sense. So, I suppose though, the scope of this game, I suppose like the element that wasn’t in… It’s interesting because like the whole kind of like a post-apocalyptic like setting element of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, seems like even that has a little bit of an origin in some previous Kirby games. I believe there’s a Kirby game, one of the 3DS ones maybe, where there’s like an extended like open city section kind of like cordoned off from the rest of the game, and that maybe like maybe that is a bit of a plot of the seed a little bit, where you could move Kirby around in 3D and they were thinking about it in more detail. That’s yeah, that’s that’s like the city trial mode in Kirby’s Air Ride. Yeah, which is like a big 3D map. Yeah, that one’s weird. Kirby’s Air Ride, I must admit, I don’t have like a huge amount of experience with and doesn’t feature heavily in this episode. So I know there’s like a few people will tell you it’s like secretly like the best one or one of the top five ones, but it may not feature so don’t don’t be cross with me. Yeah, yeah, they have they’ve definitely like they’ve tried so much with this series. And the series is defined by a complete grab bag approach to ideas that you’re going to find a lot of crossovers in a lot of places. Yeah, but it’s just really interesting how they’ll have an idea. And then it may be like years down the line before it becomes something concrete. I think a lot of this comes down to, we can talk about this in section two more, but how there is this kind of quite nebulous idea of what Kirby is, like 100% yeah, one of the it’s like compared to Mario and Zelda, which you know, you could you could argue that the 2d and 3d areas of those games are quite significantly different, but like it is one translated to the other, essentially, with Kirby, it’s like, in that water us, there are like a four or five different answers of what Kirby game is. And a few of them kind of tap into the idea that like a Kirby game can be anything as long as it’s kind of like, got fun action in its core and that like younger players can can at least pick it up and play it. But hardcore players can also enjoy the how elaborate it gets. But we look at like Kirby’s history in terms of like the actual games themselves. It’s a real kind of muddled mix. It’s hard to pick a through line. You know what I mean? Oh, it’s really hard. I’ve attempted and will attempt in section two to outline the three eras of Kirby. But it is it’s still really messy and there’s always exceptions to rule. One thing that comes out through all of this is like what an unusual studio Hal is and how little we we kind of know about Hal laboratories in terms of like their working practices. Because they’re obviously they’re so closely associated with Nintendo. And they are an independent studio, but they feel like they are a division of Nintendo. They feel like you know they were in their building at one point near they shared a space. Obviously they’re so closely tied that, you know, Oata goes from being president of Hal and sort of Hal superstar programming Megamind to president of Nintendo. You know, their fates are 100% intertwined. But I get the feeling that there’s like weirder stuff going on at Hal. Like that they’re slightly looser than maybe like the internal Nintendo teams. You know, there isn’t like a stern Miyamoto figure necessarily at Hal who’s kind of like keeping everyone in line and keeping things a bit more conservative. And like with that becomes variable quality, but also just the mad like spread of ideas. I sort of like I have more thoughts on that Matthew, because I think you can see a clear path of how like different generations of game design lead to this game here and like how fresh blood kind of like just, you know, people have different intentions of what to do with Kirby, different ambitions and different, you know, outside looking in perspectives end up being quite valuable. But I suppose like to kind of discuss Kirby and the Forgotten Land in more detail, I suppose like a good starting point here is, do you think this is a good entry for a Kirby newcomer? Yeah, I mean, again, ironically, because of Kirby’s accessible nature, you know, they’re all kind of designed for you to just pick up and be able to do. Like none of them require like any prior Kirby knowledge to kind of grasp or pass. It’s quite sexy looking in 3D. There’s a lot of like shiny fun. Like it’s very, very eager to please this game. And it’s absolutely like packed with ideas. It’s very, very fast moving, even by Kirby standards. It’s like whipping you through stuff. And I think you can probably see like everything this game has to offer a bit faster than you can with some of the other recent Kirby games. You know, it has a lot of interesting end game content, but it’s slightly like shorter and more to the point than say like the 3DS and the Wii games. So you can kind of, you know, I think you can comfortably see like the full extent of this game in like, you know, it’s a difference of like 15 hours to say 25 hours. You know, some people may see that as a negative, that they’re not getting as much out of it. But I think it’s just, it’s a super lean, which makes it like very, very accessible and fun. Okay, yeah. Interesting stuff. And that was the only thing that caught my eye is just how elaborate it looks. I mean, it feels like a lot of the time Kirby games are positioned as sort of like maybe second tier Nintendo games. But this one feels like it’s very prime time. And I think it just comes down to being this very confident looking 3D game. And quite a striking choice of setting. But I suppose like a good question to ask you, Matthew, is this game to the Kirby series what like Super Mario Odyssey is to or you know, Mario Galaxy is the Mario series? Is it that level of transformation, do you think, despite the slightly easier difficulty? I don’t think so, I don’t think it’s quite there. There’s obviously a huge temptation to link this to Odyssey in that, you know, Odyssey is about taking control of enemies and sort of possessing them. And this has, as well as the copy abilities, which is sort of that, where Kirby inhales and it becomes, you know, develops enemy powers. You can also sort of possess objects by stretching over them, it’s called Mouthful Mode. I actually think Mouthful Mode is probably like the weakest element of this game. You know, it’s very, it’s very funny, you know, seeing Kirby as a car and then he like stretches his gob around a big pipe and, you know, that’s just funny, just the sentence is funny to me. You know, you can stretch yourself over a big locker unit and things like that, all kind of vending machines. And a lot of the fun of the game is sort of seeing like what it does next. But I would say that side of the game dries up quite quickly, like it sort of front loads a lot of the Mouthful stuff. And they’re also, they’re not particularly deep. Like I think the Mario transformations in Odyssey are a bit more mechanically interesting. They’re more like fully featured characters for you to kind of like manipulate and get your head around. Here, a vending machine is basically just a gun because it shoots cans and the pipe just rolls and jumps. And so when you see them, you know exactly what you’re going to get. I don’t think it ever really like truly takes off. I think what maybe holds Kirby back from troubling Mario, for me anyway, is that it doesn’t really feel like a like a sort of sandbox to play in. I don’t mean that in terms of like an open world, but I mean, I don’t think the ideas are sort of deep enough. They’re kind of designed to show you everything they have at first glimpse. Like it doesn’t really, it’s not too worried about like depth of anything. Everything’s quite surface level, very fun, very instantly silly and enjoyable. Where Mario, I think, has that too, but then you, there’s always an extra like level to it. You know, you can go back and just like relish in the mechanics or relish in the field. And I don’t think Kirby quite has that. I think that that will always hold it back. That makes sense. I think something you noted last week when we talked about what we’ve been playing lately is that the the ideas come along and then they’re sort of gone before they really kind of get a chance to do anything that elaborate with them. Do you think that’s the case? Yeah, but you don’t really, you don’t really notice it as much because, you know, it’s gone because there’s another thing there. And it’s only when I think you go back and do like the late game stuff or go back into levels to like hoover up the collectibles you’ve missed or whatever that that you think, oh, maybe there’s not quite as much to this. You know, it’s it’s, you know, I’ve been playing a little bit more of it post review and maybe I’ve called on like a couple of bits of it because of that. We are like, ah, it doesn’t quite got the legs, you know, not so much that it like impact, you know, I still had enough fun from it. I was like, yeah, that was really satisfying. I enjoyed it. I just don’t think you’ll be playing it like, you know, three, four times over. Right, right. Are there any new mechanics in this game that add wrinkles to the Kirby formula? Outside of that Malfoy stuff, the big thing is that you like level up the copy abilities. You can hover like the bomb character and then you just throw a bomb. But if you level it up again, when you start throwing bombs, they sort of chain together. And if you chain multiple bombs, the explosions get bigger. And then if you upgrade it again, it has that chaining ability and the bombs will home in. So you can basically lay a big strip of bombs and then they’ll all drive towards the enemy and explode massively. All the copy abilities have those kind of tiers. The flip side to it is that maybe they’re not quite as complicated as some of the copy abilities in the other games. They’ve stripped the moveset back. I think that is one of the 3D things they’ve done to make it more graspable in 3D. But I’d say that is countered by just how wild some of the abilities get. Really by the end of the game you’re meant to have everything upgraded. You can upgrade things beyond their maximum level a little bit for doing the boss rush mode. So you’re basically trying to make this power as godlike as possible. And then you go and you end up killing regular bosses in one blow. Like their health bar just vanishes in a second. And so it’s more about the wild excess of it, which that’s quite fun. But again, it has like a limit after a while you’re like, well, I have maxed this stuff out. Yeah. Okay. That does make sense. But there’s bold certainly in its own way. Yeah. Like visually, it means every three or four hours, like everything’s every move is getting a big visual upgrade. So like the last stretch of the game, you know, you’re dealing with like some of the special effects on the on the powers are like really, really wild that they’re, you know, a lot of them are just sort of light shows more than like anything technically deeper. But their footage you’d record at the end of the game will look noticeably different to the footage at the start just because it is kind of crazy. And that’s quite an interesting like, like visual power curve. Yeah, for sure. Of all the kind of like bits and pieces I’ve seen about this game doing the rounds, Matthew, the thing that I was really impressed by was the fact that the 3D action, the camera perspective determines the kind of like hit boxing of whether you hit enemies with the sword and stuff like or different items. And that seems like a magic trick. Like basically they’ve kind of programmed it. So if it looks like you’ve hit them, you have hit them, which I don’t even know how to vaguely know how that sort of thing works. But were you kind of blown away by that when looking at the making of this game? Yeah, absolutely. And the fact that on Twitter loads of devs were reposting it suggested like, because I wondered like, was this a thing everyone does? And lots of people were like, holy shit, this is such a cool idea. Like what a great way of doing it. Like if it looks like it works, then it works. What an amazingly like simple sort of, I was going to say like Nintendo, you know, galaxy brain thinking, but it’s not, it’s how thinking. They’re the ones who came up with this. It’s not Nintendo team, but yeah, like that as their solution to how can we make a really accessible 3D action game? Because he says elsewhere in the interview, you know, I think he even says like, feasibly could a three year old play this game is in the back of his mind. And you forget like, you know, three, he’s super young and you know, your hand eye coordination really isn’t there. And the idea they’ve tried to like, absolutely childproof it, I mean, that’s always sort of been part of Kirby, but to see them state it so explicitly and have such like an elegant solution to it. And there’s loads of stuff like that in the game, like it’s got really generous auto aiming, but it doesn’t feel like it’s pulling your projectiles. It doesn’t feel like it’s faking it, but actually it like 100% is, you know, it hides a lot of its help. That’s the other important thing. You don’t want to feel like it’s pandering to you or being like condescending and it never does. You know, in the moment, you’re like, yeah, I’m fucking Kirby. I’m tearing it up. But it’s actually because there’s always like cool stuff going on under the hood. And I think that’s that’s that’s real magic. Like if there’s a bit of a game, you know, in hindsight, that is like 10 out of 10 thinking, the art of that, I think, is is that? Yeah, for sure. I understand this has like a kind of Bayonetta style witch time combat mechanic to like a like a dodge and then a slowdown timer. Breath of the Wild had this too, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Is that of any note? Do you think? They’ve done a few slow-mo dodges stuff before in a couple of moments in the series. Where that probably comes into action more is in the some of the end game stuff. It’s kind of a Kirby tradition in this modern era of Kirby now that there’s hidden extra hard versions of the bosses where they kind of redesign them and give them like new moves and new looks and things. And they’re definitely like a lot tougher than the basic bosses. Yeah, you have to be doing this like witch time dodging. There are lots of like dash moves and projectiles which they want you to zip out the way. And we’ve always talked about Kirby being like your like my first platformer. And I actually mentioned this in my VGC review of Forgotten Land. Like there are some 3D like arena boss battles in this where you’re like, this actually feels like my first platinum game, you know, in terms of the way the monster like evolves through the fight, like the phases of the fight, the kind of control of like space and like, oh, this is, you know, this bit of the battle, you can’t possibly lay an attack on them. This is about like dodging their mad moves and identifying a window where you can land some hits. That’s actually like pure platinum. And the kind of guy who heads up Kirby, he loves boss fights. Like in every interview, he’s always talking about like, I really like bosses and I really like like fun level gimmicks. Those are the two things. And he’s kind of the reason that every Kirby game now ends with you fighting God in space. I guess you like that idea. Yeah, well, this is it. Like, I honestly, I think this guy is like secretly, not even secretly, he’s out and out like legit, brilliant, he’s called Shinya Kumazaki and everything he seems to like about games is what I like about games. Right. He’s like, they end so big and I’m going to treat this like so seriously, so sincere, but I’m going to make it. I’m going to do it in a way that like anyone can play and anyone can enjoy it. How great is that? You know, the art, the boss fight is kind of a bit of a dying art anyway, I think. And for him to kind of be representing it better than, you know, I think the boss fights here are like way more interesting than like Mario boss fights have been recently. Yeah, yeah, I think it’s like seriously, seriously good stuff. Yeah, that’s cool. So I suppose like elsewhere with this one, Matthew, was there anything about the making of it that kind of surprised you, what you found, you know, particularly insightful? Because I know like Nintendo did this series of interviews, this kind of spiritual successor to Uwatarasu. Is there anything else in that series of interviews that you wanted to pull out here? It felt like we could be entering like another generation of Kirby. So, you know, this Kumazaki guy that I mentioned, he’s basically been Mr. Kirby for the last 10 years. And it is sort of almost sort of single-handedly kind of credited with kind of revamping the series. And we’ll see how that impacts on the rankings later. You know, this one, he didn’t direct this one. This one, he’s like the general manager of Kirby. And like, you know, it’s another guy’s first directing gig. And you wonder, like, is this now, you know, are they laying the template for the next 10 years of Kirby with Forgotten Land? And kind of the fact that they’ve spent this game answering a lot of questions about, like, how to make a 3D Kirby game, rather than in the interview, they say, like, we weren’t really interested in, like, what the world design was or what the specific gimmicks were going to be. You know, the design document was about, like, how to make 3D platforming work, like, in our world with Kirby. You know, they talked about things like his silhouette is nightmarish because you can never see what direction he’s actually facing. And how do you make an action game where a character can just float over everyone? And, you know, they’ve always had this problem with Kirby, so you can fly around stuff and they’re like, in 3D, there’s even more space for him to avoid trouble. It’s like, how do you get people to engage with things? And it feels like they’ve just done a lot of deep thinking about, like, the broad idea of 3D Kirby. And I’m kind of, like, more excited, like, what the inevitable sequel or the next kind of 3D style Kirby will look like as a result. Okay, yeah, I share your optimism about the future of the series. Was there anything else about, like, the Kirby and the Forgotten Land that you think is worth highlighting to people who are thinking about buying it but maybe don’t have that kind of fundamental interest in Kirby? It does start super easy, but there is some really interesting stuff towards the end. Again, like, I don’t really want to spoil it because I know you’re getting it for your birthday. So it does go to some wilder places. I would say with Kirby games, the mistake is to stop playing them at the end credits. Like, there’s always better stuff beyond it. You know, they’re quite explicit about that, and I think you want to get your money’s worth. But that’s definitely the case here, like, some of the kind of weirder stuff. I also really like just a complete side note that came up in that interview. Kunizaki saying that he wanted everyone to read the text on the unlockable Gashapon, because he said that’s where all, like, the deep lore is. And he’s basically, like, gone, like, full fucking dark souls. It’s absolutely hilarious, like, and this, he has done this in the past, like, he puts, when you pause the game, he puts a lot of lore about what you’re currently looking at on the pause screen. So like, you know how people build the dark souls story out of item descriptions? He also does that and has been doing that for 10 years. I kind of dismissed a lot of it, but just doing some half-assed internet research came up with, yeah, there are, like, people who are, like, super into Kirby lore, and it’s, like, all him. Like, he’s, like, the one, he’s, like, the guy who’s single-handedly responsible for all that. And it’s just really funny to me. Amazing stuff. That’s good. So I suppose then, Matthew, is this, like, is this for you, what you see as the template for Kirby going forwards? You mentioned that, like, Hal have first put the pieces in place, seemingly, to, like, make this the next generation of Kirby, but as someone who has played this game, is this the direction you want the series to go in? They’ve said that they will still do 2D Kirby 2, and I do really like the 2D Kirby 2. Kirby games. I think they’re in a really, really good place, and I’d be sad for them to stop that. I think there is an even better version of this. I think this is an absolute delight, a real treat, a real surprise at, like, how good it is for their first big 3D game, but I think there’s definitely room for them to do more, and I would like to see a slightly bolder, maybe, like, uh, like, grow mouthful or replace mouthful with, like, a sort of second, a second kind of big mechanic that’s a bit more interesting, a bit more varied. They’ve definitely done more interesting kind of… A lot of their games have, like, a big sort of flagpole feature on the box, and I don’t think mouthful is quite as interesting as, as some of the others, even though it’s obviously, like, prime meme territory. It sure is. It’s going to take so much self-control, not just to stretch Kirby over all kinds of, like, weird shit for the next ten years. Right, yeah. I saw someone say, share a meme that said, what is the correct way for Kirby to drive a car? And it was like, it showed the mouthful mechanic from this game. And then it showed, it was like that dog meme with the trousers, and it’s like, or should he be wrapping around the end of the car? Should he be sat inside the car? And someone shared it saying, like, just think, if you understand all of this, you are just too online, this meme, like, you need to get off, you need to get off the internet. And I was like, God, I understand every single layer of this. And I do hate myself for it a little bit. So that’s good. Okay, my last question about this one, Matthew, because I know this has like a multiplayer mode. So you can play the whole game with a Waddle Dee by your side, is that right? Yeah. Okay, so did you get to try that at all? I played a couple of levels with Catherine, the obligatory co-op review test, where you’re like, you’re like, yep, that works. You’re showing way too much behind the curtain there, Matthew. You of course play through the entire game again with Catherine by your side. Oh yes, of course. Oh, so many times. Kitsy, have you got five minutes to come and play co-op in this game with me? And then you’re like, that’ll do for a box-out. Oh, the co-op is so good. For lunchtimes we shared. It’s dead simple, but it’s quite nice if you’re a parent and a kid combo. I’d maybe let the kid play as Kirby. Waddle Dee isn’t particularly interesting, but you can basically act as a bodyguard for a younger player. Because otherwise it would be a bit like dad or mom has all the kind of wild abilities, and the kid just gets a tag along poking things with a stick. So be gracious. Let your kid play Kirby. Let your kid play Kirby depending on what your parenting style is like. Maybe you’ll teach them about the harshness of the world by having them play as Waddle Dee and being underpowered. It’s like one day, son, you can be Kirby. Being Kirby. Oh my God. It’s just so typical of their generation. They just had it all, didn’t they? Yeah. Okay, good. So Matthew, let’s call it a break there because we’ve got two other sections to get through. Yeah. We’ve got lots of Kirby music I want to stick in this episode. That’s why there’s more sections than usual. A little peek behind the curtain there. Oh, don’t dig. I’m excited. No more jokes at Matthew Castle’s expense. Let’s take a quick break. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, we’re gonna talk a bit more broadly about the history of Kirby, and then in the section after that, Matthew’s gonna deliver his rankings of the top five Kirby games. Very exciting. So Matthew, first encounters with Kirby. Can I go first here? Yeah, absolutely, please. Okay, so my first encounter with Kirby, it’s the first game I ever owned, Kirby’s Dream Land. So I don’t think it was the first game I ever played. I think the first game I ever played was either Mario is Missing on an old Windows PC or Sonic the Hedgehog on my uncle’s Mega Drive. But Kirby was the first game I ever owned. And I think like 94, my parents bought me a Game Boy and Kirby’s Dream Land. And then I think maybe a little bit later, I got one of those gaming watch compilations. So Kirby was the clear winner out of those two. And like, I suspect they bought it because it looked like a kid-friendly game. Maybe it came as a bundle or something. But I always kind of like knew Kirby as this little blob lad who could consume enemies and stuff. It was the first game I ever completed as well. And I did that by flying over the entire levels rather than properly engaging with it because that’s what you can do in the early Kirby games. But it felt very exciting to have completed a Kirby game. I was very fond of it. It was extremely short in retrospect, very easy, but perfectly calibrated for kids. In a way that when you think about it, Kirby’s Dream Land is such a simple game compared to Kirby and the Forgotten Land. The idea of having level-up mechanics for the different copy abilities and the mouthful stuff, even if it’s fairly thin in terms of the actual substance of the mechanic, it’s still more complications than Kirby’s Dream Land has, which is very much like a simple left-to-right side-scrolling platformer. Yeah, you can’t even copy the abilities in it, can you? It’s just inhale and shoot. Yeah, so that comes in the… There’s the 93-game Kirby’s Adventure, I believe, the copy abilities thing. But what I will say is, I think that these were nicer-looking games than the Mario Land games on the Game Boy. I think they looked the part. I think their monochrome visual style was perfectly calibrated for the Game Boy in a way that maybe Mario had to compromise a bit by being translated from NES to Game Boy. But, well, I was saying that. Zelda translated very well, didn’t it? I don’t know. I just thought it was… I think it was a bit nicer-looking. So, yeah, that’s my first encounter with Kirby and Matthew. It was the first game I ever completed, first game I ever owned. I have a, I guess, like a 28-year relationship with Kirby of a sense. Not a romantic relationship, but, you know. So, how about you? What’s your first experience? Thanks for clarifying. I think in terms of, like, the one that I, like, properly played, it may even been, like, when I was on Endgamer, like, recording virtual console footage. I think for a long time, whenever my path did cross with Kirby, the fact that it was so easy and such a sort of beginner, sort of obviously a beginner’s game, particularly Dream Land and the Game Boy, the snobby part of my young gamer brain would be like, who would want to play this when you could be playing Super Mario Land 2 or James Bond on the Game Boy 2 Classic? James Bond. It’s great. It’s Zelda but Bond. Yeah, it is good. Also, I inherited some sniffiness about Kirby from N64 magazine because they were definitely always like, it’s a bit short and easy, dumb Kirby. He wasn’t like, I didn’t feel like he was loved by that line of magazines. And when you haven’t played a game, especially at that time when you couldn’t just go and watch an entire playthrough on YouTube, you kind of absorbed other people’s opinions and regurgitated them as your own. So I think a lot of my early anti-Kirby bias is just because I hadn’t played a lot of them and Mags told me they were all a little bit 7 out of 10 when at the time it was like 9 out of 10 or death basically. Yeah, I think also to be fair, the Kirby games are super simple and particularly around that era you’re talking about. It’s not like, like I say, I always thought of them as second rung Nintendo games. And yeah, I think it’s not an entirely unfair reputation. Particularly like SNES and N64 era, like the price of games. The idea of buying a Kirby game was such an indulgence. Like the idea that like one of the two or three new games you might play that year could feasibly be a two hour Kirby adventure. You just wouldn’t do it. Weirdly, Kirby makes a lot more sense now. And because I think a lot of people didn’t play those games for that exact reason, the pricing, there’s actually quite like treasure trove to discover now. And they sort of hold up. There is something kind of timeless about them. They’re so abstract in a way that a lot of them still work now. And you can have a lot of fun sort of playing things which you were sniffy about because they got 7 out of 10 in N64 mag. And then when you do play them now, you’re like, Oh, actually, this is kind of legit. This is all right, you know. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend 60 quid on it. But like now for a fiver or as part of an online subscription or whatever, a lot of these games make a lot more sense to me. Yeah, for sure. They’re kind of unpleasant to revisit and haven’t. And because they’re kind of simple, you don’t get as annoyed with the sort of like archaic, super hard bits that, you know, might frustrate you revisiting like a SNES era game or something like that. Yeah, and because a lot of them stay in the 2D space when everyone else is moving into 3D. Kirby was already like a pretty, you know, competent, nice feeling 2D platform. They only sort of get better at it. You know, like they stay in that lane, but they become real masters of like game feel and, you know, just the technical accomplishment of those games. You know, it’s pretty rad. So, yeah, like I can sort of understand like why, you know, why would you stop making these 2D games when you are so good at them? Yeah. And you know you can do them. And for that reason, they definitely hold up better than a lot of their sort of counterparts from the time. So Matthew, you got me to do a bunch of reading for this episode. One of the pieces I like the most was an old Japanese interview with Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Kirby, about Smash Brothers, of all things. But that begins with a bit of background about his history with the series and how he started making it. So he joined Howl Laboratory at 19, I believe. Started kind of like, was working on another game, then started noodling away on… He’s the Samuel Roberts of game designers. I was thinking, how do you get a job at a studio like that without a degree? I guess it’s just, if you’re a whiz at this stuff, and he clearly was, then maybe that’s… How do you get a job on one of the UK’s most popular PlayStation magazines? Oh, you’re sending a bad review of Zone of the Indus 2, that’s how you do it. Maybe that’s what he did. So he’s like 19, makes this game, and Howl tries to pitch it as a game that it will publish itself and it gets rejected, because they think it will only sell a few thousand copies. But Nintendo are really into it and really into him, and they decide to publish it. It sells 1.5 million copies. And so Kirby from that point is established as a Nintendo series, even though it was never intended to be, you know, like a Nintendo-owned sort of property. So which is really interesting. But I kind of want you to take it from there, because I know you’ve done a lot of reading about Kirby’s history generally. So where does it go from there? And what’s your sort of grand unifying theory on the like different eras of Kirby? It’s interesting from a tech perspective that it starts on like Game Boy, because with each evolution of this, you know, it goes from like the most basic version of what it can possibly do on Game Boy. They then get NES, they get a bit of extra power, they then get SNES. A lot of these games are made super late in their console’s lifespan, which is sort of an interesting quirk of them. Kirby’s Adventure comes out way into the SNES era, and Kirby Super Star comes out on the SNES. N64 is already out. That’s like the mad thing with these. They’re working in a very old-fashioned space. They feel kind of cutting-edge within 2D platformers. I generally want to go back to some of that origin stuff, right at the start with Dreamland, because there are a couple of other funny things. There’s a really good translated interview on that. Is it… I can never pronounce it. Shmupulations? Shmupulations, I always thought of it as. Shmupulations? It’s the interview where the famously awful Kirby drawings come from. If you’ve ever seen… There was a gimmick where each of the interviewees tried to draw Kirby. Miyamoto’s is legit. Sakurai’s is obviously good. Noata’s is fine. And then there’s a programmer who basically draws this kind of screaming kind of Yushei. It’s really megally cursed. And kind of a hilarious advert for this programmer is like, Ah, there you go. That’s what you’re getting. What I love about that, Matthew, is that the whole founding principle of Kirby as a character designer is that anyone can draw Kirby. And like that interview is, you know, empirical evidence that that is not the case. Yeah, that’s yeah. Because it sort of says, oh, they wanted a character you could be able to like doodle on your sketchbook. I mean, one of the most delightful touches about Kirby’s adventure is that in the opening to the game, you get the studio logo and then the intro cinematic is a tutorial on how to draw Kirby. It hasn’t got lyrics, it hasn’t got like, you know, it’s not sung, because obviously it’s NES and there’s limitations. But it kind of sort of says, oh, you draw a little circle and then you draw some eyes. You can imagine them singing it. I was like, every Kirby game should open with this. It’s kind of mad that they don’t. It’s so sweet and so like the kind of key sort of ethos of what that character is about. I also like the fact there’s a lot of disagreement about what color Kirby is before they make the NES game. Like Sakurai is like in my head, he was always pink. Miyamoto thinks he’s yellow because he says like Pac-Man, everything was yellow. I guess at the time that’s sort of true. Nintendo of America make him white on the box, which Iwata says has a mysterious aura. Generous, I thought from Iwata there. He just looks a little bit undercooked in retrospect. The design doesn’t look all the way there and of course it isn’t because they later detail it out a little bit more, but yeah, that is funny. There’s obviously the famous story about the name, Hal internally called him Twinkle Popo or Twinkle Popo, I don’t know how we were meant to pronounce that. I wonder if it’s Popo because of Pop Star the Planet. Nintendo of America suggested calling him Gasper, which is just horrible because it’s the idea that he’s gulping in breath. I don’t know, it’s too biological. Kirby is quite cursed in its own way, isn’t he? I played Kirby’s Dream Land 2 yesterday, not to get us off on a tangent here, and I forgot that when you swallow something, let’s say there’s a little chicken enemy going around, quite cute, not particularly deadly, you suck it up and then you press down on the D-pad and it just swallows and it’s gone. You’re like, where the fuck did that chicken go? There is a fundamental curse element to Kirby of yes, he’s eating stuff and blowing out, but when he swallows it, where did it go? Because you can do that for every single enemy in the game. What abyss waits inside that little pink blob? It’s more cursed than maybe we think of it as just because he’s such a cute little character. There is the DS game where the bottom screen is Kirby’s stomach. Where you inhale stuff and you can basically store stuff in there like an inventory. So maybe that gives us a direct visual representation of what it’s like in there. Quite a boring inventory screen is the answer. Squeak Squad or Mouse Attack or whatever you want to call it will not be featuring my list. So that is probably the first and last reference to it. Right. So I hope you enjoyed it. The other thing in when you inhale them, I can’t remember if it does this in Kirby’s Adventure, it definitely does it in Superstar. You’ve got it in your gob and then you press down to swallow it and then the copyability appears as a card on screen. So it’ll say like blade or fire. But if it’s a character that doesn’t give you ability, which is like your basic fodder, I think it just says like empty or like there was nothing in it. And it’s the idea of like there was just no substance, like empty calories. Like there are some creatures that have like no worth in this world. They’re just things that you just dissolve and they become nothing. That is very sinister. Yeah, for sure. Kirby’s Adventure, they obviously, you know, they add the copyability. That’s that’s a bit that’s where Kirby gets his like defining skill because they want you to kind of engage more with the enemies than when you to just fly over. They want to give you a reason to kind of actually kind of connect with the world. It’s a much bigger game. It’s much longer. There’s like secret exits and all kinds of hidden secrets. Feels like a more complete game. I think it like sounds like it almost kills the producer on it from Nintendo, right? Because they start talking about how he has to go and have a hot bath before work every day. He’s so stressed out. I am a big fan of any anecdote that involves Japanese hot baths. There was one in Ace Attorney as well, where like all the executive producers keep fucking off for like luxury baths and Shootakumi’s going mad. Like why don’t we get to do this? This sucks. So good, good continued lineage of hot bath stories from Nintendo. That’s where he gets defining skill. And then of it, you know, the probably the key evolution then is the superstar, which is the SNES medley of games. And it’s here that the abilities kind of evolve into what we probably recognise as like modern Kirby in that when you inhale an enemy and take its power, there’s like multiple moves to it. It’s not just like one power. And I always assumed this was just like a natural evolution of like, well, we did we did these basic powers. I just want to do something a bit spicier where actually Sakurai says it comes from co-op. You know, Nintendo is like, we want there to be co-op in the SNES game. So he builds that in. And because of that, they start like, you know, two characters can chew through enemies a bit faster. So they decide to make all the enemies a little bit tougher. They take multiple hits now. But then because you’re going to be playing in single player as well, he’s like, well, it’s gonna be a bit of a drag if you’re having to like, fight these things. So I’ll give these powers like more elements to them. They’ll have like deeper movesets. So that becomes satisfying. So weirdly, it’s like a roundabout result of having to make a co-op mode that Kirby becomes more complicated as a single player character. Okay, that makes sense. The other element to this is I was going to say that like, Superstar represents seemingly represents a kind of like the whole idea that there is no sort of like one idea of what Kirby is in a very kind of literal way by being a medley of games. But by this point, you’ve already had like very well liked Kirby’s Pinball Land and a variety of spin offs, you’re up to like, I think like there’s eight games before you get to Superstar. So it’s a lot of Kirby very quickly. So it seems like it was always built into the DNA of the character that like there was no one approach to Kirby, you know, but how do things kind of go from there, Matthew? What happens after Kirby Superstar? Superstar is just is really sacri, you know, it’s sort of sacrize sort of game through and through this. There’s tons of in tons of him in it. There’s loads of like stuff you can still see in Smash Brothers now in there as well. Like he’s obviously got these like interesting obsession. So I think it’s, you know, the main line, the first three mainline Kirby games are like, I feel like you can really attribute them to sort of sac, not sacri, sacri alone, but they are so clearly the result of him doing that. And but after this, he sort of branches out. He goes on to make Smash Brothers. He’s still at HAL, but he’s not working on Kirby anymore. And I think we enter like the second era of Kirby, which is probably the hardest one to define. This is where you get like Dream Land 2 is happening on the Game Boy, Sakurai is not involved, Dream Land 3, which is like one of the very last SNES games made, Sakurai is not involved. You get the N64 version, which is directed by the same guy who did Dream Land 2 and Dream Land 3. I would say they’re harder to kind of get a through line on these games. I don’t know if you’ve played any of them, but they’re even more sort of surreal than before. Like Dream, you know, Dream Land 3 goes like very heavily on like animal helpers. And the idea is that you’re like riding giant hamsters and cats and things. And the ability Kirby has when he jumps on those animals, then can change the animal’s abilities further. So it’s kind of like a combo element to it. It’s then sort of reflected in Kirby 64, where the big mechanic there is that you mix together two copy abilities to make new Kirby forms. Kirby 64 isn’t in my list of all time greats. Yeah. But I think it is kind of rad, and I really hope they add it to the N64 VC service, because it’s very, very charming, and some of the combos are absolutely hilarious. I think if you mix ice Kirby and electric Kirby, he turns into a fridge, and then he pukes up food, which I think is absolutely brilliant. It’s like attacking people with random food sprites. I did play Kirby 64 when it came out on Wii Virtual Console. Right. Even though I agree with you, there is that level of invention to it. It was a proper Babi game, I thought. It was really, really simple, and maybe just seemed less sexy in the wake of Mario 64. I think some of the reviews were a bit over playing a 2D Kirby as well at the time, if I recall, but as beautiful as the 3D graphics were. We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, that era at the start of N64 and PS1 where almost people were kind of, no, not 2D, 3D or Bust, and I’m not saying Kirby is some great hidden gem which slipped through the cracks, but it’s definitely worth a play on VC or should it come to Switch Online, I think it would be, it’s only two or three hours long, so it’s not going to eat up loads of your time, but it’s still got fun character design, it’s got some quite good bosses, quite a simple art style, which again hasn’t aged massively, it’s still quite clean looking. I think it’s okay, considering for years I was always like, that game’s shit because N64 magazine told me it was shit, and actually it’s not, there’s something there. It’s no Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine though is it Matthew? It isn’t, no, that’s why it’s not on my N64 mini. So after that there is this weird hiatus period with Kirby. What happens there, because this is where the three kind of like proto-Kirby games that never come out happen, but like how did you sort of perceive that era in HAL of figuring out what Kirby is after that? There’s still sort of stuff going on on that. You feel like the mainline Kirby brains are basically making Kirby games that don’t happen, but around it you’re getting well-loved handheld games. People like Amazing Mirror on Game Boy Advance, I don’t really, I must say, it’s not for me. There’s a remake of Kirby’s Adventure, which is called Nightmare in Dreamland, which has got quite handsome sprite work. Then we get into the realms of DS Comes Out and we get Kirby’s Power Paintbrush. One of the more experimental spin-offs, but really great where you’re drawing onto the world and guiding Kirby that way. So there are good Kirby games happening, they just haven’t really worked out what mainline Kirby is. That kind of changes in 2011, which is where you get Kirby’s Wii Adventure, or Return to Dreamland, I think it’s called in America. This is where Shinya Kumazaki, this is the first one he directs, and he arguably knocks it out of the park and creates the formula for definitely the next two 3DS games which are really beloved. And he basically becomes Mr Kirby at Howl, I think based on the critical reception to that game. Again, Endgamer is weirdly cool on Kirby’s weird adventure. I think we were wrong on that. I think it’s one of the few scores where I’m like, maybe the full kind of extent of this game or the fun of this game, we were a bit snooty about difficulty, I don’t know, but I didn’t review it and I don’t want to cast aspersions on the person who did, it was a great review. I just feel like in hindsight I would have scored it much higher not to give away what goes on in the rankings. This is the third era of Kirby, you know, you’ve got the Sakurai where there’s clearly someone with a very clear vision at the reins, then you get this weird period in between where it just feels like lots of people are kind of taking a swing at Kirby, and then you get this era which is the Kunisaki era, which again, like Sakurai, there’s clearly someone bringing it all together, it’s just far more coherent. He kind of cuts his teeth on a remake of Superstar for Nintendo DS, he does Superstar Ultra, so does that make him the obvious heir apparent to Sakurai? I don’t know, but I would say he brings his own star to it, and he imprints his own values on it, his love of amazing boss fights, his kind of interesting, weird, slightly cosmic horror in some of the end bosses. I found a link to his personal website, you can go and see Kunisaki’s got an art blog from, I don’t know, before he joined HAL, and it’s all pretty far out. It’s kind of dark, space beasts and things, but this is clearly an obsession for him. They may be like a bit better behaved than the Sakurai games. I think that’s the difference between the two of them. I think Sakurai is just, you know, as we know from Smash Brothers, he’s a bit of like an everything but the kitchen sink kind of designer. I think he just goes for it. He goes for it. And I think Kunisaki like creates it a bit better. And I think that’s maybe why like modern Kirby lands a bit better for me. Like it just, you know, it still has all the character in the madness, but it’s a bit more cleanly presented and packaged where Sakurai is just like, you know, you know, the superstar sells itself as it’s eight games in one. And you’re like, what does that even mean? It’s like a really hectic idea. Obviously there are other people involved with these and I do like my neat narratives. It’s a bit like Ace Attorney, how this sort of takumi and post-takumi, but I think it is true of Kirby too. That’s interesting. So Matthew, one thing I did want to do on this, if you don’t mind, is I’m going to read out the discussion in the Iwata asks about Kirby’s Adventure Wii, just where they discuss what the idea of a Kirby game is and their different opinions on it. So I’m just going to read those out if that’s all right. Yeah, go for it. So, okay, so first of all, Iwata says, I feel like Kirby contains a lot after all, he can inhale just about anything, so anything fits. This is Yuri Hattori, who’s a planner. I agree his appearance and abilities are ever-changing, which should be his greatest attribute, but he doesn’t need to transform and can cruise along just fleeing his enemies. That flexibility is part of Kirby. I think anything is possible sums up Kirby. I think that whatever we add or subtract Kirby is Kirby, so I don’t insist on any one particular thing. What each person thinks is probably right. So I think that the essence of Kirby is that which is not determined, but at the same time doesn’t budge. So here’s another answer from Ishigafumi Kuase, who is the producer. In games like Kirby’s Dream Course, Kirby Tilt and Tumble, and Kirby Mass Attack, Kirby can do anything depending on the game’s materials. So I think the essence of Kirby is the player being able to turn into whatever form he or she wishes. And then Kumizaki here, at first glance it has mass appeal and casts a broad net, but you can enjoy feverish action. A lot of Kirby games’ appeal is in its cute and amusing appearance, but the action is surprising, the setting deep and the development is thrilling. I think the essence of Kirby lies in its broad appeal and the way both adults and children can enjoy its depth. When we make a game, we’re careful to ease players in during the first half and suddenly increase the tension in the second half. I feel like that bit should have brackets got in space in it. But those are like three of the answers there. Matthew got one more here from Hiroaki Nakano, who worked on the game, who I think is a technical producer. I didn’t know their job title, unfortunately. This isn’t a very developerly way to put it, but for me, Kirby is about super excitement. That was my impression as a child playing Kirby. It surprised you and stimulated your imagination, so you thought, what’s this? And Kirby can do that too. As you’re playing, you grow elated. To me, that is the essence of Kirby. So, it’s just really interesting that a series can have this many entries. Go on for so long, be such a noted Nintendo icon, but still, no one really agrees on what Kirby is, other than Kirby is whatever we want Kirby to be. And that’s kind of strange for a Nintendo series, because people have such a firm idea of what a Metroid or a Zelda is. So it really is its own beast compared to those, you know? Any thoughts on that? I wonder if some of this can all be traced back to Sakurai still, in terms of what he values, the kind of period he grows up in, the games he’s playing. Like Kirby, as flashy and as classy and as technologically marvellous as it can be, it feels very old fashioned and video gamey. And that sort of essence of video gamey-ness is, it’s very artificial and abstract. It’s kind of what I associate with the earlier games, 70s, 80s, where graphics aren’t there, there’s a lot more weird games where you’re just collecting fruit as an abstract shape. It’s not as sophisticated a kind of concept. And because of that, I think because of that sort of artificiality and how abstracted Kirby is from any recognisable things. If you compare him to Mario, who’s a guy who’s going to rescue someone and do something, there’s so much shape already with Mario. And Kirby there isn’t. And I think because of that, it creates this huge vacuum where all this stuff can happen, where everyone can shove in all their mad ideas. I think different people can imprint on him in different ways. It’s going to sound really dumb. I think the fact that he’s a bull is really helpful. You can make a bull work in a lot of different games. We talk about all these spin-off games, but a golf game and a breakout clone, a pinball game, they only work because he’s a round thing. Which is convenient. That’s the thing I couldn’t really see Miyamoto making this game. I think there’s too much logic in Nintendo games. They’re always talking about their thought process and their design process on the Mario games, as form and function, where you look at something and you’re like, this has to clearly illustrate how it behaves. The design of this world, or the design of this creature, stems from what its purpose is in the world. Where Kirby, I think, is like, here’s a fucking Easter Island head, here’s like a dog, and now you’re eating a curry, and none of it is based on any logic, it’s completely unhinged. That is the big, like, howl Nintendo difference, and that kind of slight disconnect from logic is probably what kind of invites Kirby to be all of stuff as well. Yeah, very nicely put. So what do you think makes a great Kirby game, Matthew? Do you have a core set of principles that you like to see in Kirby beyond the escalation that we already discussed? That sort of really is it for me. I mean, a lot of what I love is shaped by the Kumazaki stuff in that I think he takes all those wild powers and he builds a slightly more sensible campaign. You know, you’re going through worlds, there are hidden collectibles that require quite specific power use to use. I think the Sakurai stuff is a bit more like, you’ve got all these powers, go crazy. Like, there’s less, like, design for each power. There are definitely segments where, like, you’re meant to use Wheel Kirby to, like, run through this kind of racetrack or whatever, but there’s a lot more of that, I’d say, in modern Kirby. It’s a bit better behaved in that way. So I like that he kind of colours within the lines a bit more, but I like that he takes those lines to a wild place. It’s interesting that his answer that you read out, like he mentioned, action and intensity quite a lot. Like, this is a guy who likes action games. That really comes through, like, where he takes his games. Yeah, for sure. Should we talk about Kirby’s appearances in other games, Matthew? Because Kirby is obviously a founding character of Smash Bros, which is another Howl series that grows out of being this kind of like, kind of tech demo fighting game. And then basically Sakurai pitches it to Miyamoto as like a Nintendo character’s guest appearances. And this was all in the Shmoopulations interview, but Miyamoto is very impressed by how Mario was presented in the game, for example, and then it kind of goes from there. So do you think Kirby is a good fit for other games? Is there like a kind of element that makes him a good kind of like sort of mascot within a series of mascots for something like Smash Bros.? I just wonder if like the Smash Bros. thing is more just like a perfect storm, in that rather than Kirby being a good fit for Smash Bros. I think all the other Smash Bros. characters, they’re almost like the Kirby version of themselves. Right, yeah. Like, what Sakurai does is he looks at Mario and goes, how would Mario work as a Kirby power-up? That’s how it feels to me. Like, the button inputs for Smash Bros. are the same as the button combos for like Kirby’s copy combos in Super Star. You know, there’s an up ability, there’s a forward ability, there’s a down ability, you know. He’s thinking in those terms, like, one thing I was going to mention earlier is complete side note, but like, there’s a boss in Super Star, which is Master Hand from Smash Bros. It has the same animations. It’s attached to like a big face in Kirby, but you fight its hand and it kind of like, you know, it kind of walks in on its fingers and it makes like a gun symbol and shoots you, tries to swat you like a fly and you’re like, Sakurai is just sitting on all this stuff, I think waiting for an opportunity. Getting into like Kirby more recently and then going back to Smash Brothers and those are what are asked about Smash Brothers, you know, they talk about it like it’s quite a wild idea making Smash Brothers, you know, it’s quite like a wow, is this going to possibly work? Can we possibly do it? It feels sort of inevitable from his early Kirby games when I go back to them and I don’t know if that’s just me like sort of forcing that on them because I know that Smash Brothers come and I’ve read all these interviews, but I don’t think the leap is as big as it doesn’t seem as big to me anyway. I really love that notion, the idea that like each character is the Kirby version of themselves. It’s a really nice way of putting it. So the hilarious thing is in one of the later, I think it’s I think it’s amazing mirror. They add the copy ability, which gives Kirby his Smash Brothers moveset. Right. So it becomes a copy ability. I think maybe that’s what triggered the thought. You’re like, well, that is just I mean, yeah, of course, that’s how this works. Yeah. That’s really good. Yeah. I think what is kind of like funny as well as you saying, I do like my neat narratives and you do, but they they do work nicely when discussing the kind of course of Nintendo history in particular, which is slightly opaque, you know, but that’s it’s the stuff of always terrible video essays, though, isn’t it? It’s where you take something. If you say it with enough authority, people are like, yeah, that sounds legit. And you’re like, it’s based on nothing. Well, the thing is, the Iwata Arse does like colour in a lot of the the sort of like lines for you. Like it does tell you so much that you otherwise wouldn’t know it’s why they’re such a fantastic resource. But it is true that there is like a certain amount of jigsawing with this. It’s not like there is like the, you know, 20,000 word polygon or all history of this, you know, of this series. So it is more pieced together, but it does kind of make sense. So yeah, I agree with you. I think that like, I thought it was always funny as well that Sakurai was being asked about whether Kirby was like, deliberately made more powerful because it was a character he created, which he’s always insisted is not the case, but Kirby was, Kirby was definitely hot bullshit in LA, I would say. That’s my take. That’s everyone’s starter character, isn’t it? That’s the, because whenever you are introducing someone to Smash Brothers, you always give them Kirby. Yeah. And you’re like, you can jump loads, so it’s easy to get back on. And if you go above anyone and just slam down on them as a rock, it’s like really funny. That’s always good. That’s the first character I played. Yeah. And you know, he is just very nicely done. The flying ability works very well. It’s all very like neatly done for sure. There’s so much. There’s also like, and this is definitely true as Sakurai put so much Kirby stuff around the edges of Smash Brothers, like the trophies and the music and things like Kirby is over represented compared to other Nintendo characters, given his relative fame, you know, but there’s lots of stuff that going back and playing Kirby more recently, I’m like, oh, it’s that guy from Smash Brothers rather than, oh, it’s that Kirby character. I only know their names because they were trophies in Smash Brothers because they’re so abstract. You’re like, oh, it’s that face thing, whatever. Yeah. Oh, it’s Knuckle Joe, everyone. When I played a bunch of Kirby games yesterday just to prep for this episode, I was playing Kirby’s Dream Land 2, I had to remind myself that a Waddle Dee was not a character from The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening, that dream sequence. Because obviously the whole thing with Link’s Awakening is these weird characters from other Nintendo series, just slightly dream warped versions of them. And so yeah, I was like, oh yeah, I forgot that this is where these guys are from. And like I was trying to work out what, I just don’t know Kirby’s core and iconography as well as I do the other Nintendo characters, but you’re right, a lot of that stuff is present in Smash Bros, which I don’t think is a bad thing. It’s quite a nice kind of touch, I think, to sort of over-represent the character you created in this kind of like vast array of like, you know, kind of corporate IP. I just quite like that as a kind of creator’s touch, you know? One day, I would love to ask Nintendo about what the line is that they draw, like why Kirby isn’t in Mario Kart, you know, and like why Wario is never in, like, mainline 3D Mario. Like there’s lots of weird questions that hang over certain characters. You’re like, they’re almost in the club, but they’re not quite. Like, what’s going on with that? Yeah. You’ll never know. Okay, so there’s one other element I wanted to tap into here, is you added this note, Matthew, after a conversation we had at your house last week, but there is a kind of life of Kirby in the sort of meme space, like, or even beyond that. It’s like, Kirby as a game character is one thing, but there’s also Kirby as a kind of like cute piece of iconography that is kind of adored by the internet. And I think that that lives very apart from his games. Like I’ve never really met anyone who like adores the Kirby games, but the people love drawing Kirby and they love like, you know, collecting toys of Kirby, sharing Kirby memes. The kind of Kirby car thing was like the carby meme was very much like the logical conclusion of that in a lot of ways and Nintendo perhaps leaning into it, knowing it would be effective. And also the fact that like when they ever whenever they did like a Smash Bros reveal of a new character, they would I think something they would always do on the Nintendo Japan account is show four images of what the Kirby version of that character looks like when the powers are copied. So I think there is like a life to Kirby that exists outside of the games themselves. And I think it is just because he’s a cute character and quite a wholesome little figure. But what do you think that is all about? Because have you noticed that too? They’re like this. I don’t think there’s adoration for the games in that same way there is for a lot of other Nintendo series. But as a character, he seems to live beyond the games in quite a specific way. There’s something about his pop culture presence, which is probably the closest other video game thing is like Sonic, I’d say. In terms of it’s kind of out there and it’s it’s sort of inexplicable to me. Maybe I’m making that Sonic link because there’s quite a big Kirby anime that was made. Kirby, is it Kirby back at you? And it really isn’t for me. That side of Kirby, the wider Kirby transmedia project, isn’t aimed at me in the same way that I’m very turned off by the Sonic version of that and Sonic cartoons and things. But maybe this arrived at the right time and super resonated. Maybe it is just a generational thing. Maybe we are both just a little bit too old. And for some people they did watch this Kirby cartoon and Kirby occupies a similar place to like Pokemon or Sonic because it sort of escaped games in that way. This feels like something Jay Bayliss would probably know about. That’s like both a compliment and a damning indictment, I would say. Well, he’s very good for like deep thoughts on bullshit. Yeah, he will appreciate that too. Yeah, I would love to ask Jay about that actually. I might do that and come report back on what Jay thinks. I don’t mean that in the nicest possible way. That isn’t a burn. No, he’s really good at like the sort of like grand unifying theory of like some internet, always online bullshit. I’m just not, I’m not online enough. That’s my problem with Kirby. Like I’m online enough to know that Kirby appears in memes, but that seems obvious because he’s got like a cute face. And cute face plus like he’s holding something disturbing or whatever. I think it’s just, and that’s naturally funny. That’s just a, that’s an easy joke construction. I get that. The deeper level to it. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s odd. It might just be as simple as he is cute because I don’t know how pervasive that anime was, but I certainly don’t feel like it was easy to watch here, for example. No, they made a special Wii channel for it to celebrate 20 years of Kirby. When the Wii game came out, you could download this channel and just that only played the Kirby anime. Yeah. Which I think we dismissed in 20 words in the endgame. Because, like I say, we were very sniffy towards Kirby. Yeah. It might surprise you to learn that I never downloaded the Kirby channel on my Wii, Matthew. But yeah, it’s nice to know they did that. It’s a nice idea. Okay, so last up then before we get to your top five, Matthew. So what are your hopes for this series? I suppose we covered this a bit in part one. But is there anything else you kind of like want to see from Kirby going forwards or anything you’re kind of excited about with the future of the character? There’s one idea that I think they’ve tried a couple of times and has never landed. And I think it’s ripe for another go with this modern Kirby team. And that is the Kirby Metroidvania. They’ve done this a couple of times. In Kirby Super Star on SNES, one of the games is called Milky Way Memories. And the big gimmick in it is that he can’t absorb powers from enemies. He finds a trophy and he permanently earns that power. And it means he can rotate between them. So you’re basically exploring this big branching map, trying to find the permanent upgrades. So you end up with a wall of all his abilities and you can basically flip through them at will and use them wherever they need to be used. Which feels quite Metroid-y. And then Kirby and the Amazing Mirror has a big Metroid structure in that it’s got this huge branching labyrinthine world and all these warp doors you have to go through. But it never really makes a particular… There’s no power progression. It’s all a bit too open from the start. And I keep thinking, actually, a game where you’re gated off by more permanent abilities and you open up a world and it would allow you to have level design which let you really bring each individual power to the fore. Because I think if there’s a limit on Kirby, that’s it. He’s got so many abilities. It’s very rare that each of them is properly catered to beyond just regular combat. And it would be really nice then to go, we’re going to make a game where everything is relevant a bit more often. And I think a Metroidvania would do that. So that’s complete wishful thinking. But if I could magic a Kirby game into existence, it would be a good Metroid Kirby game, rather than Amazing Mirror, which is tough. Would it be Mercury Steam’s Kirby game, Matthew? No, it would have to be made by HAL. I would insist on that. I mean, maybe Mercury Steam. If anything, I think old Kimozaki and Mercury Steam, they’d get on like a house on fire. They both love bosses. They both love mad shit. They’d have lots to talk about. Yeah, there you go. World’s biggest Mercury Steam fan, Matthew Castle. I think there’s a lot more of them now after Metroid Dread. They’re a good studio. That game was fucking rad. So yes, okay, cool. Let’s take a quick break then, Matthew. We’ll come back with your top five, yeah? Welcome back to the podcast. So it’s time for Matthew’s rankings of the top five Kirby entries, and he’s gonna share some honorable mentions as well. There are so many of these games. I’m really curious to see what makes it to the top of your pile, Matthew. So tell me a bit about your methodology here, what you kind of thought about, how you arranged this list, that sort of thing. I’ve been replaying a lot of these games over the last couple of months, sort of for this, also because Just Forgotten Land got me kind of excited for Kirby again. So I’ve been dipping in, I’ve played some things I haven’t played for a long time. I’ve played some things I haven’t played before. Trying to get just as a wider section as possible. I may have done a little bit of pruning. I haven’t gone as deep into some of the spin-off games. They’re a bit more mainline, but there are a couple of spin-offs in there. I’m gonna admit, even though we said five, it’s quite a spongy, elastic five. In true Kirby fashion, you know, I’ve just inhaled all the games. I’ve maybe gone a bit wild. I’ve got a bit greedy. It’s kind of very much the Kirby of lists. It’s kind of five, but maybe it’s close to like seven, but we’ll see. Wow, okay, yeah. I mean, you’ve played with the concept of numbers themselves in order to assemble the top five. I’m excited. So why don’t you kick off with your number five, Matthew? Or your number seven? I’m gonna kick off with number six, if that’s okay. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. So this was a bit of a late edition, because I was only gnarling about it, but I think it’s more than an honorable mention. I’m actually going to start off with Kirby Mass Attack on the DS, which is a 2011 action game. It’s the one which is a bit Pikmin-y, if you don’t know it. It’s a 2D game where you control a squad of up to 10 Kirbys, and you basically flick them at big monsters and pummel them in a Pikmin style. Are you familiar with this game? Not in the least. It’s a quite a late DS game. 3DS was already out when this one turned up, so classic Kirby fashion. It’s a bit of a weird one. It’s not made by the mainline team at all. I think the director on this is actually a person on the Nintendo side, rather than Hal. I say it’s a bit like Pikmin. There was obviously a 2D Pikmin on 3DS. It was kind of terrible. I think Kirby Mass Attack is actually the better version of it. It’s quite big and broad. The fact that you only ever have ten things to play with. Like, ten Kirby’s is a bit easier to manage than lots of tiny little Pikmin on a 3DS screen. It makes a lot more sense. It understands the scale of the screen it’s playing with. It’s a big touch screen game that’s all played with the stylus. You’re just tapping on the screen and the Kirby’s run towards that point. Or you can then flick them to flick them up at aerial enemies and things. And really, the key mechanic in this game is knowing when to attack and when to retreat. You’ll throw lots of Kirby’s onto something and the enemy may be like, oh it’s about to shoot out spikes or it’s going to get really cross. So you recall the Kirby’s so they don’t get hurt. Which in itself isn’t particularly interesting and can get boring quite fast, but they come up with so many ways of using that ability. So many different enemy types or weird little puzzles. There’s so many strange wrinkles of like all the building blocks you expect from Kirby in terms of like enemy types, but kind of recalibrated to make use of this particular control scheme. So like when you fight inevitably King Dedede, you’re like flicking the Kirby’s at his bombs to sort of like ricochet his bombs back up to him on a hot air balloon on the top screen and things like that. Also absolutely superb selection of mini games in this one, which is why I ended up adding it. Because while I was reading an interview with the director on this and they were saying that the core game is quite hard to pin down for them. And while they were making that, they had a smaller team making mini games and it took the core game team that much longer. The mini game team were just like smashing it. They made so many good mini games that this game is just super rich. It’s got a really good little shoot them up where each Kirby you collect becomes like another gun that you’re firing. So you end up with like ten Kirby’s shooting up the screen. It’s just a real swarm of death, which is very satisfying. It’s got a Kirby pinball game, which I would say is probably better than the Gameboy Kirby pinball game as a standalone mini game. So like almost worth playing just for that. And then there’s like a weird sort of quick time event Kirby RPG, I would describe it as, which unlocks much deeper into the game. Between these things, there’s so much stuff going on in this game. It’s really fun, really wild. It’s quite expensive to buy on DS. If you’ve got a Wii U, I would really recommend buying this on Wii U Virtual Console, because the game looks absolutely amazing on the gamepad screen. Because it’s stylus only, you can use the gamepad in vertical mode and have it feel like the whole screen and the sprites just look absolutely gorgeous. A big Wii U Virtual Console recommend from me. Wow, okay, yeah, so I did look it up on eBay as you were discussing it and yeah, you’re looking at like 40 quid plus for this one, unfortunately. Late DS game and obviously the retro price is kind of spiking. That’s a big part of it. But yeah, knowing it’s on the Wii U, that’s cool, Matthew. What an interesting sounding thing. Just like you say, this kind of sums up the lack of pattern between these games more than anything. Just control these multiple Kirby’s in Pikmin fashion. It’s also like that thing we’re talking about, how it’s quite cursed where Kirby inhales. Obviously, he doesn’t inhale anything in this because he’s much smaller. But the sight of 10 Kirby’s battering a lot of animals to death. It’s just like his 10 Kirby’s killing a giant bird between them. It’s quite very sinister. Makes me think of all the Elizabeth C. End of Bioshock Infinite drowning Booker for some reason. Yeah, it’s very much the vat of Kirby games or Murder on the Orange Express if you care for another example. Very good. So what’s your number five then Matthew? Number five, this is the more obvious DS pick. This is Kirby Power Paintbrush. I think people maybe went a little overboard on how good this one was originally because it’s quite an early good DS stylus game and people just wanted stuff which really lent into what made the DS interesting. So you don’t control Kirby directly, he’s just a rolling ball in this one, but you draw like a rainbow thread onto the screen and it becomes like a ramp that you sort of fire him up. So you’re kind of… he’s ever moving, you’re kind of steering him by drawing platforms into the world. So a classic kind of DS concept. I must admit I find this one a little stressful because Kirby’s like constantly moving, like you’re controlling the world around him rather than him directly and that gives me the fear a bit. Like there’s an ever like forward march of death in this where you’re like, oh god, I’ve got to keep up with him. It’s like the blast core of Kirby games, you know, where you’re like, I’ve got to protect this guy somehow from all this other stuff using these lines. But it’s very creative. Also for our Kirby timeline, very, very important game. This is Shinya Kumazaki’s first big… he has been involved with Kirby up until now, but he is responsible for the end boss and the end boss only of Power Paintbrush. So this is where like Mr. Boss first turns up and he’s like, don’t worry, I’ve got you. There’s this thing, it’s going to turn into like a nightmare eye and float around the screen and everyone’s like, this guy’s got the stuff. How’s this one in terms of like availability, Matthew, is this also on the Wii U store? A bit more readily available than Mass Attack, but I would still suggest, yeah, it’s a Wii U VC game. Some people might ask why not the Wii U semi-sequel to this, Rainbow Curse, which is basically the same game on Wii U except it had this like plasticine look, which I don’t like. I think it was trying to do the kind of Epic Yarn thing, but I don’t think it ever really justifies it. It never finds anything interesting to do with the plasticine look and it looks quite ugly. It doesn’t control as well as the DS game. Also the DS game does have a few copy abilities like the nature of Kirby, their ever forward moving ball can change, but you can’t in the Wii U one stick with the DS one all the way. Right, okay. Yeah, fair enough. Great stuff. So what’s your number four? Next up we’re going to talk Epic Yarn. Oh yeah. Which you have played. Yeah that’s right. Yeah I was sort of like drawn to it at the time on Wii by the very nice kind of like you know wall-based character designs and such. I found it like I suppose like not a mind-blowing game but the look of it was nice and it was a kind of hit of Kirby nostalgia when I was writing the mood for it. Was this a big deal on Endgame when it came out? Reasonably. I’m sorry I was a little cooler on it than other people on the team. I didn’t review it. I don’t know if we even did a cover for it because Kirby was a bit of a risk back then. You wouldn’t put Kirby naturally on the cover. He was a bit of an odd one. There’s no WWE 2008 or whatever it was. Right. Biceps the size of small cows. That’s a promise. Maybe we did two. I can’t remember. It’s terrible. Anyway. Huge amount of buzz for this one though. It does jump off the screen. Definitely when they announced it, it was one where non-Nintendo people in the office were like, oh, that looks really neat. It looked really cool. This is I think before Nintendo had kind of like they don’t drive the kind of handcrafted aesthetic into the ground, but they definitely overdo it a bit. And I don’t think it’s ever as good as it was here. Tellingly, this game famously doesn’t start as a Kirby game. It’s made by a company called Good Feel. They were making a game called Fluff’s Epic Yarn. And Fluff is in the Kirby game, there’s a character called Prince Fluff, who you may note looks an awful lot like Kirby. And there’s some quite funny side eye in the Iwata Asks of this where they’re like, so you’re making this game and it’s not at all a Kirby game, but someone’s like, well, it really does look like Kirby though. Which I like the idea of this team just like basically ripping it off and not just ripping it off, but trying to sell it to like Iwata who is like Mr. Kirby. Like if anyone is going to know a Kirby game when he sees one, it’s him. Yeah, kind of weirdly reminds me of the whole Dinosaur Planet Star Fox thing, where it’s like, well, this guy looks like Fox McCloud, but that was much more ill-advised, I would say, as a decision. But yeah, sorry, continue. I’d say its roots are quite obvious that this wasn’t a Kirby game to begin with. Like there’s not a lot of Kirby in it apart from the cuteness, like it doesn’t have the copy abilities. It’s, if anything, it’s a slightly more traditional Better Behave platformer because he doesn’t have the infinite jump either. I’d say it’s maybe like more of a technical platformer than the other Kirby games. And it’s still quite easy. But you can’t just float over challenges. You do have to kind of play by its rules a bit more. I’m actually going to recommend the 3DS version of this over the Wii version, which is Kirby’s extra epic yarn, because in that they did add copy abilities. That is the extra thing they added. You basically get a series of hats which add extra abilities. He didn’t really need them. The game’s difficulty is kind of tuned for Kirby as he was in the original. But it feels to me more like a proper Kirby game now that you can also chuck bombs or you can throw like sewing pins at enemies. They’re all kind of thread based skills. And I think like what you lose on big TV scale of the visuals, I think you kind of gain maybe in that complexity. It also adds a difficulty mode where, and get this, Kirby is pursued by a flying devil. But Kumazaki wasn’t involved with this one. He wasn’t involved in it, but you can sense that maybe they’re trying to impress him. I don’t know. Yeah, like that’s the difficulty mode is that you have to do the level except there’s like a devil constantly on your tail, which is like very odd. So my memory of this one Matthew is that even though it doesn’t have the copy abilities, it does have like a sort of preset series of things to transform into. That’s how they do it, right? Yeah, you transform into like these big like knitted sort of tanks and there’s like a mole one that digs, a UFO, and they’re really good and that is quite Kirbyish. That feels like something that maybe wouldn’t have happened without the Kirby angle, you’d think. But they’re probably more like the mouthful transformations in Forgotten Land. They’re kind of like, this is the bit, you’re in a tank, you’re going to do this for like 30 seconds, it’s like a set piece, and then it’s done. I prefer the flexibility of you’re in a level, you’re doing your platforming, you’re doing your action, and you have some choice over what abilities you bring with you. I think that’s the more interesting side of Kirby. But those transformations are spectacular and they’re really, really well handled and I don’t know, maybe you want to go with the Wii version of this to see it on the big screen. I mean, there’s value in both. What I’d really like is a proper HD do-over of this. I think this would really pop on Switch if they took those 3DS editions and just made a really sharp 1080p version or just playing on the OLED screen would be like, yes please. This is the kind of game where I feel like it could just do with a sort of 20 quid digital only sort of like re-release, do you know what I mean? That sort of scale as opposed to like 40 quid in a box or whatever. Like I think it would suit that quite well, you know. Yeah, I don’t know what Good Feel has been up to since actually. I don’t know if we sort of owed a game from them, but I wonder if there’s another Kirby in the works somewhere. It feels like there’s too much good buzz around this one not to build on it. Yeah. Are you a big like Yoshi’s Woolly’s World, Crafted World guy, is that like your bag? They’re okay. I don’t think that they do the art style half as well as this. Like this really commits to the, you know, your unravelling stuff and Kirby’s Epic Yarn sort of presents the world as if it was like a big cloth backdrop and you can kind of pull on threads and it all kind of like pulls together and shifts all the platforms about like it’s a far more like tangible place where the Yoshi stuff is just like it’s a Yoshi game but everything’s got a texture on it that makes it look like fabric. It’s not quite the same. Yeah, for sure. So, yes, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, a game that I have come to love for its cuteness and aesthetic over time. Yeah, great stuff. I think that’s also reasonably cheap on Wii, that one. I think it’s cheap on Wii. Yeah, Wii U Virtual Console as well. Yeah, okay. Great. Good stuff. So, yeah, get on it. This is a big Wii U picture episode. Everything’s good on Wii U when it comes to this character. Yeah, but Matthew had to buy again because he’d sold his Wii U and hadn’t transferred his purchases. Or did you get that sword in the end, Matthew? Someone in the desk or was saying you could sort that? Someone did help me, but I haven’t got it sorted yet because I’m ungrateful shit. Well, OK, on that happy note, are we on to a number three now? We’re going for the SNES Kirby Superstar, which is the famous eight games in one, which is, I think, a bit of a fib. I’d say it’s more like a couple of mini games and a single player campaign that’s been cut up into smaller campaigns. It’s really the shape of this. Spring Breeze, which is the first campaign, is famously an abridged version of Kirby’s Dream Land on the Game Boy, so it’s basically like playing a slightly, slightly cut down version of that, but it’s got the same flow of levels and bosses except with the full copy abilities that they added for Superstar. So that’s what’s fun about this game. It’s like playing with those deeper powers. You get an ability and it’s got like six different moves and you can really kind of go to town with that. Can I throw the trivia here that Spring Breeze is a reference to the original Kirby’s Dreamland, like a phrase in the original manual for Kirby’s Dreamland, I believe. That’s where that came from. I read that in the reading materials you supplied me, so I assumed you knew it too. There’s a really good Sakurai interview about Superstar that they did for the SNES Mini that I passed me by when it originally came out. It’s got this really funny story about the Kirby power Mike Kirby, which is Kirby who shouts into a mic. One of the soundbites he says is, it sounds like a man saying Chester. I don’t know what he’s actually saying, but that’s Sakurai’s voice is the sound clip. In the interview, he talks about recording it at their studio, which is apparently like Howl’s studio at the time is quite out in the sticks, and he’s in the sound booth shouting Chester into the mic, he says it in a really powerful way, and he doesn’t realise that the window is open, he looks out and he describes all these workers in a nearby field looking at him. It was more the idea that this is a game studio that was that close to crops, that you could make eye contact with a farmer while you were recording a Kirby sound effect, just really tickled me. Another really good bit of trivia for this one Matthew is that I believe they threw out most of the visuals after Donkey Kong Country came out and maybe changed the expectation for the aesthetic of SNES games, but then I know how you feel about those games’ appearance, so what did you make of all that? Let’s make this really ugly, like Donkey Kong Country, and they were like, let’s do it. Yeah, I’d say that’s the one downside, like a lot of people rate this super high, they say it’s like one of the if not the best. The backgrounds on this game I think are like hideously ugly, they’re very dated, sort of CG, sort of digital sprites, they’re very, very unpleasant, but it’s just so, so packed with character this one. I think some of them are hit and miss, there’s a mode called the Great Cave Offensive where you’re trying to collect 60 treasures from this big labyrinth, and it’s like the worst thing Sakurai is hooked on is very confusing mazes where you’re walking through a lot of warp doors to get to rooms that look the same. People may recognise this also from subspace industry on Smash Brothers Wii, which I think to this day is my least favourite mode in any Nintendo game. I hate that kind of… it isn’t a puzzle where you just get lost going through a load of doors that look the same. It’s like someone plays the Mario Ghost House in Super Mario World and went, oh, let’s just make a whole game of that, you’re like, well that’s not a terrible idea. That’s my miniature Kirby maze rant. My favourite mode in this game is this one called Revenge of Meta Knight, which is a little platforming campaign where Kirby is basically trying to bring down Meta Knight’s ship The Halberd. And it’s not mechanically any different really, it’s just like a series of levels where you’re going through like the interior of the ship, but through the whole campaign, it’s overlaid with like conversations with all Meta Knight’s minions, basically like freaking out that you’re destroying the ship. And it’s like weirdly cinematic, like it’s also, I think, and again this is just me like mapping my theories video essay style, it feels like a proto-Kid Icarus uprising, in that he’s like you’re playing an action game and all this funny stuff is being said over the top of it, so they’re like oh shit he’s in the engine room, he’s like destroying the engine what are we gonna do Meta Knight’s gonna be so upset with us and like when the boss is coming along they’re like yeah this is it like unleash unleash the giant lobster and then when you defeat it they’re like no he killed the lobster really easily it’s terrible just really really charming yeah so that’s good and and and and finally it all tops off with that like Metroidvania thing that Milky Way wishes not memories where you’re kind of collecting the abilities so a bit of a random grab bag of ideas quite chaotic it’s I’m looking forward to seeing them all. I’m looking forward to seeing them all. I’m looking forward to seeing them all. I’m looking forward to seeing them all. I think it’s a really important Nintendo artifact, and worth celebrating. Annoyingly, there is a better version of this for the DS, but it’s incredibly hard to find. It’s not on any Virtual Console, which is mad that it’s not on the Wii U Virtual Console. And as a result, the games, I think you’re gonna pay 80 quid or something for it. And it is just a remake of the SNES game, but it’s remade by our good friend Shinya Kumazaki, comes in and adds a load of mad boss bullshit at the end of it. Well, the series is lining up, I would say. And that game, so the DS one is like Super Star Ultra. That’s one that you will regularly find at the top of people’s like all time Kirby lists. If it was more readily available, maybe I would feel the same way, but I think- I think the SNES one, you can play on the Switch Online. It’s got the meat of what makes this game great. Obviously the DS1 gets rid of the ugly Donkey Kong back graphics. It’s just got much nicer art all around. But, you know, needs must. This is very, very playable on the SNES. I played it on the train to and from London yesterday. I had a very good time with it. Yeah, good stuff. You get on the way to a bad play, apparently. One other bit of trivia about this one. A mode that didn’t make the cut was a horror story called Kagero Mansion, where he said Kirby’s mouth was going to be sealed shut so he couldn’t absorb any abilities and all the abilities came from items. So if you wanted to flame Kirby, you’d have to pick up a candle and it was about exploring a haunted house. Yeah, I did read that and immediately thought of Luigi’s Mansion. There’s no link there, but the concept of Kirby’s mouth being sewn shut is quite grim, but quite in keeping with the whole body horror element of the character that’s kind of in the background. Yeah, good stuff. That is well worth reading that interview. He’s in quite good form, I would say, Sakurai. Okay, great. We’ll link all these materials afterwards so people can go check them out themselves. I’ll put that on the social on Twitter, Back Page Pod. So what’s your number two, Matthew? My number two, I’m going to go super old school. I’m going to say Kirby’s Adventure for the NES. Very stripped down compared to modern Kirby. Like I say, most abilities have, if they have two attacks, they’re rare. Most of them, you absorb them. They’ve got one attack, so it hasn’t got the combos. But this is a beautiful late NES game. Loads of like weird surprises, loads of characterful bosses. It like establishes a lot. Well, actually that’s unfair. The Game Boy establishes a lot of the characters, but there’s even more like Kirby iconography is like established in this one. I think just the fact that it has the copy abilities as well just makes it that much of a step up. It’s why I haven’t included the original Dream Land game in this list. I just feel like you need those abilities to kind of get into the good stuff. Maybe you disagree with that. I don’t know. No, not particularly. Yeah, I don’t know. What’s the kind of like rationale behind that for you? I think this is just a more complete like coherent adventure. I think it’s got a lot more of the building blocks in terms of like there’s like a lot more fun mini games. I think the bosses are conceptually a bit more out there. This does introduce the trope of you fight the final boss and then there’s a cosmic horror beyond it. Where you fight King Dedede and then you fight Nightmare and there’s like a scrolling shooter before you do it. So Sakurai has fought like Kumazaki is just learning from the master here. Right, right, right. I was going to recommend specifically the 3D classics version of this on 3DS. The problem with this game is that it runs quite badly on a lot of NES emulators. It did at the time as well. It’s a late game NES game, late NES game and it’s technically quite demanding. There’s a lot of like slowdown in places, a lot of like weird visual glitches. There are certain powers for eating this game out. Of the versions that I have played and I’ve tried to be pretty thorough about this. The 3D classics, which is the version where they add 3D visuals for 3DS. On top of the 3D visuals, it also runs pretty much flawlessly. Right. If you just want the smoothest version of this game, it’s there. But you can also play it like on Switch, on NES Online and all that. But it has got, you’ll be pretty shocked at how rough it is in places. So yeah, it’s like a 1993 NES game. That is late. How crazy is that? Yeah. Bizarre really. Yeah. But then the rationale was like it’s still, it was still a kind of platform that had this monster audience. So it’s kind of like, it was still worth it for them. But yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And like, it’s not that long after the first Kirby, you know, you’re riding the wave of success of Game Boy. It’s a gateway drug. It makes perfect sense that you’d go to it. The box, incidentally, for Kirby’s Adventure of the Western Box, it kind of encapsulates Kirby’s whole deal in that the whole thing is like really cute and it’s like Kirby in a bright sky, but he’s kind of sucking at the edge of the box and underneath there’s just the abyss. So he’s like, there’s the hint of the darkness to come. Even on that box site, it’s really funny. I never really noticed it until looking at it for this podcast. So I was like, that’s actually like, that is kind of what Kirby’s deal is. There is something beyond that you will not be able to comprehend. Amazing. Okay, good. Well, that’s really interesting. I didn’t know until we were doing the research of this episode just like how ambitious it was versus like the Game Boy ones and how strange it was that ambition was realised on NES rather than SNES. It’s really good. It’s really works on it. I think there is a lot of NES era games of like series you love that when you go back to them, you’re like, oh, yikes, like this is really like crunchy and oh, this just doesn’t hold up. But this one is like Kirby hasn’t much more complicated than this ever, it’s still like bang on. Yeah. Okay. Great. So we come to your number one, Matthew. What’s so my number one is kind of three games, nine games until we go to this is the cosmic horror. So we’ve got like eight games in your top five. Very good. Okay, but I’m grouping these together because I find them very hard to untangle and I’m grouping together the three main line Okumizaki games. Kirby’s Adventure Wii, Triple Deluxe for 3DS and Planet Robobot. You might think that’s cheating. They are incredibly similar. Like he really establishes a template on Wii, which is all the copy abilities you know and love, but all of them have proper movesets, so more so than even Super Star. Everything here does multiple things, so there’s a real fun experimenting with every power. He introduces super abilities, which is a couple of abilities which have giant hyper powered versions, so like a sword the size of a screen, or a fiery dragon that comes and destroys the blocks. So he introduces this idea of every once in a while this game will just go crazy and basically make you invincible and visually spectacular, which I really love. Kirby’s Wii also has the level structure where you’re collecting hidden icons to unlock harder challenges in the map. So there’s just a lot more shape around the campaign. It’s got a really good unlockable hard mode where the big treat there is basically he re-designs all the bosses for the second run, which is a very Platinum-y thing as well. You go in there and they’ve got like new moves so you get to fight like hyper wispy woods and things, which I think is a real treat. They’re kind of gorgeous games. They’re 2D. We were definitely snooty. So this is where we went wrong, I think, on gamer. We were like, well, it’s no Mario Galaxy. And you’re like, well, that’s a bit unfair because what is? In the 2D Kirby space, it was really polished, really handsome. It’s got some really gorgeous background art, the Wii one. And the reason I’ve grouped these three together is basically those defining things, like the polish, the superpower, the copy abilities, the campaign structure. That is what he does in the 3DS games. Which one you think is best, I think, will simply hinge on an ascetic choice. Do you like the futuristic robot one, then play Planet Robobot? Do you like the fairy tale stereoscopic 3D weirdness of Triple Deluxe? Or do you like the big screen experience of Kirby’s Wii Adventure? That’s sort of why I find these three quite hard to untangle. Right, okay, that makes sense. So was Kirby and the Forgotten Land not in contention for this, Matthew? Yeah, that should probably have gone in there. Maybe it needs longer to settle. Lots of people are going to jump into that and are maybe looking to where to go next. And if they’re doing that, I would say either his Wii game or one of his 3DS games. If I had to anoint one king of all of them, so my ultimate number one, I think it would be Planet Robobot. Right, okay, yeah. This is the proper God in Space finale one, right, as well? Triple Deluxe is as well, to be fair, but this one, Robobot, it ends super big. Really satisfying. The super ability that he has in this is a mech suit, which is arguably like the best super ability of these three games. Not only does the mech have all these interesting powers, and it’s this really physical thing, so there’s a boss where you have to unscrew bits of its body using the mech’s wrench-like fists and things, so it’s really tactile, but also the mech can absorb copy abilities on top of that, so you get fire mech, electric mech, wheel mech, and so it’s just that bit deeper because in Triple Deluxe, the super ability is Kirby gets this hyper suck, where he basically inhales everything on screen, so it’s just a cutscene is what the naysayers will say, but it’s so good and so funny because all the enemies hold on to the scenery because they don’t get pulled into this vortex and it rips the graphics out of the game and all this kind of weird stuff. I love, love, love Triple Deluxe, but I think Robobot is maybe a bit more compelling because of the mech. Yeah, very interesting seeing him in his little Hulkbuster style armor there. Oh, it’s so good. And like I say, the end is just, oh, it’s so good. It’s just so funny to see Kirby do this stuff. And it’s got all the deep lore if you want it. Like I say, if you pause these games, you can read about the bosses and it tells you in true Dark Souls style, it will be like some say the hat is the source of his power and he’s actually a slave to his hat and all this kind of stuff. Amazing. So yeah, that’s 35 quid to buy digitally. It’s more expensive if you try and buy it physically. I regularly see this on best 3DS games lists, Matthew. This is very well liked, I believe, by Nintendo hardcore. So yeah, I’d say the three that regularly top Kirby lists are Super Star Ultra on the DS, Kirby’s Wii Adventure and Planet Robobot. People are a little down on Triple Deluxe, but the use of stereoscopic 3D and the way it uses lots of interesting parallax scrolling and foreground, background stuff, that stuff is slightly diminished in Robobot because you’ve seen it in Triple Deluxe already or I had. But I think whichever of those games you play first is going to have more of a visual wow factor. Interesting stuff. So there we go. The eight games in the top five are done. That’s, that’s, that’s Kirby through and through. Yeah, you know, it’s like eight, eight recommendations and five, a bit of a superstar. This is the Kirby superstar of games. It’s eight recommendations in one. Were there any honorable mentions you wanted to throw in there Matthew as well? I quite like the first big switch one they made, which is Star Allies. The interesting thing about Star Allies, it’s kind of Kumazaki seeing through one of the failed projects, which was the idea of like a Kirby built entirely around four player co-op. And that’s that was in Kirby’s Wii Adventure as well, had all that co-op stuff. But Star Allies is a lot more like the action is built for four. So even in single player, you can kind of possess or sort of entrance three enemies to join you. And you basically move as this squad. You’re just like a plague of locusts just chewing through the levels. You’re so overpowered, like it’s so easy, even by Kirby standards. But there is something quite spectacular about just like four miniature gods just destroying everything in their wake that appeals to me. It also has my probably favorite final Kimizaki boss where you sort of fight this sort of titan in space. And you’re sort of flying around its legs in 3D while shooting it. And then you sort of fly inside of its like you sort of shoot its head off or something. Fly inside its neck hole and then fight its soul. Wow. I do like that your level of research has really paid off here, Matthew. You identify the most fucked up kind of like end game boss thing in each one and then like pull it out and discuss it in shocking detail. It’s very, very good. That’s terrible. I’m like somebody can’t resist the spoiler of it, but I can’t really like oversell how cool the ends to these games are. Like they’re just and because you’ll be like, oh, this is so cute. And then it will just go mad. And you’re like, oh, OK, I didn’t see this coming. Yeah, I’ve like distinct memory of Joe Scribs laughing at his desk at something and just going like, well, what was that? You know, what’s happening? And it was just the end of one of these games. He was just laughing at this, the sheer madness of it. And like that’s such a great feeling where something just takes you by so much surprise that you’re just kind of giddy with it. Yeah. No, it’s really cool. I like that. Were there any other recommendations you want to throw in there, Matthew? Any other honorable mentions? Again, you know, I mentioned it earlier, like if they should bring Kirby 64 to Virtual Console on Switch and make it a bit easier to play, I think there’s some fun in that. It’s like really one of the nicest looking N64 games as well. Yeah. Like it’s dated fairly well compared to some of the games on that platform, I would say. I imagine some people will be a little salty that I’m quite down on the Game Boy Advance one. Crystal, The Amazing Mirror. Right. But it just doesn’t do it for me. And that’s one which will appear quite high in other lists, but not this one. Okay. Well, great. Not enough cosmic horror. Completely fair. Okay. Well, then we’ve reached the end of this Kirby themed episode, Matthew. Is there any final thoughts or are you all Kirby’d out at this point? Oh, I’m Kirby. I’m just going to go and inhale some crisps or something Kirby style. Amazing. Just a foot long subway straight in. Merge with a meatball marinara. Oh my God. What would a power would that give you? What a horrible thought. Yeah. Just like firing off kind of meatballs covered in tomato at will. That’s enough podcasts for one day, isn’t it? So thank you so much for listening. Matthew, I love it when you do these Nintendo deep dives or like Nintendo adjacent deep dives. I think they’re just great. I look forward to the Mario version of one of these episodes one day. I think that’ll be probably a two-part of that one, you know? Yeah, that’s like Everest. Yeah, that’s definitely a 2023 onwards job, that one. We’ve got, I think, God of War and The Witcher to do before then anyway. So yeah, in the series kind of round up one. So yes, thank you so much for that, Matthew. Your level of effort there was fantastic. So where can people find you on social media, Matthew? At MrBazzill underscore pesto. Okay, so we have, I think we are committing to this date, Matthew, of April 8th for the Patreon launch now. Yes. Pushed it back slightly, but we’re about to record, as we’re recording this, we’re about to record our Best Boss Battles episode. That’s going to be really good, I think. That’ll be the first bonus episode for the £5-ish tier that we’ll have going up live on day one. We’ve also, our plan is to kind of tweet out and explain what we’ll do if we reach like a higher tier and do a second extra Patreon episode a month. We’ve made a full plan almost of what we’ll do for the year if you back us, basically, so you know what you’re getting, because we’re big on transparency. Any thoughts on that, Matthew? I think that’s the way to do it. I want you to know exactly what you’re going to get and what we’re committing to. So if you pay, you’ll definitely get the one extra podcast a month. If there’s enough people, if we make enough money, there’ll be two extra podcasts a month everyone can download at that £5 tier. We think that’s the best way of doing it. Again, we only encourage you to back if you can actually afford it. There’s no pressure from us. We’ll still make this podcast. Regardless, if the Patreon makes under £100, we’ll probably quietly close it and carry on with our lives and make a joke about it on the podcast. But the current plan is for it to be at patreon.com back page pod on April 8th. So I think we’ll have it all ready to go by then. We decided it’s too complicated to try and put all the old episodes on there. So all we’re going to do from now on is when this new series goes live, which is called Back Page Pod XL, you’ll be able to download those ones. And then any future regular episodes will go on the Patreon too. So that feed will give you access to all the Patreon ones and any new ones from that point. And if you want to listen to the old ones, you can go do that on the previous existing feeds. So that’s the plan, Matthew. Exciting times. Sounds like a good plan. I think so. We’re backpagegames at gmail.com. If you’d like to send us a question, there’s also the Discord, which you can access via our profile on Twitter. Join our community, which has passed 300 members at this point. Very, very nice. Really awesome. Always some good chatting there. And one person saying that Airplane was their favorite film of all time. And I was like, not so sure about this thread. Might have to close the movie’s thread. But it’s a fun film, but I wouldn’t put it on my list. And yeah, we’ll be back next week with Best Games of 2012, Matthew. Exciting to finally go back to the series. Yeah, it’s gonna be good. Thank you so much for listening and be back very soon.