30 years of Kirby: Kirby: Squeak Squad
Squeak Squad is proof of how good the Kirby library is, because it's somewhat unremarkable and yet still plenty of fun.
August 1, 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the North American debut of Kirby. Throughout the month, I’ll be covering Kirby’s games, creating rankings, and thinking about the past and future of the series. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Kirby games are so often innovative in some way, or at least introduce some new gameplay hook that makes the series feel both new and familiar at the same time, that a game that simply does very competent Kirby that you’re used to can feel like a disappointment. Kirby: Squeak Squad released for the Nintendo DS in 2006, and received fairly mediocre reviews. Lots of low 7s, Cs, and even some scores in the 6-range, which is generally not how mainline Kirby titles are received by critics.
Seeing that would make you think that Squeak Squad lacked some redeeming qualities, but the reality of the situation is that Kirby had spent quite a bit of the prior years reinventing the series’ gameplay — the Game Boy Color’s Tilt ‘n’ Tumble was a motion-controlled, top-down title, the Game Boy Advances’s Amazing Mirror was a Metroidvania-lite with four-player co-op, and DS debut Canvas Curse turned Kirby into a rolling ball who traveled along paths drawn by your stylus. Squeak Squad was a much more traditional Kirby, and in that regard, it’s a good one, with some notable features and plenty of merit. When compared to what had recently been going on with Kirby, however — and the follow-up to Squeak Squad, 2010’s brilliant multi-mini-Kirby Mass Attack — Squeak Squad just sort of… is.
Which is a long way of saying that I don’t even think the criticism of Squeak Squad is wrong. It is pretty traditional, it is not particularly innovative, it was something of a letdown in its moment in time. But that moment in time was also 16 years in the past, more than half of Kirby’s existence ago: well removed from that context where fans and critics were maybe expecting something new and shiny to wow them, we can say that Squeak Squad is simply a good time, just like 1993’s Kirby’s Adventure remains a good time despite the many advances and tweaks and gameplay innovations made in the series since.
If Squeak Squad were poorly made, it would be one thing, but it’s got solid level design, with enough changes that were made to the Kirby gameplay formula to give it an identity of its own. Plus, it’s memorable for, if nothing else, basically the best setup for a Kirby game (and resultant fallout) going. The game begins with Kirby about to dive into a delicious piece of strawberry shortcake, until [gasp] it is stolen out from underneath him. Kirby, hellbent on finding his stolen baked good, sets off to find the culprit and retrieve his dessert.
This leads to him going right up to King Dedede to start a fight about it — Dedede is innocent, but let’s be real, he’s been brainwashed so many times that Kirby’s inhale first, ask questions later approach isn’t acceptable, but is at least understandable. Dedede didn’t steal the cake, but maybe the band of thieves, the Squeak Squad, did! He then chases this mouse-based squad around for most of the rest of the game, hoping the next treasure chest he finds holds his precious shortcake, but alas, all that he eventually finds is a chest containing the sealed away remains of the Lord of the Underworld, Dark Nebula. A relatable and predictable occurrence, for sure.
Meta Knight actually swipes the chest away from Kirby to keep it from being opened, but since he isn’t much for talking, Kirby mistakes this for Meta Knight reverting to evil, and beats him down, too. Squeak Squad is at its heart just a game about the PTSD Kirby has suffered over his years of saving the planet again and again. No wonder he needed that alone time with a piece of cake.
Squeak Squad is mostly, as said, a traditional Kirby platformer. Inhale enemies, use copy abilities, and do it all in 2D. There are some changes to the formula, however: the bottom screen serves as Kirby’s innards, where he can hold additional copy abilities, healing items, pieces of eventual 1-ups, projectiles, and treasures. There are only five spots, so you do need to think a lot about what you’re carrying: very early on, it might seem like an abundance of space, but as you move onto the levels where there are three chests you’ll need to carry if you’re to retrieve them all, while also trying to collect 1-up pieces, keep a piece of food around for healing, and have a backup copy ability, well… you can’t have all of that in one place, and will have to make sacrifices.
This does change the way you play a bit, as you need to think ahead as well as in the moment — if you see a copy ability that has environment-changing abilities, like the hammer that so often opens pathways you otherwise can’t enter, you’re going to want to hold on to it. But if you see a Maxim tomato, you probably want that, too. And if you see a treasure you haven’t collected, of course you want that: there are 120 of them, and they contain anything from pieces of art you can view to new skills to use with your various copy abilities. This has you slowing things down sometimes, which can be tough — not in a bad way — when a member of the Squeak Squad is on your tail, attempting to wrest a treasure chest from you. And if you play the extra mode of the game that is basically a time trial speedrun that challenges you to collect all 120 treasures as fast as possible, well, time is really going to be of the essence with these decisions and your planning, isn’t it?
I will say that, while the bottom screen inventory is nifty, it doesn’t quite have the wow factor needed to sell Squeak Squad as this innovative masterpiece of forward thinking. Even so, it’s still a useful system that changes the gameplay and makes Squeak Squad feel a little less traditional than its look and general play imply. And as for the enhanced abilities? They’re a neat touch that encourages you to get the treasures even if you aren’t a completionist, but it’s still a bit disappointing that the end result is that Kirby has a couple of moves per ability, instead of a fuller range of them such as in Super Star. It feels more like Nightmare in Dream Land and Adventure because of it, and while those games are plenty of fun, the way Super Star felt to play still reigns supreme in the straight-2D realm for a reason.
Speaking of the look, it’s worth noting. Despite a brief foray into 3D graphics with the Nintendo 64’s Crystal Shards, Kirby would dive right back into 2D, and make the most of it: Nightmare in Dream Land was a hell of a bump in graphical quality and sprite animation for the series even with the reversion to 2D, and Amazing Mirror had some wonderful backgrounds and sprite work on the same system. Squeak Squad kept the 2D sidescroller thing going, and the results are lovely: backgrounds are highly detailed, everything looks crisp and animates beautifully, whether they’re standard-sized sprites like Kirby or the most massive of Squeak Squad members. Kirby’s little bit of visible fatigue after inhaling for too long is a personal favorite bit of animation and art, and the idle animations are adorable, too:
Kirby dreaming of his cake and then inhaling the thought bubble once he wakes up is brilliant. I’ve changed my mind, the critics were dead wrong about Squeak Squad.
As for the music, Squeak Squad has some quality original music — the Squeak Squad’s theme, for instance, is notably good and catchy…
…but much of the soundtrack is composed of arrangements of Kirby music you know from other titles. In a game with 42 tracks — and that includes things like the Game Over screen, the lost life jingle, failure songs for sub-games — three come from Adventure, four from Super Star, four from Amazing Mirror, two from Dream Land (though, to be fair, one of those is just Dedede’s theme), and one from Kirby 64. None of this is a bad thing, because those songs rule, as does the remix of Dream Land 3’s Grass Land 3 theme, which here is Prism Plains. But it definitely feeds into the idea that Squeak Squad is something of a Kirby pastiche, homage, whatever you want to call it, that is sending you down memory lane in more ways than one.
While HAL, as they do, worked on Squeak Squad, development was also handled by Flagship. They were an independent outfit that received funding from Sega, Capcom, and Nintendo over the years, and eventually folded into Capcom entirely: Squeak Squad was actually their final game before that occurred. You know them from other games, Kirby and otherwise: Kirby & the Amazing Mirror was a Flagship joint, as were the Oracles of Seasons and Ages Legend of Zelda games on the Game Boy Color, and the GBA’s Minish Cap. It’s a shame the legacy of their final game is what it is, because Squeak Squad is actually pretty good, and Flagship’s library is full of bangers that understood just what made the series they were working on tick. Squeak Squad is no exception: it’s just lacking the innovation fans and critics of the time had come to expert from Kirby.
If you want to play Squeak Squad, you either need to find a DS copy, or download it from the Wii U while you still can, until March 27, 2023. DS games on the Wii U are not the ideal way to play, by any means, especially since Wii U screen protectors that work tend to be a little too thick for the stylus to properly and consistently register, and everything is real small to look at. But if it’s your only option, well, so it goes, until Nintendo smartens up and figures out a solution for bringing the impressive DS library back to us.
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