30 years of Kirby: The sub-games
30 years of Kirby: The sub-games
HAL hasn't just been making Kirby games for 30 years now. They've also been making dozens and dozens (and dozens) of Kirby sub-games, too.
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.
Counting originals, remakes, and one collection, there have been 38 different Kirby games released in the 30 years the franchise has existed. That’s a lot of games, and they’ve all sold enough for Kirby to be in the top 50 or top 60 franchises ever by that metric, depending on how you want to count sub-series. Kirby, with over 44 million lifetime sales reported as of the latest Forgotten Land numbers, is right around other longtime classic series like Street Fighter, Pac-Man, Crash Bandicoot, and Diablo, which is no small thing.
Kirby may not have the success of Pokémon or Mario, but very little does. And HAL Laboratory has had enough success with Kirby that they’ve felt free to experiment with the little guy: not all of those 38 games are mainline entries, with plenty of them spin-offs. Even beyond that, however, is HAL’s obsession with making games within their games. There aren’t just 38 Kirby games: there are easily over 100 of the things, as there have been over 60 sub-games across those 38 titles, and more like 70 of them if you count each kind of boss rush/arena/endurance mode that has existed in Kirby over the decades as a sub-game. And then you inch towards 80 if you count the Satellaview’s eight Kirby’s Toy Box titles, but as those are Japan-only and have no importable form, well, I won’t count it against you if you don’t count them.
There are enough sub-games that I already wrote up a ranking of the 30 best ones for Paste earlier in the year (and because it’s me, it’s actually a list of 35) without having to resort to including anything I didn’t outwardly enjoy for one reason or another. And that was before Forgotten Land introduced another three that probably merit inclusion on the list! The sub-games range from worthwhile distraction to multiplayer fun to ones that were understandably blown out into their own full-on, expanded releases, and others that should have also received that treatment — where’s our Dedede Runner-style game, HAL? There’s still time to make it happen!
Maybe if you’re not used to how Kirby games operate, you don’t see the appeal in a bunch of minigames stuffed into a larger game, especially since many of us have lived through eras where the very word “minigame” could set off some alarm bells. HAL isn’t working on shovelware or half-assing anything, though: these sub-games are almost universally entertaining for one reason or another, whether they require a single button press, the use of your memory, a test of your reflexes, or actively challenge your mastery of Kirby’s battle prowess over a longer period of time. HAL’s love of making games that someone out there could enjoy — a mission that former HAL president Satoru Iwata believed was vital in development throughout his career, regardless of role — is felt in Kirby’s sub-games. And when done exceptionally well, they can even improve the overall quality of the game they’re in: six of the top 30 sub-games in my rankings are from Mass Attack, and if you think that doesn’t make me like Mass Attack even more, just know you’re off-base.
There has been an evolution in what the sub-games do and their scope, much of it depending on who the director for a given Kirby title was. The first Kirby game, Dream Land, didn’t have a sub-game, and its followup, Kirby’s Adventure, included most of them in the title’s campaign as stops along the way. That was generally how sub-games worked in the series (if they appeared at all) for most of Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai’s time at HAL: 1996’s Kirby Super Star was more the exception than the rule for having sub-games out there as playable whenever you wanted. Shinichi Shimomura’s trio of Kirby games, which ran parallel to Sakurai-led efforts, weren’t much for sub-games, either, not until his final one, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. Dream Lands 2 and 3, though, effectively passed on the practice, sticking with replayable boss fights and an expansion on the Goal Game rather than new efforts or in-game diversions.
After Crystal Shards, though, sub-games — and ones that were available from the game’s main menu, playable whenever — became a more standardized part of the Kirby experience, and were often very tied to the specific hardware they were on. Toshiaki Suzuki’s motion-controlled Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble still made these in-game, but included five different ones you had your pick of playing whenever you collected a hidden Blue Star in a level. Kirby’s Nightmare in Dream Land, a remake of Adventure directed by Sakurai, included its motion- and IR-focused sub-games in the main menu, however, as did its Game Boy Advance followup directed by Tomoaki Fukui, Amazing Mirror. which leaned on the system’s link cable capabilities for multiplayer. Canvas Curse, directed by Motomi Katayama, made it so you had to unlock the stylus-driven sub-games within the story, but they were still available to play whenever once you did so, which is also a tactic that Kentaro Sei’s Epic Yarn and Mari Shirakawa’s Mass Attack utilized. Takashi Hamamura’s Squeak Squad had them available from the main menu, and this is essentially where we run out of the directors of Kirby games coming from various corners of HAL and whichever developers led production on the partner-produced titles.
The remake of Kirby Super Star released on the DS — Kirby Super Star Ultra — was directed by Shinya Kumazaki, who found himself going from “directorial debut” to “general director of Kirby” in a hurry. He started out with Ultra in 2008, then Return to Dream Land in 2011, Triple Deluxe in 2014, Planet Robobot in 2016, Star Allies in 2018, and Forgotten Land in 2022: the only mainline Kirby titles to not be directed by Kumazaki in this stretch were the Wii U’s Rainbow Curse, and the 3DS port of Epic Yarn. Even Sakurai didn’t have that kind of command over the series’ direction, and he created the thing.
Ultra had its own slate of menu-accessible sub-games different from the original title’s, and the way the era of Kumazaki started is also how most of it has gone. Return to Dream Land made its bonus stages and challenges unlockable in the story, but kept its sub-games on the menu. Triple Deluxe and Planet Robobot not only had menu-accessible sub-games, but effectively made those sub-games demos for future, larger releases: under Kumazaki’s watch, a slate of sub-games converted into the spin-offs Kirby Fighters Deluxe, Dedede Drum Dash Deluxe, Team Kirby Clash/Super Kirby Clash, and Kirby’s Blowout Blast. I guess this means the reason we didn’t get Dedede’s Go as a solo release is because Sei directed the Extra Epic Yarn 3DS port, not Kumazaki.
Forgotten Land switched things up by having the sub-games accessible not from the main menu, but unlocked in-game — once they were unlocked, however, they could be played at any time from the town hub that serves as a walkable menu, so it’s not that much different. These games also are purely sub-games, and not demos of future releases: the fact they’re as simple as they are instead of genre-hopping affairs with their own themes and such was one hint that this was a return to the older ways, but the harder evidence was that Kirby’s Dream Buffet, a spin-off title created using Forgotten Land’s engine but with no other ties to the title, was the first post-Forgotten Land Kirby release.
Given how sub-games are treated has fluctuated so wildly in the past, you can’t make any definitive statement about how Kumazaki and HAL are going to handle them going forward, based on just one game’s relationship with them. What is clear, though, is that they’re here to stay as long as Kumazaki or at least his ideas continue to influence HAL. They’re just too much fun to make and to play for it to be any other way.
That the sub-games are so often tied to the system they’re on, with HAL utilizing the specific features and strengths of consoles and portables like the Wii, DS, 3DS, and even the Switch, makes it difficult to expect there will ever be some kind of massive sub-game collection that would successfully replicate the way the titles were all supposed to be experienced. That being said, though, HAL doesn’t need to do that sort of thing, anyway: a smaller collection of games that work on any platform could be worthwhile, or they could just get around to an official worldwide release of the (nearly) lost Kirby’s Toy Box sub-games. Or, you know, Nintendo could ensure that every Kirby game is available at all times, so you can just play them in their original context, sub-games included. But now I’m just talking silly.
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