Past meets present: Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
Past meets present: Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
The fun thing about Kirby is that there are no bad Kirby games, just better and worse ones.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Contextualizing how enjoyable Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards can be is… difficult. It’s a good game! An underrated one, probably, considering critical attitudes toward games of its era that didn’t go all-in on the 3D or let you explore with the kind of openness that existed in Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie and a whole slew of other 3D platformers of the late-90s and early-aughts. It introduced a gimmick that people still love to this day — combining copy powers — and has seen re-release on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Consoles, as well as the N64 portion of the Nintendo Switch Online service, for a reason.
And yet, it’s a pretty mediocre Kirby game. The soundtrack is good, but not at the level of its direct predecessors, Kirby Super Star or Kirby’s Dream Land 3. Visually, it’s fine, but again, it has nothing on the stunning Dream Land 3, which, hidden in its adoreableness, really pushed what the SNES was even capable of from a graphical perspective — 3D art in general just wasn’t at a place where it could be compared favorably against the high-level 2D art that was possible, and this is just a comparison of 64-bit 3D vs. 16-bit 2D, never mind if you throw 32-bit in the mix. The 3D art in Kirby 64 looks good for the time, Kirby animates well, etc., but the levels are also emptier, their design starker in both visuals and in gameplay, than what Kirby worked with in his straight-up 2D affairs. And that the game plays much slower than other Kirby titles, too, is both notable and felt.
Again, that’s not to say that Kirby 64 is a bad game, because it isn’t. I’ve said it before and I will surely say it many times more, but there is no such thing as a bad mainline Kirby game. Triple Deluxe is disappointing for a number of reasons, sure, but it still has its moments and is worth playing — you mostly wish it were better, that there were more of the high points, rather than think it is bad. Kirby’s Dream Land 2 has a lovely soundtrack, changes things up considerably from its Game Boy predecessor, and is still enjoyable today. It also might be the worst Kirby platformer, depending on how harshly you look upon the extremely short length of the pink puffball’s pre-pink debut, or how much the motion-controlled pinballing nature of Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble speaks to or angers you.
No offense is meant here: these are all good games that I not only own but have played through multiple times. The Crystal Shards should be nestled in comfortably within this group, rather than the middle-tier with Kirby’s Adventure or Dream Land 3, but it’s mostly because there needs to be a bottom in the first place to correspond with the middle and the top, not because The Crystal Shards is a problem, as it were. The Crystal Shards’ issue is that it is kind of the inverse of Squeak Squad: whereas that game lacked an innovative central hook but was saved by tight level design that makes it a pretty good “traditional” Kirby platformer, Crystal Shards has its excellent hook, and a mediocre Kirby game within which you get to play around with that.
That hook, though. In The Crystal Shards, Kirby gets to combine powers. You get your pretty standard power usage by having just the one, but every power can be coupled with another, whether it be a doubling up of the same power to create a mega version of that copy ability — two stones equals one giant, nigh-impervious rock Kirby rather than just a little stone guy, for instance — but mixing and matching copy abilities is even more enjoyable. You can create exploding ninja stars that stick to surfaces and enemies this way, turn Kirby into a curling stone with stone and ice, or mix fire and blade together for a flaming bastard sword that can be held aloft or thrown in addition to being slowly swung in an arc. Kirby can equip himself with a dual-bladed definitely-not-a-lightsaber if you combine shock with blade, or, combine shock with flame in order to laugh so hard you scare your cats when Kirby rubs paper on his head until the static electricity generated by that causes him to burst into flame and run into enemies while wide-eyed with terror. HAL very clearly had fun coming up with all of these combo powers, and that effort makes them the star of the game.
If there is a complaint to be made about them, it comes back down to the level design. You should, in theory, find most of your fun experimenting with combining powers and seeing what happens, as there are just seven base powers, but being able to combine them all with each other means there are actually 49 different copy abilities in the game — the basic seven, plus 42 different combinations. Consider that the shortest video I could find displaying all of the powers is over eight minutes long:
The problem is that you kind of need to decide between constant experimentation over the game’s fairly brief runtime — there are just five worlds with four non-boss stages each, many of them on the shorter side, and a sixth with three non-boss stages — and whether or not you want to collect all 75 of the titular Crystal Shards in order to unlock the true ending and true last boss fight.
Some of the shards are indeed just hanging around to be collected regardless of what power you’re carrying around, but others require specific combo abilities to reveal, whether it’s breaking them out of a cage in a mid-boss room or destroying some rocks or a wall hiding them from sight. You very often need to pay close attention to which powers are available in a given stretch of a stage in order to prepare yourself to unveil the next hidden shard, which means you spend more time worrying about having the right powers than in just being free to mess around how you want to. You can do both, but it’ll create quite a bit of backtracking and replaying of levels in order to play that way, and as said, this game doesn’t have the greatest level design in the Kirbyverse. It’s not as seamless of a transition as it is in some other Kirby titles, where specific powers are needed to unlock everything, and it’s only an issue here because of the specific nature of this game’s hook.
Still, though, that hook does rule, and Kirby 64 is a fine way to spend four or five hours. You can complete the entire thing, all 75 shards included, in that time, especially if you know what you’re looking for in terms of hidden shards. It’s easily worth the $10 it goes for on the Wii U Virtual Console service, if you’re still able to access that, and if you’re a member of the N64 portion of Nintendo Switch Online, well, once the game-breaking bug Nintendo introduced is fixed, it’ll be worth your time to revisit or check out this game for the first time, too.
The game is more than just the combined powers, too: I don’t mean to end the sales pitch there. The soundtrack is quite good, for instance, even if it’s not on par with its predecessor’s stellar work. The Pop Star theme that you’ll hear in a few different stages is one you’re likely familiar with even if you’ve never played Kirby 64 before, thanks to its presence in series like Smash Bros.:
The Castle Area theme on Ripple Star is such a perfect encapsulation of what HAL was up to at the time, musically — the kind of sound that would be familiar to those who have played EarthBound or Mother 3 (the original N64 version of which HAL was developing prior to its cancellation and shifting of both development team and platform), that the sound of Dream Land 3 gave us a preview of:
And there is the best track from the entire game, the one you won’t even hear unless you’ve collected all 75 shards and unlocked the true final boss of the game, Zero Two:
This isn’t just the best track in Kirby 64, but it’s also one of the finer boss themes that Jun Ishikawa has ever composed in his 30-plus years of doing that. The ominous build up to an eventual explosion of sound that sounds alien in comparison to the rest of the soundtrack — as it should, considering the final boss in question — with the synths creating a lovely, haunting melody to work in concert with the very digitized and electronic drum effects. It’s certainly a track you could apply the “epic” label to without having to feel embarrassed about using a word that has been pretty ruined in its overuse, especially if you listen to the arrangement of it that was played during the 25th anniversary orchestral concert to celebrate the franchise:
The way those drums build up until it the crescendo reaches its climax… what a theme. It’s worth tracking down the 75 shards just to get a chance to hear that play while you take down Zero Two, the manifestation of Dark Matter that is the true final boss of Kirby 64.
Speaking of Dark Matter, Kirby 64 is the third of four games in the series directed by Shinichi Shimomura, each of which features that antagonist. Dream Land 2 was the first of the Shimomura games, then Dream Land 3, and finally, Kirby 64. Not only is Dark Matter in each of these titles, but it’s required that you complete all of an optional objective in order to truly complete the game. In Dream Land 2, it’s collecting all seven Rainbow Drops, and in Dream Land 3, you must complete all of the hidden side missions that help out various denizens of Dream Land. Otherwise, you’re left thinking someone else was the baddie (sorry, Dedede), but completing these optional quests allow you to find out who is actually behind stirring up trouble, and putting a stop to them. While you face off against Dark Matter in Kirby 64 either way, it’s not until you have all 75 shards that Kirby is able to exorcise Dark Matter from the queen of Ripple Star, leading to the battle against Dark Matter’s final form of Zero Two that allows for 100 percent completion of the game.
Shimomura, who began his time with Kirby as a designer on Kirby’s Adventure, would leave HAL after directing the remake of that game for the Game Boy Advance (while he was director, he actually worked under series originator Masahiro Sakurai, who was credited as the Chief Director on that game). The series went in much different directions after Shimomura’s exit, with different directors running things for a few years, until Shinya Kumazaki mostly took over the role. Mostly, because, just like in the 90s and aughts, Kirby still features different directors, depending on the project, but it appears as if Kumazaki is the leader in this post-Sakurai, post-Shimomura world.
Kirby 64 was certainly successful, but I do think it’s fair to say that HAL wondered what to do next and where to go from there. The Crystal Shards was good, but could have been better than it was, and figuring out how to ensure the next Kirby would reach that level took some time and reflection. There was no mainline Kirby game on the GameCube, for instance, as it was thought to be canceled until it reemerged as a Wii game years later, but even then, it wasn’t even originally announced until the end of the Cube’s lifespan in 2005 — HAL was in no rush to go back to the world of 3D, console Kirby just yet.
Going back to the beginning of things with the Kirby’s Adventure remake in the interim was a good idea, and the couple of Kirby titles after that would go in some wild directions, with The Amazing Mirror basically being what would happen if you plunked Kirby down into a Metroidvania, and Canvas Curse denying Kirby the use of his limbs and the player of the use of buttons. HAL eventually found their footing again in the more traditional Kirby spaces, too, and while they had resumed 2D design after Crystal Shards’ foray into the third dimension, they eventually went back to the 2.5 realm with 3D characters, art, and environments with Return to Dream Land, and have stuck to that since.
The Crystal Shards is a real turning point for the franchise, is what I’m getting at, with HAL deciding to abandon the shift to 3D, maybe recognizing that, as good as the game was, it didn’t deliver quite the Kirby experience that was at the time still possible in 2D. Still, though, even with its faults, Kirby 64 is worth playing or replaying. It’s cute, it’s well-animated, and being able to combine copy abilities is a joy, even if it’s a stricter system than you’d think if you care about getting all of the shards. As I said, there is no such thing as a bad mainline Kirby game. Even the worse ones are still good, and worth an afternoon or two of your time to get through.
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