During their presentation at E3 in 2005, Nintendo unveiled gameplay for a Kirby GameCube mainline game. However, the GameCube would only receive the spin-off “Kirby Air Ride,” and this trailer and its concepts would become the only evidence of a home console main series Kirby title for over a decade. I watched this footage religiously as a child, not even knowing what the GameCube was (my allegiance to Nintendo home consoles began with the Wii). I loved Kirby — I still do — ever since I played my favorite game of all time, “Kirby Super Star Ultra.” I’d glue myself to airings and YouTube clips of “Kirby: Right Back at Ya!” I would even draw my own custom Kirbys and show them to all of my elementary school classmates. Above all, I’ve always loved sharing my friend Kirby with the rest of my friends.
In 2011, one of my other favorite games of all time dropped, carrying over concepts from that lost GameCube footage and incorporating four-player gameplay into the main series for the first time: HAL Labs’ “Kirby’s Return to Dreamland.” This past summer — after researching for my review of the 3D “Kirby and the Forgotten Land” — I went back to the Wii U in my family’s basement to replay a lot of the game. It still held up and looked great despite being relegated to the 480p resolution of Wii games. Maybe that’s part of why I was initially disappointed at the announcement of the game’s Switch remake, “Kirby’s Return to Dreamland: Deluxe.” “Forgotten Land” was such an innovative step forward into the third dimension, so why put efforts toward remaking a 2D game that was barely a decade old? This feels like a common trend for the industry now, as console improvement has begun to approach an asymptote of processing and graphical capabilities. Remaking games and moving the industry into the future would then take innovation, doing something entirely new rather than improving on what’s been done. So what does “Deluxe” do that’s new?
Well, it’s not supposed to do anything new for the first several hours of the game. It certainly looks and sounds like new, and then it faithfully translates the mechanics of the original. Those low-res supreme soundscapes and rendered environments are now in full HD, with thick lines outlining each character to distinguish them from the rest of the colorful world. There are a couple new visual flourishes I immediately noticed, like enemies flying and cracking the “screen” of the game like in the Super Smash Bros. franchise. On top of that, a couple new abilities like Sand and Mech have been added, being two of the most mechanically rich powers we’ve seen so far. Despite bringing in the same levels as before, HAL gives the player a couple brand-new ways to traverse them. On top of that, its minigame collection is the most expansive in Kirby history, even if several of them are repeats — though it’s nice to see them in HD too. All of them are collected in a tributing theme park called Magoland, named for the new player character of this remake, Magolor. Oh, yeah, that’s the newest part of this remake.
Let’s do a ‘lil lore recap. The premise of this game is that Kirby and his friends are helping out an interdimensional traveler named Magolor who crash-landed on their planet. You collect the broken parts of his ship and travel with him, but in the end, the traveler is cast out between dimensions. Magolor lore aside, “Deluxe” brings the epilogue of this character’s story with a fascinating twist on typical Kirby mechanics. Kirby’s arsenal has always been built to be able to avoid any obstacle if needed through hovering and able to barrel through any enemy for cathartic satisfaction, all in an effort to keep the games accessible for all ages. In the game’s new epilogue, Magolor is brought to square one — he is as weak as possible and barely able to keep himself in the air. As you navigate remixed and darkly reskinned game levels, your attacks need multiple hits to beat even the cannon fodder, forcing a smarter playstyle until you’re able to upgrade Magolor’s abilities. As time passes, you’re able to start from your character being much weaker than the game’s other protagonists to being a much more powerful version, giving a sense of well-needed growth reminiscent of the Ability Evolution system from “Forgotten Land.”
This addition alone justifies the remaking of this game for me. HAL Labs returned to “Dreamland” again because they could take the series’ 2D gameplay even further, just like my favorite game “Super Star Ultra” did for “Kirby Super Star.” As I played through levels I had beaten just months before on the Wii U, it began to feel repetitive until I started to see how intricately this beautiful game was put together at its inception, how much work went into polishing it for the remake. I saw the series’ core beat-em-up puzzle gameplay loop varied on but never fundamentally changed throughout its history. I saw Kirby as both Camus’ Sisyphus and the pink boulder being pushed, content to revel in the evolving-yet-unvarying absurd nature of its premise. Above all, however, I saw what being on the Switch could do for this game. My sister and I blasted through several of the first levels, first downloading it to play in our AirBnB on Spring Break. I took it home and then on a bus to East Lansing to play some of the final levels with my friends. We even set up the Switch at the Arts desk to play after production. Like I said: Above all, I’ve always loved sharing my friend Kirby with the rest of my friends.
Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.