Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 401: Kirby, Pt. 1

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Stuart Gipp, and Henry Gilbert join forces with patron Andrew Olivera to handle a topic request: The Kirby games. It's kind of a big topic! Unlike Kirby, you could say we bit off more than we could chew... swallow... whatever.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, we enhance our curb appeal. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode. Oh, I forgot to look it up again. I always do that. Episode 400 some odd. I am Jeremy Parrish, and here, 400 episodes later, I'm still talking about old video games and have other people to help me with this noble endeavorate, this lifelong pursuit. of passion. And in fact, this episode, someone was so passionate and noble about this topic that they said, hey, I'm going to give you money to talk about some really good video games.

And we said, okay. So please, patron who has made this request for this episode, please introduce yourself and let us know, what are we talking about and why? I'm Andrew Olivera and we're talking about Kirby, specifically the platformers. And why? Why would we talk about such a thing? Well, because you guys served around to Wario for a second time before we even coming to Kirby was my main impetus for this. Oh, we've done three now. You just haven't heard the Wario Land 4 episode. Oh, okay. So that just makes it even worse. But it's true. We've done some deep dives into a lot of Nintendo franchises, out of bias, because we love Nintendo games.

games and hate everything else. That's what I hear on the internet anyway. And here to share in my bias, we have the biggest Nintendo fanboy of them all from the UK, a man who hates, just absolutely hates anything that is not by Nintendo. It's true. I do. When I think about any game that's not made by Nintendo, especially like Alex kid. I'm physically sick. All right. And who are you vomiting over there in the UK? I'm Stuart Chip and I love Kirby because when I look at Kirby, it's like looking into a mirror. It's the amazing mirror, as a matter of fact. Oh, yeah, there it is.

But we're not talking about that one. It's too far in the future. Also, here in the studio with me, my God, it feels good to say that after a year and a half. Wow. Although it's not really a studio. It's a hotel room. But we take what we can get in these unprecedented times.

Cue the sad guitar music. But hey, it's Henry Gilbert right back at you. Damn. All right. Nice. So, yes. Now that's a reference. That is a reference. And there's four of us here. We are all lovable puff balls. We should all be like floating around recreating the amazing mirror. But we're not. We are not getting to the amazing mirror. Because as Andrew sort of obliquely alluded to, when we've been going back and talking about franchises, we haven't just been doing like, hey, here's a franchise. Let's talk about it for 80 minutes and try to cover everything in about, you know, three or four minutes per entry per topic.

because Wikia exists now, and we don't want to just do that. So we're going more in depth, and the original request for this was to talk about Kirby games, and I said, no, that's too much. And I said, well, why don't we talk about Kirby Platformers? And I said, you know, I still think that's too much. There's a lot to say about these games. So let's slow it down, throttle back, start at the beginning with Kirby's Dreamland and see where we go from here.

So my hunch is that we might make it up to Kirby 64, the Crystal Stars. That's as far as the notes go. Andrew, you've made amazing notes. I feel really embarrassed about the notes that I make because yours are so much better than mine. But yes, we will maybe get to Kirby 64, but we may not get that far because this is a topic that deserves love and discussion. And so we are going to take the time it requires to talk about these games. And there's always an opportunity for us to come.

back and revisit the topic. In fact, that's such a great idea that we're definitely going to do it. So please buckle down, eat a large tomato in a single gulp, and enjoy this conversation about Kirby. All right, so to begin with, we're going to do the usual Retronauts thing. Where did you first discover Kirby and why did you decide? This is great and I love it. We'll start with you, our guest, our requester, Andrew. I discovered it when my father brought it home with a bunch of Game Boy games and two Game Boys.

We were getting to go overseas to visit family in Portugal. and Kirby's Dreamland was one of those games. So this was back when they were kind of brand-newish? Looking at the release dates, Kirby's Dreamland must have just came out like before a trip. So I'm surprised he didn't wait for a sale. Oh, so you were there like on the ground floor kind of at the very beginning. So you've been with Kirby from the start. Seems to be the case, yeah.

Nice. What about you, Henry? Oh, well, I have a bad. history of being prejudiced against little brother games that I had considered. And for a time, I thought of Kirby is that. You know, I actually have a bit of a connection to it with a vacation too of thinking, Tal. My brother, my three years younger brother, he is eight. I'm 11 or 12, and we're going on a trip. I get the 1994 Donkey Kong for the trip to play on the Game Boy. He gets Kirby's Dreamland, too.

And I constantly tell him the trip, like, ah, this game's way better than your game. That's a baby game. But then when I played it a bit and saw the intro with his animal pals and how I thought, like, wow, this is actually kind of cool. But I couldn't admit it to my little brother that I liked his game. So I didn't. It was that game. And then, starting with the spin-offs, I did actually start giving Kirby the time of day.

But it was really the super NES. superstar game that really pulled me in as a fan of Kirby. And, yeah, I, since then, especially once I realized it was for the hardcores, as well as the babies and the little brothers out there, I became a fan. Well, the great thing about video games and liking them is that it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. As it happens, both of you managed to buy two of the absolute best games ever made for the original Game Boy.

So, you know, the ideal situation would have been to, for each of you to have played through your respective game and then said, all right, awesome, that was great, let's trade. That's, you know, looking back in hindsight, that's a strategy. You don't understand the competition between older and younger brother. No, I do. I do. Yeah, it's not how, we weren't doing it then. I understand. Stuart, how about you?

Pretty basic. A friend of mine had an NES and he had Kobe's Adventure. And I would say, I don't think. I think it's too much of a stretch to say it's one of the most impressive 8-bit games, especially from that era. Even looking at it now, I looked at it relatively recently, obviously, sort of for this. And some of the stuff it's doing on the 8-bit is wild. It's really wild ahead of its time. But it's not just a sort of visual showcase.

It's also really fun with all those doom powers and stuff. And there's still not really a whole lot that has that kind of variety. It's sort of similar to something like Mega Man, where you're changing your weapons, I guess. but it's much more immediate, it's much more sort of level by level. It's pretty much great. And then obviously after that, I would play every Kirby game that sort of remotely came my way, mostly via emulators because I never had in a SNAS,

but all the way up to all the three years stuff and the most recent Switch one, which is great, by the way. Did you say as anez? As SNAS, yeah, or Enz. I can never decide which one. Oh, does that upset you when I said? No, no, it's just charming. It's, you know, like calling up.

a truck of lorry. It's just a regional difference. You know, it's a dialect. A lorry load of sneezes. Wow. That's the most foreign concept I've ever heard of in my life. Yeah. So, as for myself, I have to admit, this is one of those games, one of those series that I just totally passed over initially. When Kirby's Dreamland came out, I didn't have a Game Boy. And when I did get a Game Boy player for my Super NES. I was like, I just got to hit the, you know, the franchises I know. I got to catch up on Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Metroid, Zelda. So I did all those things, and that's about where I stopped. And Kirby's Dreamland came out, or Kirby's Adventure came out in 1993. And by that point, I was fully all in on Super NES. So I never even paid attention

to the time of, like gave a Nintendo NES game, time of day after basically I got my Super NES, And then that fall, I rented Mega Man 5 and said, wow, I'm really done with this. No more 8-bit games for me, 16-bit power only because this was dumb and bad. So, yeah, it just never occurred to me to play Kirby's adventure because why would I? I had a super NES. But a few years later, a thing called emulation came along. And it was very interesting to be able to play an NES game badly on my Macintosh. And so I downloaded many ROMs illegally and it did not delete.

them after 24 hours. This was the daring life of crime that I led in college. And I used emulation to just check out games that I'd never seen or heard of or paid attention to. And in addition to revisiting games that I loved, I tried out new things. And when I booted up Kirby's adventure expecting nothing whatsoever, I was kind of floored that there was a game so advanced, So sophisticated and at the same time, so fun, so playable, not just like a tech demo, but a game that married its graphical splendor and great music and advanced gameplay to like good, fun mechanics that was just, you know, interesting and enjoyable. And I said, wow, I'm a foolish fool. I should have been playing NES games all this time. But then it turned out most NES games from that era were not up to the standard of Kirby. So I wasn't such a fool. I just shouldn't have missed Kirby's adventure. Anyway, that's my story. kind of what is Kirby?

What is Kirby? Andrew, what is Kirby? Who is Kirby? Why? Why is Kirby? He is anything, which is what makes him so awesome. I mean, he can be a little guy with legs running around or a little ball rolling around playing golf. He's just

can make him do or be anything. Yeah, that's a pretty good start. But yeah, Kirby is just sort of this all around extremely blank slate character. He is a pink ball with big eyes and tiny little

flipper hands or whatever those are and large feet with shoes. Don't ever take the shoes off. You do not want to see. It's terrifying. But yes, onto this very malleable, like, very malleable character. Like, physically, you can reshape him. And that is

really what the premise of most of the games beyond the first one are about is turning Kirby into other things or giving him new powers. He is very, very like malleable. Yeah, that's just the word. Even like thematically

that's true because he doesn't really exhibit a personality outside of forward momentum. And like the storylines in Kirby games along the lines of Kirby's strawberry shortcake got stolen. Oh, the universe has cleft in twain and a demon has come out and is

possessing and bleeding at you. And Kirby's just obliviously like i guess i'll kill it it reminds me of those cartoons where some a baby is sleepwalking on a construction site and they just you know what i mean like yeah yeah yeah yeah managed to resolve everything that's how i feel about cubby it's just a beautiful a beautiful boy i don't know if he is a boy though i don't know if it's important i believe kirby has masculine pronouns yes i think that's canon okay yeah instruction manuals uh kirby's a he is referred to as a he but i mean yeah i he's just such a smiling little happy

guy just like hi like just the little the noises he makes always the smiles i know sometimes he isn't so happy in some territories but only in america everywhere else he's a lovable happy little fellow yeah he's just like squishy ball he hears about our health care situation and about uh corporations and he's just like no terrible his eyebrows get big and bushy and angry um yeah so kirby was was a character created by Hal Laboratory. And we can talk a little bit about the history of Hal. As the notes say, they were founded in 1980. And they basically at that point were like a person, a full-time employee and a couple of part-timers that included Satoro Uwata, who was a student at the time, I believe, or just out of college. And they made computer games. And for whatever reason, they specialized

in Western computers, American computers, like the TRS 80, I believe. And it was a very unusual choice. I mean, this was kind of around the time Japanese, like, indigenously grown computers were starting to appear in the market, but a lot of computers were imports at the time. And for whatever reason, they kind of focused on this one platform. And that actually turned out to be kind of the key to their future, because Iwada specifically just learned a program for the 6502 processor.

And that just happens to be the basis of the processor that Nintendo used for the NES and then, you know, the 16-bit variant for the Super NES. And he got really good at programming. And when Nintendo first started out, they, you know, launched their family computer, the NES in Japan in 1983 and needed to create a lot of software for it. And they didn't really have a lot of experienced programs. programmers. Most of their software development was done out of house for arcades. So they brought in contractors like Pax Safnika and Hal. And as it happened, Hal had Iwada and he could do all

kinds of crazy things with the 6502. So he became kind of their go-to guy for a lot of stuff that they did. And some of the early, very impressive games that you saw on Famicom like F1 Race, which had, you know, behind the car perspective, kind of like pole position, you know, the road receding into the distance and moving around and so on and so forth. Like, you didn't see anything else like that on home consoles, period, especially not as smoothly and with as much detail as F1 race featured. So Iwada was kind of like, he also adapted that into mock writer, which came to the U.S. He was kind of the secret weapon for Nintendo in the early days.

And that really put Hal on good terms with Nintendo. And anyway, that kind of led to Iwada becoming president of Nintendo up until a passing about, what, five years ago? It feels even longer now. I think it might have been longer. Which, of course, Retronauts listeners will know we learned about in real time on this podcast. But, yeah, I don't want to be the only one talking here.

So please, by all means, someone, talk a little more about Hal and how Kirby came about. Well, I mean, Masahiro Sakurai, who's better known for Smash Brothers nowadays, took on the task of creating, you know, a game essentially for anyone, you know, whether it be people who don't play games or, you know, Kirby was meant to be a game that anyone could just pick up and play. And he did it at the age of 19, which blows me away. I mean, just bypassing universities in Japan, like that, that is not how you get a job, like not at that level, like that it, that is breaking the rules already. like he is like a wounderkeem of development.

I think I came to appreciate Kirby games a lot more after I became, I was a ground-level Smash Brothers fan, love Smash Brothers, me and my friends played it endlessly. And when I really understood Saccharized like entire style as a developer, I then could see that so much clearer in the Kirby games that preceded it that made me like appreciate Kirby like 10 times more than I had before. Like I finally understood what was below the surface of the just the big pink smiling ball. Yeah, an important thing to note about Hal history is that around the time that Kirby came into being, the company had been through some pretty rough times.

Like, they were not dedicated to Nintendo in the early days. They did a lot of partnership with Nintendo, a lot of behind-the-scenes work, eventually started publishing on Nintendo platforms. But, you know, they were kind of a third-party publisher, and they published on other platforms. And some of their games were very good and did fairly well. Like the Lolo series showed up on a few different platforms and got several sequels and recombined remakes and so forth.

but at the same time a lot of their games didn't do so well and if you play some of the late 80s, early 90s how games out there like Hyperzone you really see them just like throwing everything at the wall doing cool tech stuff like Hyperzone is F0 but twice as much F0 which I guess two times zero is still zero

but don't think of this in mathematical terms it's like F0 with the ground beneath you and above you It's very much like Thundercross by Namco or Space Harrier by Sega, but on Super NES, it was very cool, and I don't think anyone bought it. And so the company was pretty much about to go out of business on all these kind of expensive gambles they took. Their biggest gamble that really just destroyed them was a game called Metal Slater Glory, which was the, as it says on the notes, the biggest ROM, like largest cartridge ever released, for the Famicom. And it was a very elaborate graphical adventure with tons of animated cutscenes and just,

it's a beautiful game, amazing music. And I don't think anyone really bought it. And it just about ruined the company. So Nintendo stepped in and said, you know what? We'll buy you. We'll bail you out. But you've got to work with us and you've got to make Iwada president. And that was, I don't know how.

that came into being, like why they decided to go that direction, but they did, and it was a great choice. And Iwada, I think, started making very good decisions and collaborating with the Nintendo, and that's where Kirby comes from, is how basically making a Nintendo first-party published game for Game Boy. That would be a brand-new IP, a new character, and as Andrews said, is something that would appeal to as broad an audience as possible, a game that had lots of interesting mechanics and design choices that would appeal to core gamers, but also had a very cute, likable character and a very low difficulty level that, you know, wouldn't scare off people who were more casual, who just wanted to pick up and play, didn't necessarily do a lot

of gaming, but wanted something cute and fun to play. And Kirby's Dreamland hit on all those points. Well, Kirby as a character, like, demographically, you look at him, and he definitely seems to appeal to, like, a lower bar than even, like, the Mario games did. And it also, I mean, it's crazy to me to think the Nintendo, with how many mascot-driven platforms, I mean, they were the, you know, they were the genre of the day.

But for them to request that from how, when they're like, you know, we don't have enough of more, we need another mascot, we need another, well, not mascot per se, but like a character-driven platformer, to go back to that, well is surprising but it uh i think to the the ease of kirby really was such an appeal because like it's why i looked down on it when i first played it because i was like oh you can just jump forever like oh wow how challenging like you just keep lap in your arms and you know i only

got to get one jump right once in all these other games but uh yeah yeah Kirby i mean as a young kid in the 90s, being a Kirby fan, you know, didn't always play well. Oh, he's pink, you know, why do you like him? You must be gay, you know, so on. Oh, it's so easy, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, Kirby is really what you make of it. If you want to play through the whole game flying, you know, you can do that if you really want. You mean, you could do the same thing with Mario 3 and slap a P-Wing every time. And what do you get out of doing that, you know? Yeah, if you just fly around every level in Kirby, it's actually kind of a boring game. And you actually, like, it's not the instant win ability either.

Like, there are a lot of flying enemies and aerial hazards and things that are targeting Kirby. So you can't just float on past. What it basically does is give you a way to avoid having to make perfect jumps and, you know, kind of float around a little bit. But, you know, it's not that different than Super Mario Bros. 2 and Princess Peach, who could hover. And she was also pink. So, you know, I think there is some coding there. It's like, here is the pink character there, easier. Although Kirby did not initially start out as pink necessarily on Game Boy.

He started out as this kind of vomitous green. And with Kirby, like the whole way through this area, something that makes it so, I guess, kind of compelling for all ages is the fact you can pretty much make your own challenge. Like if you want to play something that's hard as nails, that's going to be in there. Like once you've beaten the game or towards the end or in getting up 100% completion. I mean, even in the first one, there's the extra game, which is really difficult.

So, you know, pass that to those people in the schoolyard and say, yeah, we'll put that in your pipe and smoke it. That's what people say in America, I think. I was even feeling that kind of thing, you know, with Kirby's Epic Yarn, up to that game even, of just like, oh, yeah, if you want this to be hard, it's right there. Like, this is the path. Like, get, try to get all of these, you know, the rubies, I think they were or whatever. But there's always extra challenge in the Kirby games because that, and I mean, that's just right there with Sakurai.

Like he, his, a huge thing for him is pick up and playability, but also if you want to dig even slightly, there is so much hidden beneath that, like, he, he's always about tricking you with that, that simplicity. I think Kirby is a perfect character to represent that, you know, if the, for him or symbolically because Kirby is this character you just fully underestimate and then they, in games

like he has eaten the universe. Like he is this power, he's that powerful secretly. Is he the only Smash Brothers character who hasn't been murdered? Well, like, yeah, actually Hachie kill him. That's one of the coolest I was watching it on my way here because I was like, oh, what's some of my favorite Kirby memories? And one of them is

watching out of the Nintendo store, they would do, you know, fan-wap viewings of all, pretty much every Smash Brothers trailer they'd do it. And so this was reaction footage from it. And it was the one where they revealed, like, the ultimate mode where the hand kills everybody.

Everybody's dead. And then at the very end, the one survivor is Kirby, and you start with Kirby in that mode, and just seeing the audience at the Nintendo store go, Kirby, Kirby, like, that he survived. And that is, that's because he is Sacchari's favorite.

Like, he's his favorite guy, and he makes, he, he, he is a star in Smash Brothers because of that, really. Yeah, I mean, Sakurai, that's how he got his career started. Like, he became a video game design superstar because of Kirby. So, of course, of course he loves Kirby. But, you know, going back to the idea of why would Nintendo need another mascot platform game, you know, in, in 1991, 92, Nintendo didn't really have any unique character-driven IPs for Game Boy, like all the Nintendo's Game Boy type.

were either, you know, things like Mario. I guess Zelda came out in 92, didn't it? Yeah. Metroid, 91. Like, these were hangover, Kid Icarus, you know, all from the NES, Famicom. And other games that Nintendo published first party on Game Boy tended to be either sports games, just sports games, not mascot sports games, just sports games. Or else they tended to be things like Solar Striker that were just, you know, genre games

that didn't really have characters. So, at the time Kirby came around, Nintendo really didn't have sort of a lead character for Game Boy. So I can see why they would have tapped Hal and said, like, you guys have, you know, a lot of technical skill behind you. Like, you really, you know, with Kirby's adventure later, you know, but, but, you know, Metal Slater Glory and Hyperzone, like, they always seem to ring the most out of their, their, um, their work on different Nintendo platforms. Even something like Howl's hole in one golf for Super NES was really unique because the entire golf game took place on a single contiguous course. Like all 18 holes were on.

It was like the Metroidvania of golf. It was all just like a contiguous space. So they did a lot of really interesting things. And at the same time, they had really strong game design instincts. They were good at working with cute characters. You know, they created the Lolo games, which basically were. Not only were they kind of the precedent, the antecedent to Kirby, like those characters show up in the original Kirby game and some of the later sequels,

just like these cute round characters who basically played Sokobon, but, you know, with a twist. So, you know, it makes a lot of sense to me that Nintendo would have said, you're the guys, okay? We need, we need this thing. We need to fill in this gap. For Game Boy, we need Game Boy to have its own iconic hero that's, unique and distinct to the platform. So we need to do this for us. And, you know, Kirby's Dreamline came out in August 92 and absolutely did the trick. Even if it's a, you know, in hindsight,

a pretty short, simple game. And it lacks a lot of the kind of iconic elements that define Kirby now. The foundation was right there from the beginning. You know, I had heard that story of the naming of it for the first time when Awada told it at his famous GDC conference. And just hearing him say, Tinkle, Popo. in front of a whole audience. He knew that would be like a great laugh line, especially, you know, in English to an American audience, that sounds very, very silly that that would be the name.

But I also think of like, you know, Nintendo of America in 91, this is the start of them having to, like, fight the fight against Sonic, who is like, hey, you're in middle school now in Sonic school, and here's this Tinkle-Popo character. Yeah, playgrounds just there would have been a massacre, to be honest. They were just the Sonic. We would have won.

So Sega would have won. Well, I mean, this was how Nintendo countered Sonic. Like, this was the first character platformer they released following the launch of Sonic the Hedgehog. It was Kirby, who's cuter and slower and, you know, not nearly as, like, edgy as Sonic the Hedgehog. He's just a little round guy who blows puffs of air and can float. It really, it just kind of shows Nintendo, like, doing their own thing. but the name Kirby there's a few different theories

about where that name came from did you want to actually say you know on that stage I don't when I was looking into in Alex's great notes I saw the one that's like the most accepted one of like well it was the name they're the lawyer for the universal case

which you know I could definitely see that I could also see those one theory I saw out there that there that there is, you know, the Kirby company vacuum cleaner, which I was always my assumption. Which I do believe is a brand in Japan as well. It's not just one we know about which. And I had heard that Sakurai is catty about it, which I could assume would be the case if you'd say, if you'd say, like, well, we got it from this company that could sue us. So you wouldn't, you wouldn't say that in an interview.

And that does very much fit in with kind of the overall ethos. of naming in Japan around this time, where they were just like, here's someone else's property, let's reference it. I mean, I've been watching Jojo's Bizarre Venture lately, and that is just like... That's all of the killer. It's just like, let's piss off all of the entire music industry. Well, it was a guy, like, this is how, you know, in Lupin, the third, going back to that, like, the guy was like, well, this is just a joke comic.

Like, this, I don't plan for this to be a giant thing. And so I'll just call these characters based on all these things that are also. like cool foreign words. Like, it's the same of like just calling something like Samurai or whatever, like just using Japanese words in American stuff, just because it sounds cool to hear a foreign language word. It's just samurai is not trademarked, whereas Kirby is. Kirby is, yeah, but. But, I mean, I recently watched Megazone 23 or Megazone 23, the anime, which was like the original OAV that really kicked off that whole craze in the late 80s in Japan. And that thing is full of it. Like they're trying to

create the image of Tokyo in the mid to late 80s. And so you have not an upside down McDonald's Arch, you know, McDonald's or whatever. It's McDonald's and Pepsi. There's a character named Dump, who looks exactly like Dump Matsumoto,

the Japanese women's wrestler who was big in the 80s. Like it's people and places and names. Kittyland. They reference Kittyland and all these places in Haredajuku. It's just like, it's just out there. It's like, well, you know, these are parts of the actual world.

Why wouldn't we reference them to create this verisimilitude? So getting kind of a sidebar here. But like, I could see, you know, Kirby being named after something, whether it's a corporation or a person. I don't know that it really matters. But I do think there is like this kind of referential element to it. But in Japan, the series is called Hoshino Kirby or Kirby of the Stars, which never comes through here. I guess we got, you know, Superstar Deluxe and a few things like that. Star enters some of the naming here, but yeah, it's like the,

him writing on a Star and all that is cute and everything, but yeah, so it's also like, you know, that, I mean, that's kind of a hoshino blank. Like, that is a naming convention in Japan, too. Like, there's Star of the Giants was one of the first hit anime television series in Japan in the 60s. So, I mean, that could even just be like a reference of calling it Hoshino Kirby could also be a pun on a certain level. I agree. But, you know, we've talked around Kirby a lot.

Maybe we should actually talk about the games a little bit. I guess that's what we're here for. There is a great question in here. Maybe we should start to lead into this with the question that Andrew raised in the notes. What actually is Kirby? Is he an alien creature, a sentient cream puff, omnipotent being, is he light matter who fights against dark matter? What is everyone's theory? I just like to think of him as the beautiful boy, the definitive article, Kirby the

beautiful boy. When I think about Kirby, that's what pops up on my head. Just there he is, the beautiful boy himself. And that's a word to think of him as. He's beyond traditional like labels, I think. He just, he just is. He comes into a situation, eats everything, kills demons, and walks away and sits down under a tree. And it's like it never happened. It's like none of it ever happened. There are no consequences for him. He's just an entity that just appears when you need him.

Yeah, I think of him as, you know, like cuteness brought to life. Like he's just this squeezable, huggable thing that he, I mean, if I like to think, especially because of all the dark matter storylines that go in later games, I'm a sentient light matter and just being a, thing of the stars like a spirit of the universe you know that's that's fun to consider with him i but i i also think of them as just like the one of my favorite jokes they do with kirby and when they really like crank up the uh the japanese humor in something game especially like a superstar is when they make him into like you know the rice ball uh rice putty you make with the with the mallet

and stuff just folding him into that like i just i love thinking him as that kind of gummies, uh, property. Well, the whole light matter thing is actually seemingly more recent as they've been starting to take Kirby's lore more seriously, if you can even say that. After we got the split timeline theory from Nintendo in Zelda, there's, there's just, it's, you know, all the bets are off. Oh, don't even get me started on that one. But the latest, uh, star allies seems to really contrast.

Kirby is being the positive, you know, lighter friendship, positivity entity, whereas dark matter is the evil darkness and they're just two clashing galactic forces. I love the fact that Kirby has law. It makes me so happy. Like, the best thing about it is you can't, if you want to ignore it, it's just completely invisible. it's like if you're fighting certain bosses and you pours the game you'll see law it's so weird

how they put all this stuff in the background and yet if you actually dig into it it kind of makes sense and ties together some stuff and it's exactly like Dark Souls in every way that was the comparison I did not expect in this episode congratulations

the reference for all ages all purposes all occasions yeah the great thing about Kirby is that you can just play like hey, he's my little pink buddy, and he's fighting the tree that drops the apples and cries. He's doing it again. I love it. I love it.

But if you actually look and read some of the stuff in there and actually stop and pay attention, you're like, wow, he just destroyed God. Like, he just defeated basically Satan and Cthulhu all at the same time. That's good, good job, Kirby. And all because someone woke you up from your nap. Yeah, it gets really dark if you read into it. It's pretty weird. what is his problem with Whispy Woods? Like

Whispy Woods doesn't do anything It's just sitting there and then defending itself Because Kirby starts to beat up on it In every single game I think it's wild I honestly think it's intentional It's not supposed to actually be that aggressive And he cries when you beat him

All he's doing is dropping it at apples And Kirby is just like get out of my way I think although it's not always explicit Pretty much Kirby is friends with everyone and they all get tainted in some way by dark matter or some other force and he's forced to beat them into submission to get dark matter out of him out of his friends so his friends with every creature on the planet in the galaxy except that tree hates it it's tough love he loves he loves he loves wispy woods and that's why he has to hurt wispy woods he sees the

tree and he's just like hang on lads i've just got to come and beat this tree up he saw he saw the Wizard of Oz and he's like, oh, I know, I know what's up with that guy. Nothing good's happening there. My theory on what Kirby is, is the Kirby is whatever he needs to be at the time. He is a spirit for our age. He is a spirit for our age. is a man of the times, he is sometimes a golf ball. He's just what you need him to be. And I think that's a good place to start. Because in Kirby's Dreamland, he is not nearly as sophisticated a little guy as we would come to know. Kirby's Dreamland is actually a pretty simplistic little game, although apparently it's sold 5 million copies. Wow. Yeah, it's blown away by that. That's amazing. Yeah, this one, I can't, I wish I had played it when it was new.

in 92 if I could do it all over again. But the cover also, I will say when he was white on the cover, I mistook it as a boo. Or I was like, oh, they're ripping off booze. Bubble ghost two. Oh, boy. Yeah. So I look down on it in many ways. But now another reason I wish I had played it when it was new in 92 is because to go back to it,

I played it a little bit yesterday. I just miss stealing abilities so much. it feels like there's it feels like a so much a lesser game i could be without that even though it's it's it's good on its own terms but yeah you're just i i feel like it's missing a limb honestly i i really like how breezy it is you can get through the whole thing so quickly and it's quite varied as well with like there's even a sort of schmup boss fight in there and then of course once you've beaten it you've got uh hard mode to do which is actually really difficult I think it's pretty good

It's exactly what I want from a game by game Which is something that's kind of easy to pick up and play And doesn't strain your eyes for too long, basically And also the forgiveness of the jumps is really helpful too Because, you know, in the constraining game boy screen Like you need a little forgiveness Or else you're not going to know where you're jumping some of the time Like I really like that niceness about it too

Yeah, I think it's interesting that Kirby's Dreamland came out right around the same time on Game Boy as Super Mario Land 2. But to me, this feels like much more of a game sort of in the mold of Super Mario Land 1, where it's briefer, breezier, less, you know, not necessarily as challenging. There's not as much stuff to it, but it does have more variety. It has shoot-em-up levels. It just, you know, kind of has that simplicity that I think works really well for Super Mario Land. So Mario Land 2, you know, tried to be much more complex with stages that could scroll in many directions. And it does, like going back to it, it feels like it's kind of just barely holding together. Like it's trying to do too much with Game Boy.

And this doesn't do that. Was Mario Land 2 also made by Hull? Because it has some of the sort of hallmarked set. That's so weird. It has Kirby enemies in it. It should be made by Hull. I mean, you know, Hal was working as a second party for Nintendo at this point. So it makes sense that there was.

probably like some elements being traded back and forth, but no, Mario Land 2 was in Nintendo R&D 1. So it was developed internally at Nintendo. But it wouldn't surprise me that, you know, they're hanging out together at the New Year's parties. Yeah, right? Like, God, everyone else gets to work on Super Famicom and here we are doing this little crappy pea soup green thing that can barely even hold graphics on the screen. What the hell, man, what the hell? How can we get the crap jobs? That's, you know, they get the liquor flowing, you get the opinions flying. So they were like, yeah, let's team up and put, you know, the same little cute guys in our games.

That'll show them. But that, the original one, too, I was happy to see that that did still have, like, the super spicy curry appears in that game as a power up. And I just wanted to say, like, one of them, another big drawn for me that really when I started to get into Kirby was that, like, when the Japanese culture, like leaks through a bit because they were so so careful with the mario series to not let that happen and same same with with zelda like for their their big ones but for for this they they let more of it gets through like there's less watchdogs over it to make sure that it stays universal and like just seeing like a big curry you know not that spicy curry is hardly a japanese uh signifier as well But it's, in America, if you think like, oh, I'm going to have a power up that make somebody's mouth so hot, spices come out, it'd probably just be a pepper.

Yeah, you would not draw curry if you're an American designer. It would be like one one tortilla chip that's just encrusted with ghost pepper powder. That's it. Just a tortilla chip, but not a bowl of curry, no. Yeah, so this game, like I said, it is, you know, more simplistic, I guess it's like everyone has said. and it does feel more like it's kind of in that Marioland vibe, which I guess, you know, if you go with the idea that this was Nintendo's attempt to work with Hal to create a platform franchise that was specific to Game Boy,

that would make sense that they would kind of go back to where Game Boy started and say, let's create our own game kind of in this mold. But, you know, a lot of the hallmark elements of Kirby are here. He can suck in. it's just he can only suck in air. And then he can use that to fly, float, hover, he can spit air out. He can suck up enemies. He can't, you know, absorb their powers, but he can swallow them to destroy them,

or he can spit them out to use them as projectiles. So, you know, it just feels like the things that came along in later Kirby games were really just kind of iterating on the basics here. Like the ideas are all kind of there. I think like Henry said, it does it. a bit of a disservice playing it after any of the other Kirby games because I played adventure first. And when you play this after adventure, it just seems like a bad port that's had content stripped out of it. You know, obviously it's not. If I'd played this first, I would

have loved it. And then I'd played adventure and I would have probably loved adventure even more. But yeah, it's a bit more difficult to go back to this one than any of the other ones, just because it is so formative. But it is fun. And it's my merit, I think. Also, it was fun. I was looking up old commercial. for the original games like How's the Marketed? And I just, I love seeing this one of, I didn't know this until after he passed away, but that Rick Mayall and the funniest guys ever,

I didn't know he was the Nintendo spokesman in the 90s in the UK. So seeing him like with a giant pink Kirby in a commercial, I'm like, holy shit, this is like the funniest thing. It's really wild. It's really wild. getting back to what Jeremy said you know a lot of the the world building is just really there

the music is there the enemies everything bleeds into all of the other Kirby games in a way that a lot of games don't carry that stuff over you know I think it'll get more obvious as we go on but the Kirby

series is really I say respectful it's really kind of it nods to its past constantly like even in the very next game there's a throwback to this game in there, tucked in at the end, like a really direct black and white monochrome stage that recreates some of this one. So it is the very basic sort of building blocks

of something that's going to consistently be iterated on and iterated on, but it's never going to lose this. It's always going to be this in some form, which is quite interesting to get back to. Yeah, you know, not as many series have it all figured out like this other than the copyability, like this has so much of the stuff that will be core to the series from the night, including... There's no animal pals on this one, though.

That's true, yeah. But there is King D-D-D-D who is, you know, one of the best... If Bowser didn't exist, he'd be the top, like, Nintendo villain because he has all these great Bowser properties, but so much even more personality than Bowser, like, because... He's a penguin with a mallet and a robe. It's not to love about that. I just love, yeah, he's so...

And penguins, I love blue anime penguins are so cute. I've seen him anywhere. And this guy's... He's a penguin. He's just like, I'm going to drop you off the edge. Yeah. And I love about D-Dity that he is, like, one of Saccharize's favorites.

Like, it's, uh, one of my favorite things in his very expensive, uh, trailers they do for any character reveal is the D-D-D-D-D-D-D is like the Saccharized troll self. Like, if a troll moment happens in one of those, uh, Smash Brothers trailers, usually it's D-D-D-D-D-D-doing it. The funny, I mean, when they first had King K. Rules trailer and a character you never thought you'd see in the smash games, the guy who pranks you to make you think, ah, it's not really King K. Rule. It's D.D.D.D.D. Who is voiced by Sakhar. Like, he makes the noises for that thing. So I think that is proud. I would bet he loves D.D.D.D.E. even more than Kirby, if I had to guess. all the characters are just so expressive without even saying a word you completely get what's going on in the story completely through pantomime and it's just great yeah the series invokes a lot of manga elements and a lot of you know just kind of like shortcuts and conventions like you know when kirby takes damage his eyes bug out and he gets that little tear in the corner of his eye there's just little things like that that just seem like hey this has a kind of cartoon strip philosophy to it it's very much a playable comic strip see in the pendulum tier on wispy woods every time like it just it's so satisfying i know it's cruel to this poor poor tree who doesn't deserve it and then kirby does like a dance he creates two more of himself

somehow and does a dance in front of this weeping tree as if to rub salt in the wind that maybe maybe we're just seeing what wispy woods is seeing like he took a blow to the head so hard that he's just seeing multiples he's like whoa there's so many of them now then he passes out i don't mean to be crude, but is that dance essentially Kirby's version of teabagging? Like, because that's how it comes across to me. I think if there were two Kirby's, like moving up and down

in rhythm, that would be teabagging. Hey, Nintendo, make it happen. But you get the third one in there. Now that's something else. It's okay. It's family-friendly. It's medically worrying. There's a rumor about Mark Wahlberg that's relevant. Anyway, So, yes, this game does invoke a lot of elements, or not invoke, introduces a lot of elements, but, you know, basically every, every enemy that shows up here beyond Whispy Woods shows up in every Kirby game down the road. Everything from Waddle D and Waddle Do, who are, are they related or are they just happen to be, you know, they share the same first name. Like, I had friends in high school named Jeremy Mason and Jeremy Martin. They weren't related, but they were both named Jeremy.

me, M. So maybe this is the same situation. Well, interesting note on that, the character models are almost identical due to design convenience and saving space. They're just changing the face between Waddle D and Waddle D. And in Kirby 64, getting back to the whole, you know, dark matter taking people over, they make it seem like dark matter is what turns a Waddle D into a Waddle D. which would explain the big eye Ah, okay, yeah, that single eye thing I guess that kind of makes its debut with Waddle Do

and with Cracko, Sir Cracko, not Sir Cracko, just Cracko, the cloud demon that you fight. He hasn't been knighted yet in the canon. Ah, yes. Hasn't visited the Queen. I was going to say Kabula doesn't come back, but I think it did actually come back at one point in one of these games, but it's a mystery, which one?

Of course, for me going back, as someone who owned several of the Lolo games for NES, the battle with Lololo and La Lala is very exciting because it's like, wow, Hal remembered its past for the last time here. It would soon forget, but that is kind of like the cameos here are sort of the last hurrah for pretty much Hal's mainstay franchise through the late 80s, the puzzle games, where you play it as Lolo, the little blue ball. who had to rescue Lala, the Little Green Ball, from an evil king type character who kidnapped her. So, so kind of like, that was definitely, you know, kind of building some of the basics of Kirby there. Yeah, I mean, with Lolo and Lala, I mean, in Kirby, they're called Lolo, Lo, and La Lala, which I, you know, you love to assume that they're the same characters, but the name change is very strange. and then you combine that with the fact that Kirby was originally going to be called Twinkle Popo

like they have a weird naming convention going that I just don't quite understand. So if King Didi had been in the Adventures of Loe he would be called King Didi by this logic. No, that also feels more like gag comic

kind of writing of just yeah that repeated automobiles thing or whatever yeah and I mean even Dreamland was is called Poo-Poo-Poo-Land in Japanese. Yeah, I... Is that like an automatic pier for something, like sleeping or storing or something?

I think it's like the breath sound that he makes, is the Poo-P-P-P-P-P-Oh. I believe that's it. In my home of I have a Poo-Poo-Poo Station washcloth that I got, or like, you know, face handkerchief, I guess, that I'd gotten at Tokyo Station and I used for like,

I put my glasses there, When I take a shower, it's like, okay, put them on my poo-p-poo station thing. Because it's just adorable that it, because it was, it's a tribute to the Japanese rail system, that it, it has the layout of, you know, the JR rail lines of Tokyo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen that in your house. Except it goes from stars to star to star in the, in the Kirbyverse. It's a real great. I also love it because it makes me think like, well, they never sell this branding of Kirby in America because it's poo-poo-poo. like they'd be like,

the children will never stop giggling at it. It's like we can't call it that in English. Tinkle Popo from the land of Pooh-Poo. Yeah, that's asking for trouble. With a purposeful grimace and a terrible smile, join Nikki and Wyatt as we stomp our way through the history of Toho's Dai Kaiju films in Discuss All Monsters. Are you telling me we're going to discuss all monsters? We won't stop until there isn't a monster left to discuss.

Smash that play button like Godzilla and King Kong smash an 18th century Japanese pagoda. Only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Video Deathloop is a podcast where we watch a short video clip on Loop until we just can't take it anymore. Along the way, we'll try our best to make each other laugh and to hold out longer than the other guy. You can jump in on any episode, no need to worry about continuity. Check out Video Death Loop on the Greenlit Podcast Network with new episodes every Friday. All right. So anyway, that was a very solid little game. I did not realize it sold so well, but it definitely got the Nintendo's player's choice, reissue with a little gold seal that's apparently not worth as much, whatever.

But was a strong start for the Kirby series? I think in the UK it was a quite common packing with Game Boy, so that might account maybe for some of it. But I don't know exactly. So in any case, it was successful enough that Nintendo was like, let's do some more of these. And that gave us Kirby's adventure. Kirby made the jump from Game Boy to NES, which is actually very rare.

Mostly what you saw with Nintendo was games starting on NES and then making the jump to Game Boy. But here we have the first sequel or spinoff making the jump over it back to NES and it's kind of, you know, fading days as sort of Nintendo's, it wasn't their final release, but it was definitely their best late release. Kirby is the closer of Nintendo consoles. That's his job. Yeah. We don't talk about Star Tropic's too here. But, yeah, again, I really regret not playing this one at the time, but like in 1993, you know, I've moved on. Like, it's time for new systems. It feels like going backwards to a child with this game. And I really regret because when I played this as it's 3DS classics, I really came to understand just how good it is.

And especially for 1993. Yeah, it basically incorporates every technical trick. you can pull off on NES, besides like first-person shooter, basically. But it has like the spinning tower level. It has huge levels. It has lots of different colors. It has lots of different moving characters. It has so many different animations and appearances for Kirby himself.

That's really the big thing this adds is the copy power. And it's a huge game changer for Kirby. But it's also just technically so impressive that your, your character. again, is so malleable. He's a little pink guy, yes, and he can do all the stuff that he did in the first game, but he can do all this other stuff. And it often has a transformative effect on what he looks like and how he plays. And it's, it really, it just feels like a game where every time you play it, you can do something different and finish a level, a different way, battle enemies a different way. It's really great. I think it's more versatile than most 16-bit games

I can think of, to be honest. The only thing that makes it less impressive is, I guess, it's not as richly colorful as it would be on the SNES or something. But it's faster-paced than the SNES Kirby games were. Yeah. And, you know, in terms of NES games, this is maybe the best-looking action game on ES. It's crazy. It does basically as much as you can do graphically on NES. I think it's this and that game.

What is it called? Summer Carnival 92 RECA, which. looks absolutely insane for an NES game, but I still think this probably takes it. I mean, the ending, sorry for the spoilers, everyone, the ending when you fight the nightmare is just wild. It's absolutely wild in terms of the music is amazing. The whole multiform, like, battle is incredible. The way you're sort of rushing down towards the ground. Oh, it's just great. I love this game. I could gush about it all day. Well, and for what you said at the start to hear me about, you know, Awada's relationship with just

programming on the NES, like him and the rest of his team at HAL, this lets them as a farewell show off everything they've learned from understanding development on it likely better than any other person in the world.

Like, you know. Yeah, HAL was getting the most out of Nintendo's Famicom and NES from the beginning. So it makes sense that here at the end, they would still be the company, the developer, getting the most out of the platform. And, you know, when they were given basically the largest ROMs Nintendo

could produce in order to make it happen, like give someone with talent and skill the space, the luxury with which to the means to really explore their potential, and what you get is something truly incredible. Even then, there's some mentions here in the notes that show the fact that it was still limited by the capacity of NES ROMs at the time. Like if, you know, if someone made a game like Kirby now, they could make it even bigger. But at the time, they had to scrap a bunch of abilities. How many abilities are there in total in the game? I think it's in the notes.

24, 24 plus one extra at the end. So they trimmed, you know, more than a dozen abilities in order to reach the final setup. But, I mean, that's still 25 different powers. That's like three times as many as Mega Man gets in a Mega Man game. That's a lot of powers. That's a lot of things you can do. And some of them, some of them just show up once or twice. Some of them, like, you get it and you can only use it once or twice, and then it's gone.

So, you know, it almost has that, like, you know, the appeal of, like, the Hammer Brothers suit or something from Mario 3 where it's like, oh, I got this cool thing. Well, that was it. But I can't wait to play this again and get that cool thing again, just that one time. Like, it really kind of creates this enticing sensation that makes you want to. keep exploring the game, want to keep revisiting it. And that's a great thing to have in any kind of game, but especially one on NES, where you would think, well, this game's not going to be that big, not going to be that substantial because it's so much more limited than later consoles.

But no, this is a huge game. And it does have just so much you can do. There's multiple paths through stages sometimes. There's the different powers, the different ways you can approach things even without power. Like, do you float around? Do you attack enemies? Do you devour enemies? Do you use enemies as weapons? Like, how do you do it? Kirby just allows you to do so many things.

And it makes level exploration so interesting, too. When I was replaying it last night, I was like, each new enemy I saw, it was a different thing clicked in my head instead of thinking, like, oh, how do you defeat this guy? How do you do that? I was like, odd new power up. Like, it was seeing an enemy that's also power up at the same time is such an interesting. way to go through a platforming stage. It's not how, if you're used to

the classic 2D platformer, it goes against the grain of what you think. You're used to thinking of power up an enemy as separate entities, and here they are together. Yeah, I feel like Nintendo has taken a lot from this series, this concept with

the new Super Mario games, especially the original, where a lot of times in Kirby's adventure, you'll see an enemy that will give you a power you haven't seen before and you have the choice like do I defeat the enemy or do I take the enemy's power and then the question is like what do I do with this

and a lot of stages have like I said multiple paths and what that ultimately breaks down to is there's the path that you can just take you know with any skill set up but then there's another path where you can only use a certain skill to get through or a certain power or certain set of powers to get through a barrier or access a door or something

And if you, you know, think in terms of like, I need to get this power and I need to hang on to it and figure out where I can use it, it adds a lot of kind of strategy to how you explore the levels, how you tackle the enemies and, you know, use them to get around and it opens up more of the game, more pathways for you to find stuff again. And, you know, it's not like you're getting permanent treasures or upgrades for doing that. It's just like you can get more, you know, health. you can get, you know, access to new powers from enemies you can only find on that alternate route or, you know, just play a different path through the game. It's more something you do for the satisfaction of doing it, not because the game is like, you have to do it this way or else you're not getting the true experience. That would be more like the amazing mirror where it was very much about, like, finding the right power,

carrying it through sometimes to a different stage, using it to access, you know, a path that would be inaccessible otherwise. this doesn't go that far. It's just like, you know, here is something you can do. Here is a reward you can experience if you kind of understand what this power is that you've got. If you take the time to explore an experiment and poke around in levels, like what can you find? Well, here you go. You've done something that you wouldn't have done otherwise. Good job. Yeah, this is kind of the beginning of the puzzle element of these games. And they did exactly what they needed to do.

They looked at Kirby's Dreamlander like, this is too short, too linear. we need to do something more and they went whole hog they added the abilities they added puzzle elements they added all kinds of mini games they just threw everything against the wall and it all stuck when you see like that first door at the end in the one of the first stages and if you just play dreamland you might think like well i guess that's about as long as the level should be and then you figure out like no this is not even the end of the first level and wanted to see in your notes too that like this was, I had not heard that before that Sakurai

originally the plan was that it just be a remake of Dreamland and then in a very Sakurai moment that he was like, no, no, no, that's too light for this. We got to, this remake is really a chance to just make an entirely different video game that's like way

deeper. Like, yeah. And also, another thing I, in adventure, we talked about the need, we've not talked about Metanite yet, who is like, another of like the most important characters in Kirby. Like he was Shadow the Hedgehog before there was Shadow the Hedgehog. Like he's the cool Kirby who's like a badass.

They love the fact that when you battle him, there's this unspoken, like, honor system where he gives you a sword and forces you to use it. And it raises, it just immediately raises questions. Like, what is the deal with this? And you never find out ever. it's all there to speculate on I think but like the fact when you defeat Meta Knight his mask comes off and it reveals that he's like a dark colored Kirby

it's like what's going on what's the deal with that you're never going to know it's always going to be a mystery yeah I hope I hope that's lore they never explain we don't want to know like if they can if they give us you know Metanite the prequel series and explain his backstory what does that add to anything nothing nothing it's a terrible idea don't do it well that's what I love the fact they just lay a more

more nonsense on like you've got galacta night as well. He gets cooler every game Metanite does. That's true. Yeah. They do allude a little bit to the whole Metanite stuff in Kirby Star Allies, but I haven't ruined that for you. Which one is Star Allies? Is that the

latest on Switch? Yeah. Is that one a platformer or is it like a battle game? It's a very much a traditional Kirby platformer and I thought it was personally, I thought it was quite underrated. I had a great time with it. Just enormous amount of content. The only problem is

they haven't made any more Kirby games since then, really, apart from small ones. And I want another Kirby, and I'm sad that they didn't announce one. Which is weird, because they average about one a year. Yeah. It's been like four years since you had a proper Kirby now. Yeah, I did an interview with Hal

a few years ago, and they said, basically our plan is to our mission, I guess, is to create a Kirby game every year, but we alternate between the platformers and the more experimental titles. But it feels like all they're doing now are like the little experimental things that will eventually become like bonus modes in some bigger proper game. Did they do part, was part time UFO one of this?

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that should just be a Kirby game. You know, it's, it's crazy. In another world, Nintendo approves that as Kirby's part time UFO or whatever, but. Yeah. Yeah, I guess they haven't really spoken to why there haven't been as many Kirby games lately. Actually, I did play Star Allies. Geez, I totally, like, I reviewed it with my nephew. I'd, like, got paid to review it. I just totally forgot about it. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I hope you gave it a one out of 10 because it only runs at 30 frames per second. Man, like, who could even play a game that only runs at 30 frames per second? It has to be a hundred and 20 at the least. Then again, they did, they did support. I have two eyes and each one of them

sees at 60 frames per seconds, damn it. They did support it with a bunch of DLC, like a loads of extra stuff. as well. New characters and things just throwing in for free. It was a really good game. Oh, man. Yeah, the adventure game too, like the copyability, all that stuff just, it really just pulled me in so much again, just even playing it again last night. And then seeing, you know, some of the first mini games like this, like that also, in the same game that introduces the steel ability, then you have these mini games that tease just the incredible depth of different game types that Kirby can be in and make it work. And it's a little dose of what you'll get in Superstar, which is still my favorite

Kirby game today. But you get a little, including the quick draw, like I just love the, I'm normally not a type of guy who loves a reflex-based game too much because I often lose at him, but there's just so much personality to it. I love the reflex game. Have we got time for me to briefly say that the reblex. make if this game is horrible and you shouldn't play it. Nightmare and Dreamland?

Yeah. Why is Nightmare and Dreamland bad? What does it lose that makes the game good? Well, if I'm beatly honest, it's okay. But basically, as is mentioned in the notes here, that Sakurai or someone drew the maps on paper, so there was a consistency to them, like a coherence to them. That's sort of all gone in Nightmare and Dreamland, so you'll get weird things that don't really make sense, like where there was previously a door.

that was part of the background, like maybe part of a tree or part of a wall or something. There'll just be a random floating door. It's like they didn't understand why things were placed the way they were. Plus, they replaced all the mini games with rubbish ones. So I'm not having that. Anyway, sorry, I just wanted to bitch about that because I always do. I have to, no matter what the occasion, no matter what's going on every day, I bring it up at least once. Well, we can't have the quick draw anymore because quick draw is, you know, gun related.

We need to go to Samurai Kirby with the paper fan. Yeah, and we need to hit bombs at one another using frying pans, because that's completely fine. That's not immutable, to be fair. But with a sword, you still draw your sword quickly, so why not quick draw? Oh, well. Yeah, I never really spent much time with Nightmare and Dreamland, which seems like, based on the name and the fact that it was portable, it was their attempt to say, like, hey, it's Kirby's Adventure, but put back in the portable context of Dreamland where it needs to be. It did have the unlockable mode Meta Nightmare. That was kind of cool, because you could play as Meta Nighter throughout the whole game.

I did enjoy that. I will break it for that. Even the bad Kirby games, at least, at least a seven, at least a seven. Well, as it turns out, Jeremy Parrish for Polygon wrote that Kirby Star Allies is a seven out of ten. Even if it's on the brief and simple side, Star Allies, demonstrates the polish and personality you've come to expect from the series. It's a kid-friendly romp through the franchise's most memorable moments, and the asymmetric gameplay and lively spirit of Kirby's latest journey make it a great way to introduce a new generation of fans to the series. And that was you, not another Jeremy Parrish? As far as I recall, yes. This was 2018, so I was still freelancing at that point. So there we go. I trust that Jeremy Parrish guy. He sounds like a straight shooter.

Did they ever ask you to rank all the Kirby games? You know, I would have gotten there eventually if I still freelanced. I think they really liked those ranking articles because I was just like... They made everyone mad. They were conversation started. They were, yes. They were like a conversation. piece. That's, that's one.

People will be like, hmm, I see this gentleman has ranked new Super Mario Brothers year. It's the finest Super Mario Brothers game of all time. Such a great game. I shall respond. It really is. I shall respond with typical grace. This isn't the podcast for the no, but I

wonder what Kirby game I would put at the top. That's a good question. I'd have to do a lot of research because there's a lot of having. Ranking Huth and Annie. I mean, it's Superstar. That's the one. That's number one. But if you ask me Kirby's Adventure before we move on to Dreamline, too, which actually, that's going to be the last one we're able to talk about this episode if we want to give them all justice. So I guess there's

going to be 16 bits and beyond for the next episode. Well, I think probably just the one note I have here that I find interesting is all the stages, the first letters of each stage spell out Roy G. Biv representing the rainbow, and the color palette matches per stage. And it's That blew me away. I didn't even realize that until I read it. You just blew my mind, actually. When I saw that in the notes, I was like, wait, what? I had no idea.

But you're absolutely right, and it's very cool. Like, it just kind of captures that, like, colorful spirit of Kirby. Like, hey, we even named the world after the rainbow. Well, now they're on a system where you can have actual color. So they probably are just like, yay, color. Yeah, let's theme it to color now, finally. Well, it's actually, that also works really well with the NES's innate limitations and abilities because the NES' color palette is really heavy on blues.

So you've got the blue, indigo, and violet, all of which are kind of in the blue spectrum. So they were able to get a lot of color variety within those stages, even with the NES's palette, just because it has so many shades of blue to work with versus brown or yellow. So that's a fun little fact for you. Do you have a favorite ability from this game? Favorite copyability? Oh, geez. Sleep?

What is sleep in this game? How useful is it, Stuart? It's not at all. You just get to look at Kirby full of sleep and he's cute. That's all. I love him. It's a beautiful boy. Yeah, I think the first time someone gives up a good power in favor of sleep, they're like,

what did I just do? I can't play the game anymore. Kirby's just asleep. I'd go with the mic one is in this one, isn't it? Yes. Yes. No, the microphone Kirby is one of my favorite drawings of Kirby.

It is. So I just him with the little, you know, this little pink ball with headphones on talking into a microphone. Like, that's cool as well. And that's such a great feature of this game is that when you get a new power or any power, when you get any power and you pause and go to the menu screen, it has a little drawing and an explanation of what that power does, which you just did not see in APEC games. Like, APEC games were so obtuse and opaque.

Just like, you did the thing. What does that do? Who knows? I got to say, with the mic, sorry, Jeremy, with the mic ability, as great as it is, it doesn't achieve full greatness until Superstar, wherein the punchline is one of the funniest, like, jokes ever in a game to me.

I love it so much. When you use that mic for the third time and he does a death metal roar, that's amazing. Well, I like it in Kirby's adventure, because if you beat paint roller on your third mic strike, if you deliver

the final blow, as you're jumping in the middle of the screen, you collect the star and finish the stage, and you get infinite mic ability for as long as you're alive. What? Yes, it gets extremely annoying because he's screaming constantly, but

you know, it's an interesting little glitch, but... Like the 2021 version of Kirby, just constantly screaming. I would have to say, I'd have to go with Parasol as my favorite because it does everything that the sword does and it protects you from attacks from above. So it's just a better sword, in my opinion.

And I do love the design of sword, Kirby, though, that he's like Link, but with this nighttime sleepy cap instead. Like a little puff ball at the end of this green hat is pretty great. As for me, it's probably a boring answer, but I really like the UFO ability because it's one of those like Hammer Brothers suit type powers

where you're just like, wow. What did I just do? I'm amazing now. And then it goes away. And it just leaves you wanting more. You want to go back and play that level so you can become UFO Kirby again. So rad. One of my first ever YouTube videos was a video of me getting that on the first level of the game.

Because there's a hidden one on the first level. And all the comments are just like, yeah, under the, you've written it in the notes as well, Andrew. But under the waterfall towards the end, one of the waterfalls is slightly discoltered and it's actually a door. And if you go in there, you can get UFO on stage one. And all the comments are just people going like, what? How? I thought that was kind of cool how it seems to be a secret from an old game that's eluded a lot of people. I love stuff like that.

I did not know that. That's exciting. I want to play the game again now. But I also want to play it again because it might be the best Kirby game. But maybe not. I don't know. Let's talk about Kirby's Dreamland, too, and then wrap up the episode. So, Dreamland 2, Andrew, you want to lead us in and walk us through this one?

Well, this is the first appearance of dark matter, which is pretty interesting. And also the first appearance of his animal friends, Rick the hamster, coo the owl. And I don't know if it's kind or kine, the sunfish. It's probably kind, because I think it's supposed to be Hawaiian. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Keeney like, like pogs. I think doesn't kind mean boy or a kid, child? I don't know.

Okay, well, anyway. Right, right in a little. Yes, he has... Rick the Hamster's the coolest. That's who I like. Like, he's so cool. I like, you know, when Hamtaro came over here, I was like, Yeah, not as cool as Rick.

That's a top Nintendo hamster. And he doesn't talk, even better. Doesn't say him ham ha-ha all the time. But he doesn't do a ham-ham dance, though. That's against him. That's not against him. But, yeah, the anime opening to the game and just seeing their pictures just fly by the screen, that was the moment I had to admit to my brother that it wasn't a baby game

and that I couldn't fully judge my little brother or tease him about it. But, you know, there's always still openings to just say, oh, well, your game sucks. I mean, this is a game where the premise is that an evil spirit has stolen all the rainbows. So it's not really like ultra-hardcore. This is not where you cannot compare to Dark Souls. Sorry. That's not Dark Souls. Dark Souls?

Oh, no, no. Well, this is like the bridging. gap that gets you there. Yeah, I guess if you praise the sun, then you get rainbows. I am the sunfish. You know, the original started out with being directed by Sakurai. This is the first one that's directed by Shinichi Shimomura, who went on to do the third and 64 entries.

So he's sort of setting the precedent here of, okay, let's try and have like a more cohesive story, and dark matter appears in subsequent games as well. But a game, what I like about the animal friends is that it's a game series that already is defined by, you know, they found their gimmick. They already had their gimmick from adventure now, of the copying abilities. That then for their next Game Boy entry, they're like, well, we ought to, look, we are still going to have the copy ability, but this needs some animal pals. Like, this needs another gimmick to go on top of it. Like Kirby, Kirby is always a series and quest of a new gimmick each game. Okay, I didn't realize that Dark Matter is a hidden boss, sort of.

You've got the, like, the true ending. So it does a little bit of like the Sonic the Hedgehog Chaos Emeralds thing here or the inverted castle from Symphony Night, except that was two years later. So this is actually surprised to me because I've never finished this game. You have to collect all the rainbow drops, all seven of them, one for each area. And if you don't get them all, then you get the fake ending where you defeat King DDD and then it keeps raining. But if you get the rainbow drops, then you create a rainbow bridge to the, no, the rainbow sword to fight dark matter with. And you discover DDD was just possessed like Richter Belmont.

Yeah, this is where they really crank up the puzzle aspect, where you need to gather the. right combination of animal friend and power usually and they're not often in the same stage that the rainbow drop is in but you need to somehow put together that you need these abilities and go and try and retrieve the rainbow drop and it really adds a lot more complexity I am not crazy about this one for that reason because for me I mean there are two distinct flavors of Kirby at least they used to be and for me I don't like Kirby to be really kind of smash mouth and kind of knock

about and breezy and fun and it doesn't really matter if you get hit because whatever, you're nearly invincible because you're Kirby, you can hit harder than a traction engine, I don't know. And in this it's more like there are these blocks that you need a certain power to break

and also a certain animal to break. And it's really not there's really no clue as to which ones you need. You kind just have to get them and then go back If it doesn't work, you're like, oh, I guess I'm going to be digging for a bit longer. Unless I missed the clues like an idiot, which is possible because I am an idiot. But, yeah, I'm not too keen on this one.

I think this goes back to what we were saying earlier about how one of the appeals of Kirby is that you can play it in a very straightforward way and you have a good game that's fun. But then if you take the time to dig, you get more. And in this case, if you just play through the game, then you defeat King DDD and you get the quote unquote bad ending, which is still not like, and, you know, Kirby died from his terrible wounds and now Transylvania is cursed forever. It's not that kind of bad ending. It's just like, oh, it's still raining. But then if you do take the time to really poke around and explore and go through all the, you know, the process of finding the secrets, then you get the true

ending. You get to fight the real boss. So I don't know. I, I, to me, that's a good way to kind of meet out this sort of design approach, you know, to give people like a good satisfying game that can be even better if they really dig into the secrets. I think it works, but even without even bearing that in mind, I just don't find it as fun as the old other ones just because it is more, it's slower. It feels more sort of labor. It feels like it's always going to be kind of the same on each level. You're going to find a room that's got a choice of two animal friends that you're going

to find like a mini boss or some sort. If memory serves, there's quite a lot of auto-scrolling in there as well. I'm just not riled about it. Like I said before, a not great Kirby game is still like a seventh. So I still think it's well above average. And it's a good Game Boy game. Just not my favorite compared to the other ones. Well, one interesting thing about this is that it takes away a bunch of the abilities

you gain in Kirby's adventure, a lot of the copy powers, and really whittles it down to looks like seven basic powers. and instead of giving you lots of different skills around those different powers, those different copies, instead it uses the animals to kind of upgrade those by giving you special abilities depending on the animal companion you have with you at the time and the copy power you collect. So I don't know, like it just feels like they were really trying to kind of capture the breadth of Kirby's adventure on a system that,

that just didn't have the capacity for that much. So they had to do some scaling back. And this is kind of what you get is, you know, some design choices that might feel like a step backward. But you just have to keep in mind, like, technologically, this platform that this game was on was just less advanced than the NES. It's insanely impressive, like, technically. I think it was one of the few color games on Super Game Boy as well.

I remember having like a really nice, like, banner and some nice, features for that too. I'm not sure if they did the music for the SNES as well, maybe. I don't think any Game Boy games did that, but they would have given it a custom color palette. I thought they added some SNAS like juice for the music on some games. I thought they did, but maybe not. They may have done. Write in and let us know. Yeah, I don't recall that. But yeah, the color on the Super Game Boy color palette for it was really impressive, I remember, And also just plugging, you know, they carried over to the Game Boy Color as well once you could play it. Like, I think that was another one I returned to once we got a Game Boy Color like three years after the fact, you know.

Whenever my younger brother was not playing Pokemon on it, if it was free, then I plug in an old game. It might be worth noting, even though we're only covering the platformers, that the last time Game Boy players had seen Kirby, there have been, like, at least three spin-off games, Kirby's Pimble Land, Kirby's Block, what is it called, Blockball, and Starstacker, I think there was even a fourth one that I forget. That brick breaker, you know, I never really played a brick breaker until that one, and that's, I still associate Kirby with breakout,

even though there were many, many breakouts before it, but I just love, you know, to do a breakout clone where you can also puff around as Kirby is was such a great, great side thing. Anyway, so final thoughts on Kirby's dream. Anyway, so final thoughts on Kirby's dream 2 before we called an episode and reconvene some time in the future to talk about future

Kirby platformers. I mean, the animals are adorable. I wish I always love whenever they show up again in later games, like at the, when I turned on Dreamland 3 and my Nintendo online account thing, just seeing them at the very start, I was like, yay, it's my good buddies. Yay. There's Rick. I'm looking forward to getting to Dreamland 3 in this podcast.

series. But it won't be this episode because we're at our time limit. We've got another episode coming up that we need to record. Guests coming soon. So let's wind down. We got a few letters from listeners. I don't know if we'll get through all of these. Maybe I'll just read one for now and save the rest for the inevitable mailbag catch-up episode. But this one comes from John Harris, an occasional guest on Retronauts to talk about rogue-like games and who also loves classic games. He says, Kirby thing number one. Here's something I've always admired about Kirby games. They went and threw away the big thing that platformers are supposed to rely on, the surly bonds of Earth. Platformers are about jumping around from ledge to ledge, but Kirby can dang

fly, fall into a pit. Oh no. But wait, he's just floating up and out of it. By the way, how come when Kirby falls off the screen he loses a life? At what point in a bottomless pit does it become deadly? this is this is a question for your priest I think yeah and yet this doesn't destroy the game it almost feels as if the developers are showing off kirby thing number two secret passages all kirby games have a number of well-hidden secrets hidden in ways different from other games the basic atom of the kirby secret is the secret door the place in the background that's actually a door even though it doesn't look like one the moon in one of the areas in kirby's dreamland is a portal to a big secret area There's another place in that game where two background walls have a cunningly placed gap between them that doesn't look like a door, but it is. The first level in Kirby's Adventure has a waterfall near the bottom of the screen with one miscolored tile that leads to a secret room. I checked three different long plays of the game, and all three of them just floated right over it. It was infuriating. He didn't watch your video.

He didn't check mine. I know, thanks for that. John, don't write in again. There are also the secret hal rooms. some of which are really hidden. The only one that appears if you despond a warp star by scrolling it off the screen, which unlocks the scrolling and lets you reach the room. Wow.

Thing number three, if you inhale two or more enemies at once, the resulting shot is stronger than usual. If you inhale two power-granting enemies at once, you get the mixed power, which flips through all the powers and gives you one randomly. But in games up to Superstar, if you wait for the mixed roulette to stop on its own, the power you get is consistent based on the enemies you inhaled. This can be used in some places to guarantee getting a power you might have to travel some distance to get otherwise. See, this game is like bubble-bobble.

There's just all this wild stuff happening beneath the surface that I didn't even know about as many times as I've played it. It definitely is the best Kirby game. But maybe there's a better one. I don't know. I can't believe we forgot to mention Mix. It's such a cute little ability to be able to combine and potentially even get the UFO in a stage where you wouldn't be able to have. it is so neat and you know a little image of kirby in the corner is him with a little like bowtie bartender outfit mixing a martini it's wouldn't see that nowadays you would not nope

nintendo's like no booze in our games only milk he's making soda it's right now root beer root beer got to pour that cola on my grave because i'm the great tomo levine the teetotaler adventure anyway um yeah i think that wraps it up for this episode we've actually talked a lot about just three games and also did a lot of background on Kirby and also talked about Super Mario Brothers We for some reason, Super Mario Brothers You. But Andrew, thank you very much for requesting this episode and getting us started on a, I think, a long-term journey through the Kirby series. Hopefully we'll have you back again someday to talk more about some of these Kirby games

and maybe even someday get to games that are not platformers. Sounds good. So this wraps it up for episode. I looked it up 401 of Retronauts. I was correct when I said 400 some odd. It's the lowest 400 some odd you can get. Anyway, Retronauts, as usual, is a show that ends with plugs. And right now, I will plug the podcast.

If you, like Andrew, would love for us to talk about a topic of your choice and join us for the conversation. We have a limited number of Patreon slots for people who want to support the show at that level. I don't think any are open at the time of this recording, but they come and go. So please keep an eye on patreon.com slash retronauts. You may not be able to get the request topic episode, but you can still support the show. For $3 a month, you get every episode that we publish on Mondays a week early at a high bitrate quality higher than you would get on iTunes or other podcatchers with no advertisements. Just pure talking and opinions, lovable us. For $5 a month, you get all that.

Plus, you also get access to patron exclusive episodes every other Friday, as well as Discord access to talk about games such as Kirby with cool people like us on Discord. We're on there talking about games. That's right. And also every week, end, there is a patron exclusive mini podcast and written column by Diamond Fight. It's been going for more than a year now. So there's a lot of stuff that you have access to if you join Retronauts and subscribe at the $5 a month or better patron level. But if not, that's okay.

This show is also available for free, listening on pretty much any platform of your choice except Spotify because it sucks and is bad. But, you know, we're here for everyone to enjoy our ruminations on classic video games such as Kirby. And there will be further reminiscences and ruminations on Kirby down the road. Anyway, that's the retronaut's pitch. Andrew, what about you? What kind of stuff do do you do? Where can people find you and possibly support you online? Well, I don't do anything really online.

That's probably better that way. Yeah, that's living your best life. I was on a previous episode discussing virtual on. So that's worth checking out. I was also on another podcast discussing virtual on called Padukin. It's a biweekly arcade podcast where they talk about the history and development.

of different arcade games and it's done by people that own and operate the machines so it's an interesting take and good listen if you're interested in that kind of stuff. All right. That's about it. Stuart yourself. Okay, I do loads of things

so I'll keep this as brief as I possibly can. Okay, right, podcasts. Okay, just start a new podcast with my friend Global Atula called the Dillcast where we read and review every single Dill book comment from beginning to end. It's horrible. all. We're mostly just using to

think about or make fun of Scott Adams. Okay, another podcast, Us, Halvania, which is about me and Andy Hamilton, making up a terrible take about a video game, tweeting the take and laughing at the responses that we get. Third podcast, AnimaniChat with Luke Fletcher, where we watch and review every single episode of Animaniacs.

And the secret twist is, I hate Animaniacs, and when I watch it, I want to die. Do you have any podcasts about things you like, Stuart? No, that's absurd. Why would I ever? do that. Okay, just curious. Maybe I'll start one at some point, but probably not.

Okay, and I'm also doing stuff with retronauts. You might hear me in the near future talking about video games on there. I write stuff for Nintendo Life and RetroGerman magazine sometimes. And who knows what? I'm very busy. And you can find me on

Twitter at Stupacabra, but I don't recommend it as my tweets of that. Thank you. And finally, Henry. Hey, I'm Henry Gilbert. Follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. I have many podcasts, one with two, with the co-host of Retronauts Bob Mackie, Talking Simpsons, where we go through the entire history of the Simpsons, one episode at a time.

We are into deep season 12 at this point, and also doing season two at the same time because we didn't do it good enough the first time. And also we do the What a Cartoon podcast, where we cover animated series, one episode at a time for a different series. We've had Jeremy on for G.I. Joe and Max, for instance, or the Max.

Did I do bubblegum crisis also? And bubblegum crisis, yeah. So many episodes. And listeners can check all this out. We are Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon on wherever you find podcasts. And, of course, we're Patreon-supported as well at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons

with tons of extras and early access to all those podcasts. And also, you know, Stuart, if you ever do a wrestling-focused episode of Retronauts, you know, you know where to find me, okay? Oh, I will. I will. I will. Definitely. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, doing Retronauts, doing stuff with limited run games, doing my YouTube journey through Game Boy and NES and Super NES and Sega stuff, maybe even Super Casset Vision? I don't know. Maybe someday. It's a lot of stuff that I do. I'm online. I probably should be less online. But here I am just permanently online for 25 years now. It's not ending any time soon, so you might as well get used to it. Anyway, that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts.

Thanks again, Andrew, for recommending it. And I think it's time for us to break now so we can all go tinkle-pop-po-po. Thank you. Thank you.