Kirby over the years

Since sometimes I feel like just about the only person who actually noticed this, here's a blog post about how Kirby -- yes, the round pink Nintendo character -- has had design changes over the years.  Mostly focusing on the box/instruction manual art, but also going into the in-game sprites a bit.

Anyway... the very first Kirby game, Kirby's Dream Land, came out in 1992.  This was a Game Boy game, so of course the game itself had four shades of green and that's it... the box art, on the other hand, depicted Kirby as being white.  And with white feet, even.

On the left, an advertisement for some Japanese kids' bath toy.  On the right, a video game box.

...or at least, outside of Japan it did.  In Japan, Kirby had the pink-with-red-feet coloration he's known for today.  Of course, the Japanese box art wasn't completely free of errors -- while the American box art displayed Kirby's two black "cheek marks" prominently, the Japanese box art left them out entirely!  Whoops.  Chances are this was a result of the Dream Land sprites not really showing the marks all that clearly (probably due to how small they had to be for the Game Boy), along the same lines as the reason why Kirby ended up solid white on the American box -- all they had to go off of was the in-game sprites so they had to guess.

This was the Kirby that inspired my creation of the K'hyurbhi species waaaay back when I was in 3rd grade -- white body, two black lines on the cheeks, and red feet (I believe I had seen the Kirby's Adventure box art at the time and interpreted it as "white with pink shading" rather than "really pale pink," so I knew Kirby's feet were supposed to be red.)  While Kirby's design changed, the "two black lines" cheek markings continued to be a part of my K'hyurbhi design all the way up through 2015 when I finally decided that they were whiskers and started drawing them that way.  (Meanwhile, basically everything else Kirby-like about the K'hyurbhi design, minus the round body shape, had either been changed or made less-Kirby-like by Kirby's own design changes over the years. XD)

Yep, no sign of cheek markings on these Kirbys.  Whoops.

 Colors aside, the American box art is pretty much a perfect representation of early-'90s Kirby design.  His arms are more pointed toward the end, giving them a flipper-like appearance; his feet aren't especially large compared to his body (even when he's not inflated to fly like he is on the Kirby's Dream Land box), his eyes are also relatively small compared to the modern design, and he has two black lines on his cheeks rather than the "blush marks" that would later replace them.

A little less white this time.

The box art for Kirby's Adventure (released in 1993) fixed the color issues but kept the overall design the same.  Interestingly, early-'90s Kirby was often depicted as this "really pale pink, almost white" color shown here rather than the current "high-saturation solid neon pink."  I wouldn't be surprised if Pokémon was at least somewhat responsible for the change, considering that the Jigglypuff species also has that "really pale, sometimes almost white, shade of pink" thing going on.  Heck, the change over to "neon pink" even happened in the mid/late-'90s, right around the time Pokémon was getting started.

Oddly, the Kirby's Adventure sprites seem to "predict" two changes that would later come around to Kirby's sprites -- first, the change from black cheek-markings to red ones, and later, the change of his red feet to this sort of dark magenta thing.  I'm pretty sure the feet being pink rather than red here is due to palette limitations (his mouth, pretty much always depicted as red even today, is also pink and his tongue is the same pale pink as his body), but the cheek-markings being reddish/pinkish rather than black might have been an intentional change.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that was an intentional change, because not much later...

Kirby and the cap-less mushroom are making the same face here.

...Kirby's Pinball Land, released later on in 1993, depicted Kirby with reddish cheek-markings.  And on top of that, they drew the markings as vertical lines (and there were three of them) rather than the two horizontal lines that Kirby had always had previously.  His color scheme is still the "pale pink, almost white" here, but that's about to change too, and it'll make only one more reappearance.

No Kirby games were released in 1994, but the next year there were a lot of them, with both the Game Boy and Super Nintendo getting a game or two each.  Rather than new side-scrolling games like the first two, though, the first batch were spinoffs like Pinball Land.

...is that broom-wielding potato sweeping Kirby into the hole?

First, there was Kirby Golf.  Or actually "Kirby's Dream Course."  I think it went by the name "Kirby Bowl" at some point, too -- unless that was a later game that had a name-change and I'm getting them mixed up, anyway.  But anyway, Kirby's color scheme is now more like the Kirby's Adventure title screen (minus  the weird pink mouth and feet), and the triple vertical red cheek-marks return.  1995 marks the end of "Early '90s Kirby" and the beginning of the "Mid-'90s Kirby" design.

Dedede gives a thumbs-up to awkwardly standing under a rain of blobs.

Kirby's Avalanche had a similar Kirby to the one on the box for Kirby's Dream Course.  The blinding neon pink of the later '90s has not yet arrived on the box art, though in-game is another matter...

Okay, he's not as bright a pink as the modern Kirby design quite yet, but he's definitely getting closer to that.  Interestingly, the SNES-era games (well, most of them; Dream Land 3 was very strange in a lot of ways so of course it's the odd one out) almost give Kirby a purplish tinge to his pink, rather than the more reddish hot pink of later games.

Another odd thing I'm just now noticing is that Kirby's sprites in Kirby's Avalanche (and presumably most if not all of the other SNES-era games) show his cheek markings as something closer to the solid "blush stickers" of the later designs, rather than the three vertical lines always shown on the box and in the instruction manual.  Another "prediction" or just the sprites being too small to show three tiny little lines so close together? Yeah, okay, I'm guessing it's the latter.

The spark blob thing isn't supposed to have eyeballs hanging off of it, is it...?

May of 1995 saw the release of the second in the "Kirby's Dream Land series," though really the first game is pretty far removed from the rest of the "series" considering that Kirby couldn't copy powers yet and Dark Matter wasn't involved at all (while he's been the villain of every other game titled Kirby's Dream Land, including Kirby 64 which had the same title in Japan as the "Dream Land" games despite having a different one in the US.)

Anyway, this box art is probably the definitive point where "Early '90s Kirby" changes over to "Mid-'90s Kirby" -- his eyes have gotten bigger, the pinkness is more pronounced, and his cheeks have three vertical red lines on them.

The last game where Dedededede was actually the main villain.  I think.

1996 was also a Kirbyful year, with the spinoff Breakout-type game Kirby's Block Ball making an appearance on the Game Boy and also...

...okay, some of them are just minigames, but close enough.

...Kirby Super Star, which was easily the best of the 1990s Kirby games and to this day remains one of the greatest games in the series.  Both of these games use the "Mid-'90s Kirby" design for their box and instruction manual art.

 The game also puts more effort into making the design consistent between the in-game sprites and the box/manual images -- whenever Kirby is shown big enough on screen for it, three distinct reddish cheek-markings are drawn.  This makes me guess that the "blush marks" on Kirby's cheeks in previous games were just the result of the three lines being "scrunched" by sprite size restrictions, as the same thing happens with the smaller-sized sprites in this one.

1997 also had two Kirby games (well, three in Japan, but one was just the SNES version of a Game Boy game we also got over here) -- once again a "regular" Kirby game and a "spinoff/puzzle" one, and once again with the spinoff coming out in the spring and the regular game in the fall.

Kirby's Star Stacker is one of the few Kirby games I've never actually played, so there's not a whole lot for me to say about it.  Kirby definitely still has his "mid-'90s Kirby" design here, though, with the lower-saturation pink and three vertical red cheek-marking lines.

Was Whispy Woods in this game? I... actually can't remember.  He probably was.

Also released this year was Kirby's Dream Land 3, which can be seen as either a strange step back from the level of Kirby Super Star or an awkward stumbling sideways step from Kirby's Dream Land 2.  I'm still not entirely sure what was up with this one -- it's a very odd game compared to the entire rest of the series in a lot of ways.  It wasn't a bad game by any means, but the thought that it came out a year after Super Star rather than, say, a year earlier is just bizarre to me looking back now.

Speaking of its weirdness... it's not really noticeable on the box.  You'd never guess this was such an oddball game in the Kirby series by the box art, which looks very much Kirby-ish (specifically, very much like Kirby's Dream Land 2, all the way down to the "Mid-'90s Kirby" design and presence of every single one of Kirby's friends from that game... plus a cat and little green bird that showed up here and were never seen again.)

Kirby's brothas from anotha mutha: Rick the hamster, Kine the fish, Coo the owl, Chuchu the
tentacle blob monster, Gooey the Dark Matter blob... the big cat, and... the other bird.

Even the title screen isn't especially odd, use of "blush marks" rather than the three lines aside.  But the pastel pink of Kirby's body here is definitely a hint at one of the oddities of this game...

Is he whiter in this game so Gooey's blackness stands out more?

...Kirby's color scheme has randomly reverted to "early '90s American box art" pale, almost-white pink! Why, I do not know, but for some reason Kirby is paler in this game than in any other color-graphics game in the series.  Everything from Kirby himself to the bosses to the scenery around them also has this really odd fuzzy pastel crayon-ish look to it, which is not present in any other game in the series before or after.

Okay, enough about how weird Dream Land 3 was, on to 1998!...

*cricket chirps*

Okay, apparently there were no Kirby games released in 1998.  How about 1999, then!?...

*cricket chirps louder*

...yeah, the late '90s were a period of Kirby drought following the constant stream of one or two Kirby games per year that made up the mid-'90s.  Kirby did make an appearance in Super Smash Bros. in 1999, but considering that Super Smash Bros. is not a Kirby game (or a Mario game, or a Pokémon game, or... you get the idea) I'm not going to mention it any further here.

It wouldn't be until midway through the year 2000 that another Kirby game would be released...

Kirby's awkward 3D teenage years.

 ...and that game was Kirby 64, which was (like Dream Land 3) kind of an oddball when looked at alongside the rest of the series.  Rather than having Kirby's non-round buddies of various species tagging along, the game gave the option of combining two different abilities to make... awkward fusions of the two that sometimes kinda worked.  It also randomly renamed Ado from Kirby's Dream Land 3, though I suppose you could say "Adeline" is the character's full name and she(?) goes by "Ado" for short.  Counting them as two entirely separate characters is absurd though, considering that they look pretty much the same, act pretty much the same, and even have similar names.

But anyway, Kirby 64 is the "awkward first steps into 3D" title for the Kirby series, much like Super Mario 64 (with its Chinese bootleg plastic toy Bowser, humongous Goombas, and other oddities) was for the Mario series and every 3D-graphics'ed Pokémon game prior to X and Y was for the Pokémon series.  Kirby's design has now changed over to "2000s-era Kirby," though at the time this game (and Super Smash Bros.) was released a lot of people -- such as me -- figured the look of the new Kirby was just the result of it being difficult to replicate 2D Kirby in a clunky early 3D model.  As it turns out, the rounder arms (vs. the original flipper-like pointed ones) and pink blush marks (vs. lines) were here to stay at this point.

Look, obnoxious internet fandom! There's no angry eyes on this one! >_<

...or are they?? Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, released in 2001, suddenly returned to the "mid-'90s Kirby" design, and fans of said Kirby design breathed a collective sigh of relief -- the huge eyes, blush marks, and awkward spherical hands of 3D Kirby were just an "everything looks kinda bad in 3D before they get some practice and work the kinks out" issue after all...

Damn, Kirby, you really gained some weight.  And height...

...and then the Kirby anime happened, shattering all our hopes and dreams forever.

(Okay, I'm mostly joking there.  Though I really did not like it at all when I was first exposed, the Kirby anime wasn't really that bad -- though to this day I am not fond of how they took Kirby and changed him from "vaguely-aged young person (young adult or older kid?) who's perfectly capable of forming complete sentences" to "mute and/or incoherently babbling baby" just for the sake of... cuteness, I guess?  It's fine if that's the direction the anime wanted to go with Kirby -- that's an alternate-universe kind of thing and it works there -- but the way it seems to have bled over into the games' universe now annoys me.  Kinda the same annoyance as the anime Pikachu voice showing up in the newer Pokémon games -- the two are two separate things and should be kept separate, barring occasional minor references.)

Anyway, the next Kirby game to be released was Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land in 2002, which was a remake of Kirby's Adventure using semi-Kirby Super Star style graphics.  It also had its box art designed by the All-Time Master of Inaccurately Depicting Games.

This cover would be so much more fitting if it was Kirby Super Star's"Revenge of Meta Knight" released as its own individual game...

Looking at this you'd think Meta Knight had some huge role in the game.  Well, okay, he's slightly more notable than the other end-of-level bosses due to appearing partway through levels to give you candy or sic his knights on you, but the game doesn't really revolve around him.  Also, looking at this you'd think Kirby's Fighter ability from Kirby Super Star was in the game... it's not.  The game is a remake of Kirby's Adventure which didn't have that ability.  Yes, they reused the red Fighter headband for the Throw ability in this one, but you cannot do a flying kick with the Throw ability!  That's not the worst of it, though...

...I can't actually find a picture of it, unfortunately, but I have very clear memories of noticing that they had randomly stuck characters from the Kirby anime on the box of this game.  Y'know, characters that literally do not exist in the game, or in any Kirby game.  I think it was Tiff/Tuff and Escargoon if I'm remembering right, and they were on the side or the top of the box (I had originally thought it was the back, but the back only shows Kirby in several ability hats so that wasn't it after all.)

Somewhat depressingly, much of the Kirby fandom misses all of the actual things wrong with this game's box and instead complains that "oh no, they gave Kirby angry eyes in America!"... as if angry eyes were not a standard part of Kirby's facial expression range that's perfectly normal for the "leaping into battle" poses that Kirby is often in on box art.  Seriously, the "durr why is American Kirby so angry" crowd annoys the heck out of me.  Kirby is not the Burger King, with his face frozen in a permanent goofy grin no matter the situation.  It's like "box art angry eyes" have become the Comic Sans/crocs/Nickelback of the Kirby fandom, that random little thing that's not actually so horrifically bad (or at the very least, not deserving such vocal outpourings of hate from so many morons... and worse, some otherwise-intelligent people who got pulled into the rushing dumbflow by accident and weren't able to escape before they were infected by the dumb) but gets hated on incessantly by those who don't have enough thought in their head to form their own opinions on things rather than just absorbing from the hivemind.

Oh, and Kirby's design on the box art here is full-on "2000s Kirby" now, going directly from the anime.  Compared to "Mid-'90s Kirby," he's a brighter pink, his arms are more rounded, his eyes have a visible blue hue to them and are much larger than before, his feet are also bigger, and his cheek markings have been replaced with oval pink "blush stickers."

While Kirby games didn't quite go back to the "two or three per year" pattern of the '90s at this point, the drought of 1998 and 1999 was replaced with a trickle -- one Kirby game per year, generally, but sometimes just a spinoff puzzle/ball/racing game or remake.

Angrily flying into Gamecubes everywhere.

The first of these spinoff ball/puzzle/racing games was Kirby Air Ride, which is the reason for "racing" being listed among the other standard Kirby spinoff genres.  This was Kirby's first and only Gamecube game, with the other one ending up changing into a Wii game which eventually ended up released as Kirby's Return to Dream Land many many years later.  It's also very much riding off of the Kirby anime, with the same "2000s Kirby" design featured in it and even the whole "individualized Warp Stars ridden by different characters" thing.  I never actually played Air Ride, mostly due to not having a Gamecube, but I have heard it was actually pretty good.  Maybe I'll track it down at some point, since I'd be able to play it on the Wii.

Or, as someone on Deviantart once described the behavior of Kirby's split-bodies
in this game... "Kirby and the Amazing Morons." XD

2004 brought in another new Kirby game, Kirby and the Amazing Mirror.  This one was actually a new Kirby game rather than a remake or spinoff, and it was actually 2D rather than awkward 3D, though Kirby's design is still pretty much the same as the 2000s-era awkward-3D version.  I notice they did draw Kirby's hands a little closer to the old-school "flipper" style rather than the recent "odd spheres that shouldn't be able to hold onto anything" version, though.  Funnily enough, it seems like they made some effort in this game to make it clear that the Kirby game and anime universes were not the same -- Meta Knight's sword is given a name here for the first time outside the anime, and it's not the same one it has in the anime!

As far as in-game graphics go, everything's pretty similar to Nightmare in Dream Land, which can be said for pretty much all of the GBA and DS Kirby games.

I think this "painted" look works better for Kirby than
the yarn and clay things they tried later on.

2005 was a spinoff "ball game" year.  I never actually played Canvas Curse, so I can't say much here, but the design of Kirby used seems to be very much the "2000s-era" version going by the box art... though his shade of pink is closer to "Mid-'90s Kirby."  The mid-2000s were Kirby's "European versions of games have awkward re-titles" years, as this one being called POWER PAINTBRUSH over there makes clear.

Of course he's angry, those mice want to steal his cake.

Next year we got Kirby: Squeak Squad, where mouse thieves showed up and apparently so did a monster that Dedede kept in a chest in his castle that may or may not have been a fragment of Dark Matter (I'm not 100% sure as I haven't actually played this one, only read about it.)  If so, then this is the last game that had a real appearance of Dark Matter.  This game makes Kirby's feet awkwardly huge and pointy on the end, which I am now noticing is a design change also present on Amazing Mirror's box art -- I guess you could call this bigger-pointier-feet version "Mid-2000s Kirby," though this variation of the design didn't last too long and wasn't really consistently used (the anime sometimes gives him the "huge pointy feet" thing too, for example, but not always, and most of the early-2000s games don't.)

It's called MOUSE ATTACK in Europe.

And it also introduced Kirby's most poorly-named ability, "Animal."

Grr! Rar! Me good at digging and sniffing butts.
Not so good at picking name for dog-based power.

As if Kirby were a plant, or a fungus, or a robot, or a single-celled organism, or some sort of ghost-being in his normal state, and only when absorbing the powers of a big fluffy puppy dog does he become an animal.  Why not "Dog Kirby?" "Digger Kirby," since the ability revolves around claws and digging? "Claw Kirby?"  Heck, even "Beast Kirby" might work since that's at least more specific than "Animal."  Anything -- anything -- would be better than calling it frickin' Animal Kirby.  That's like if Kirby got an ability called "Pink" which gave him the power to attack with flowers, some of which were pink -- shouldn't it be called Flower or Bloom or Petal or something? No, it's PINK KIRBY!  Ugh. >_<

After 2006, the second Kirby Drought began.  No Kirby games in 2007.  2008 brought on a remake, Kirby Super Star Ultra, which also added some extra stuff in (to the game that already had the most content of any Kirby game ever made, which is pretty impressive.)  2008 also brought on the "late-2000s Kirby" design...

Kirby developing a mild case of pinkfoot disease.

As seen above, Kirby's eyes are now even bigger than before (though not by a whole lot as the 2000s-era Kirby design had already embiggened them most of the way), his feet are now a magenta-ish sort of color rather than being fully red like before, and his arms -- after briefly returning to something closer to their original flipper style in the mid-2000s -- are once again almost perfectly spherical nubs that really shouldn't be physically capable of grasping anything.


After Super Star Ultra, another Kirby game wouldn't come along until 2010 (as I said before, pretty much "the second Kirby Drought"), and that was an awkward spinoffish thing titled Epic Yarn which randomly made everything out of yarn.  I guess the Kirby take on the Paper Mario series' "everything looks like paper" art style.  Yeah, it was weird.  Apparently Kirby didn't even have his usual inhaling/absorbing abilities in that game, which is kind of puzzling to me considering they missed an opportunity to have yarn-Kirby inhale enemies and then have said enemy's yarn unravel itself and then reconstitute as the ability hat on Kirby's head.  Anyway, not going to put a picture of that one up since it's an intentional departure from standard Kirby design rather than a gradual over-time change like what I'm trying to go over here.

Kirby's pinkfoot disease has become quite severe here.

2011 ended the Kirby Drought, with two games being released in the same year for the first time in a long time.  The first of these was Kirby: Mass Attack, where Kirby was split into a ton of little Kirbys that couldn't use his full abilities, but could swarm all over enemies like a bunch of like Kirbugs to defeat them.  Like Super Star Ultra, Kirby's design here was "late 2000s Kirby" with magenta feet rather than the usual red.  Oddly, I'm only just now noticing another feature that was introduced with Late 2000s Kirby -- the lighter blue "star" highlight in his eyes, which is also present on the Super Star Ultra box art.

And now Kirby has been cured of pinkfoot.

In 2011 the Wii got its first real Kirby game, Kirby's Return to Dream Land.  Which is a strange name when you think about it, because Dream Land is the region of the planet Popstar where Kirby lives.  So it wouldn't be so much a "return" since he's... kinda been there the whole time.

Alternate title: Return to Red Feet, as this game moves away from the "magenta/almost-purplish" color of the previous few games and brings Kirby's feet back to their original red hue.  The lighter blue highlight of Late 2000s Kirby is still present, but doesn't seem to be star-shaped as far as I can tell.  So this return to red feet is the "Early 2010s Kirby" design, I guess?

2012 saw only one Kirby game, Kirby's Dream Collection, which was (as the title may suggest) just a collection of older Kirby games in a single-Wii-game package.  The box art continued the "Early 2010s Kirby" design, with all of the features of "Late 2000s Kirby" but with red feet and no star eye-sparkle.  It ended up being two years before another Kirby game came out...

See the beetle in the background? You really want to eat that one.

...and that game was Kirby Triple Deluxe, which is in my opinion one of the better Kirby games and one of the few I'd put close to Kirby Super Star.  Still the "Early 2010s Kirby" design here, with red feet, huge eyes with a lighter blue (but not star-shaped) highlight, and round everything.

The most recent Kirby game was Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (or the Rainbow Paintbrush in Europe... apparently they really don't like the word "curse" over there?), but from what I can see that's another "intentionally different design" situation like Epic Yarn was --but with clay rather than yarn -- so I'll be skipping over that one.  Aside from the clay-ness, though, it seems to use pretty much the same Kirby design as the previous few games -- huge eyes with lighter blue highlight at the bottom, round everything, and his feet are still red.

To summarize...

Early '90s Kirby:  Sometimes white, sometimes a very pale pink.  Pointed-tip flipper-like hands.  Two black horizontal lines on each cheek.  Smaller eyes and feet relative to overall body size.

Mid-'90s Kirby:  Sometimes pale pink, sometimes pink.  Hands are sometimes more rounded than before.   Three red vertical lines on each cheek.  Eyes are larger than before and sometimes have a dark blue highlight at the bottom rather than being solid black.

Early 2000s Kirby:  Pink.  Really, really pink.  Eyes are even larger than before and consistently have a blue highlight.  Pink oval "blush sticker" on each cheek.  Hands are usually almost spherical in shape.  Feet are sometimes unusually large and slightly pointed on the end.

Mid-2000s Kirby:  Like Early 2000s Kirby, but with a more consistent use of unusually large, pointy feet.  Hands are a bit more flipper-like again rather than spherical.

Late 2000s Kirby:  Like Early 2000s Kirby, but with feet that have a magenta/purplish hue to them rather than red.  Eyes now have a lighter blue highlight which is star-shaped.

Modern Kirby:  Like Late 2000s Kirby, but with red feet again.  Eyes still have a lighter blue highlight but it is round, not star-shaped.