User:Waddlez3121/Kirby Structure

This page is full of me rambling about how the Kirby games use their structure to apply challenge and function in unique ways. Essentially, I'm acting like I'm analyzing the games with direct game knowledge when I actually have no substantial knowledge whatever about game design. Maybe this page is an interesting, semi-accurate analysis; maybe it's a useful guideline to creating one's own fan game; or maybe I'm just spitting Halcandran language at you. Enjoy the show.

	Notice: Semi-open sandbox
	This is Waddlez3121's personal sandbox. You may fix minor details, but are kindly asked to avoid making big changes.

Credit to User:ShadowKirby/ShadowMagolor for the template. To be more specific, feel free to correct any outright errors, but please ask me if you want to add any major analysis because we might be able to collaborate and combine.

Game Modes

Game modes are pretty much the bread and butter of Kirby games. Once you've gone far enough, you have a lot of options - especially in Kirby Super Star Ultra and Kirby Star Allies, which have far more game modes than usual.

• Story Mode: surprisingly, in spite of making the bulk of a game's content - reflected very clearly in the game's completion tracker - the story mode of a game is just there to introduce you to everything. Kirby can fly over anything he pleases in most games, or he can pay attention in class and learn how things work.
• Sub-Games: at least two per title starting in Kirby's Adventure, these are here for five-minute fun and usually don't go very far. You have three difficulties, depending on your coordination how spicy Kirby's feeling today. Rising difficulty means one, two, or all of the following: lower health, more complex stage design, and/or more interesting enemies. If you're a 3DS title, your sub-games might get blown up and tossed onto the eShop for a few pennies.
• Theater: just in case you want to experience the opening cutscene again... because sometimes that's the only story you're given for the next three fourths of the game.
• The Arena / Boss Endurance: Even if the Colosseum isn't called an Arena, it seems Shinya Kumazaki is directing Kirby titles towards having those rather than a single Boss Endurance. This mode is a great refresher if you want to enjoy some of the stellar boss fights again. Good warm-up, too.
• Extra Mode: The extra mode is where the real game begins. Highlights of the story mode are made more interesting, and there's often a partially new plot involved. Not that you'll know what's going on if you forget to pause and read the Special Pages. In order to keep things fresh, there's usually ramped-up bosses coupled with lower health.
• The True Arena: The real - shall I say true? final challenge. This is where the game's toughest parts come together and challenge you one after another, barely relenting for but a moment. To top it all off, you get a secret final boss, buried deep behind all of the other enemies you've faced before. After this, there is no more to say.

The True Road to Becoming a Modern Kirby Game

Unsurprisingly, there are a specific few games that are undeniably important to the Kirby (series) series as it stands in the modern day. Without further ado, here goes the list:

• Kirby's Dream Land: Characters, mechanics, incredibly basic formatting, and cheat codes. What's not to love?
  • Introduced Kirby, King Dedede, etc.
  • Introduced around two thirds of Kirby's basic moveset, found today under Normal (or still Kirby depending on how much progress has been made with migrating movesets from this page)
  • Introduced a normal and hard mode, creatively reusing and swapping out assets to produce more content. Very rudimentary, but it was a start for sure
  • You might not think it, but Mt. Dedede is actually the first boss rush in the history of the Kirby series.
  • Introduced the Sound Test, later to become the Jukebox.
• Kirby's Adventure: Copy Abilities, game/level structure, world maps, and more.
  • Greatly expanded on the length of the game
  • Introduced saving (unless you count writing down cheat codes a form of saving)
  • Introduced sub-games
  • Introduced unlockable supplements to normal gameplay off of the beaten path with Big Switches
  • Introduced the first draft of the structure of how games are organized (see #Story Mode below)
  • You thought I forgot about Kirby's Copy Abilities, didn't you?
• Kirby's Dream Land 2: Bet you weren't expecting this one.
  • Introduced the per-game gimmick in the form of the Animal Friends
  • First game to require certain hidden collectibles in order to make progress. Also the first to feature two varieties of collectibles.
  • First game to feature a bad ending
  • One of few games to carry over any kind of story into another game - Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards both continue the onslaught of Dark Matter fights - and, depending on what you believe, other bosses and games may also carry this legacy.
• Kirby Super Star (Ultra): Both versions of the game make important leaps forward, particularly in overall structure rather than gameplay.
  • The general organization of Super Star is very different. Sub-games are open to try from the minute you open a save file, and completing Spring Breeze opens up your options quite widely.
  • Strangely, the first game that lets you revisit all of the content. Dream Land would prevent you from going backward at all due to the lack of a world map or a save file, and even then, most games up until now (as well as for a little while after now) would prevent Kirby from having a rematch against already-beaten Bosses outside of the Boss Endurance mode.
  • Move lists and some flavor text on pause screens. The latter would not be fully developed until Ultra, but progress is progress.
  • Super Star introduces the concept I described above in #Game Modes:
    • Spring Breeze is the playground where you learn how things work.
    • Dyna Blade gets more complex and introduces a map to the player.
    • The Great Cave Offensive doesn't have nearly as much of a substantial impact, but it was a likely inspiration for Kirby and the Amazing Mirror's format and also greatly increased the abundancy of extra collectibles, likely influencing Keychains, Stickers, and Celebration Picture pieces.
    • Revenge of Meta Knight significantly upped the ante when it came to difficulty. Spring Breeze is comparable to Vegetable Valley, while Revenge of Meta Knight is more like Access Ark (in oh so many ways.)
    • Milky Way Wishes does what Super Star's menu does, but in an actual game mode: Kirby can start anywhere so long as he gets everything done that he needs to. Relatively minor impact as a whole aside from Marx, but this idea was somewhat revisited in Star Allies's fourth level.
    • The Arena gave the Boss Endurance category of modes a specific name and format
    • Ultra introduced The True Arena, mentioned above in #Game Modes
• Kirby's Return to Dream Land (not Deluxe): Oh boy, oh boy. Lots to cover here; this might not even be a comprehensive list.
  • I recommend reading any resource you can find (except FANDOM) on the three lost Kirby games to get even more info about this game's impact and what it drew from.
  • Revived the series at a time of mostly spin-offs
  • Solidified the importance of games mentioned above and pulled many influences together to bring forward a polished experience. Gimmicks, 3D graphics, a proper world map that Super Star went back and forth on having (featuring the ability to run around and test Kirby's moves out like in Adventure and Dream Land 2), among several other things.
  • Another Dimension and its dimensional rifts are the first truly optional stage content, rather than just being an alternate path to the goal. These rift sections add some extra challenge for experienced players.
  • While Super Star was the one to introduce a twist villain, Return to Dream Land was the game to introduce soap opera levels of late-game shenanigans.

Formula

Here's the breakdown:

Story Mode

Though I described it above as really just the beginning, story mode is where most of the drama and the fun happens. You get a title screen, an opening cutscene, a random blurb in the manual, and... go! The point of story mode is that it's a really entertaining stepping stone. The story is separated into levels (often chapters in Super Star) which are sub-divided into stages. Each stage has rooms; each room has an entry, an obstacle, and an exit; you get the idea. There are several recurring stage design elements, some of which can be found on ShadowKirby/ShadowMagolor's user sandbox.

A stage might contain a Mid-Boss, or even several. One common type of stage in particular is the Tower of Mid-Bosses, which is essentially the Arena before the Arena. A level will end in a boss, no matter what type of game it is. However, ever since Kirby's Adventure, there has almost always been a distinction between the last level's boss and the overall story's final boss. Often, the final boss is fought with a Last Battle Ability and given its own level. Modern titles tend to give the option of fighting the level boss before the final boss, or skipping to the final boss, after having beaten both at least once beforehand.

Examples of Boss Types

Name	Type	Game	Name	Type	Game
Poppy Bros. Sr.	Mid-Boss	Kirby's Adventure	Gigavolt	Mid-Boss	Kirby: Planet Robobot
Rolling Turtle	Mid-Boss	Kirby's Adventure	Miasmoros	Mid-Boss	Kirby: Planet Robobot
Whispy Woods	Level Boss	Kirby's Adventure	Clanky Woods	Level Boss	Kirby: Planet Robobot
King Dedede	Level Boss	Kirby's Adventure	Mecha Knight	Level Boss	Kirby: Planet Robobot
Nightmare	Final Boss	Kirby's Adventure	President Haltmann	Level Boss	Kirby: Planet Robobot
Dark Matter	Final Boss	Kirby's Dream Land 2 / 3	Star Dream	Final Boss	Kirby: Planet Robobot

The distinction between level bosses and final bosses, particularly during the finale of the game's story mode, can be hard to distinguish. The last-resort method I use to distinguish the two in games after Super Star is whether the extra mode revamps or replaces the boss, but the methods in the previous paragraph also work. Some weird cases deviate from this formula: Another Dimension (level) involves the Last Battle Ability throughout a shooter section, then featuring its own level boss before abandoning Landia to fight the game's final boss on foot.

Extra Mode

Extra modes feature all or most of the story mode's content again, but usually with certain restrictions in place. For example, in Kirby's Adventure and Kirby's Return to Dream Land, Kirby's health is cut significantly, reducing the amount of damage he can sustain without losing a life. Alternatively, the player may be forced to choose a different character to control, such as in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, Kirby: Planet Robobot and Kirby Star Allies. In this case, truncations are more frequent as the game must tailor to the character's abilities - for example, Meta Knight has no issue cutting ropes, but he will be unable to complete puzzles based on moving objects with the Robobot Armor to destroy gold blocks. Notably, the original version of Meta Knightmare combined these two ideas.

Extra modes almost always feature bosses that are made considerably more difficult, often sharing a designation relative to their counterparts. First introduced in Revenge of the King, the "revenge" boss has been dubbed a number of things.

Revenge Boss Names

Game	Designation	Notes
Kirby Super Star Ultra	's Revenge	The name of Masked Dedede's Revenge in Kirby: Triple Deluxe is a reference to this, since Masked Dedede was not given the "Revenge" name.
Kirby's Return to Dream Land / Deluxe	EX	The special page for Whispy Woods EX implies "EX" means "Extra", as does the classification of Soul Melter EX as "Extra". This is fitting, as these bosses are exclusive to Extra Mode.
Kirby: Triple Deluxe	DX	Though also implied by Flowery Woods DX's special page, additional Japanese material such as the Kirby Character Encyclopedia confirms that DX is read as "Deluxe" through furigana, referencing the game's title and their more grandiose appearances.
Kirby: Planet Robobot	2.0	In the East Asian releases of the game, boss names are instead prefixed "Re:" in reference to email replies (though the Japanese special page for Clanky Woods 2.0 implies it stands for "Renewal").
Team Kirby Clash Deluxe / Kirby Star Allies / Super Kirby Clash	Parallel	Indicates a stronger, alternate boss from Another Dimension. In the East Asian versions of these games, the prefix is literally "Another". Parallel Susie and Parallel Nightmare are not fought in their base forms in their respective games, however.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land	Phantom	Indicates a stronger boss from Isolated Isles: Forgo Dreams. Phantom bosses are copies created by Fecto Forgo's thoughts.
(several)	Soul	A formula introduced in Kirby: Canvas Curse to denote strong final forms of bosses. These bosses are often exclusive to The True Arena.