The placeholder nobody replaced
KIRBY began as a stand-in. Masahiro Sakurai, nineteen years old at the time, drew a simple ROUND blob to fill the screen while the proper character was designed. Everyone liked the blob. The proper character never turned up.
His colour caused an argument as well. In Japan he was PINK from the beginning, but the American team, selling what they thought was a tough little fighter, put a pale, almost white KIRBY on the box. Japan won that one, and the pink PUFFBALL is now among the most recognisable shapes in games.
Designed so that you will finish it
Most games are built to resist you. A Kirby game is built so that someone who never finishes games will finish this one. He can FLOAT for as long as he likes by gulping air, so no jump is ever impossible. Falling off the bottom of the screen rarely kills. The main ADVENTURE is deliberately short.
The argument behind that is simple: a game can be generous and still be worth the player's time. Kirby keeps its difficulty at the edges instead — optional challenges, hidden routes, and a true final BOSS that only shows up for players who went looking for everything.
One character, a hundred movesets
The COPY ABILITY is the engine. INHALE an ENEMY and KIRBY takes its POWER for himself: swallow something burning for FIRE, something frozen for ICE, a blade-carrying foe for a SWORD, a hammer-swinging one for a HAMMER. There are dozens, and each comes with a full set of moves.
It turns one small hero into a toolbox, and turns every ENEMY into a possible solution rather than just an obstacle. Levels can be beaten several ways depending on what you swallowed — a design idea the same creator later built an entire fighting game on, which our Super Smash Bros puzzle covers.
A second player made out of a power
Kirby solved co-operative play in an unusually neat way back in 1996. Whatever ABILITY KIRBY is currently carrying can be spat out as a helper character — a little fire creature, a sword-carrying knight — and a second player picks up a controller and becomes it.
That means a parent or a younger sibling can join halfway through a level, with no menus and no second save file, and leave again whenever they like. The helper is weaker than KIRBY, so an inexperienced player cannot easily ruin the ADVENTURE, and it costs nothing more than the POWER already in hand.
The cheerful surface, and what is under it
DREAMLAND is pastel skies, a helpful WADDLE DEE and a greedy KING DEDEDE making off with everyone's food. Then the final BOSS arrives, the music changes completely, and the series shows its other face: dying stars, unsettling creatures and a backstory that fans assemble out of item descriptions.
None of it troubles KIRBY in the slightest. He eats, he floats, he wins, and he goes home on a WARPSTAR, looking exactly as CUTE as he did at the start.