EDIT: AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING LIKE A TOTAL IDIOT, I SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE THE MAKING OF KIRBY SQUEAK SQUAD FOR THE DS. MY GOOD FRIEND MICHAEL POINTED THIS OUT TO ME. THIS DOESN’T MAKE THE CLAIM ANY LESS PLAUSABLE THOUGH BECAUSE IT WAS NOT DEVELOPED BY SAKURAI.

Okay, before I get a barrage of people telling me that I am a terrible person for saying this, let me just say that I am not passing any of my conclusions below as fact and that I am not saying that I want any of the claims below to actually come to fruition. With that said,


If you’re like me, then you love KIrby games. And, if you’re like me, you may have noticed a lack of new KIrby games being released.

Sure, we just got Kirby Super Star Ultra, but that was really just a remake of an SNES title. The last real console Kirby (saving Virtual Console titles) was KIrby 64: The Crystal Shards. Sure, we have seen spin-offs like Kirby AirRide, but these just aren’t KIrby games. This was brought to my attention by Dustin Chapas on the forums.

I had actually seen a very good YouTube video about the history of Kirby and I have placed it below:



In this video, it is explained that Kirby was designed as a game that was meant to be a game that even novice players could pick up and play. With that as its mission statement, it only seems fitting that we would see a deluge of new Kirby games on the Wii and DS, but we haven’t.

I don’t know about you, but I have noticed a trend. I think what we are seeing is a manifestation of Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Kirby and Super Smash Brothers, not wanting to make Kirby games any longer. In fact, in this “Iwata Asks” feature of Wii.com, Iwata said,”Maybe it’s more appropriate to say that I realized we wouldn’t be able to add any new elements to the game without your help and I think I said as much when we discussed it at the hotel. It wasn’t right, but you might even say I used it as a threat of sorts.”

Now, I couldn’t find the actual source where it was written in a more direct fashion, but the general feeling was that Iwata had to persuade Sakurai to actually make the newest Smash Bros.

Now that Sakurai has his own company, Sora Ltd, I fear that Sakurai doesn’t want to make Kirby. All we have seen recently are spin-offs and remakes like Canvas Curse, Super Star Ultra, and Air Ride. Perhaps Sakurai was trying to “reignite the fire” he felt for developing Kirby games that he once felt, but most of these spin-offs were not particularly spectacular in sales.

As I said, I am not passing this off as fact, but considering that we haven’t seen any traditional Kirby games for a while, have heard that Sakurai took convincing from Iwata to get him to work on Smash Bros, and that given the respective mission statements of the Wii and DS lending themselves so perfectly to Kirby in spite of the lack of titles, I think it is reasonable to surmise that we have have seen the last of traditional Kirby games.