the underrated brilliance of kirby's dream land

Sakurai’s first game is a little Game Boy game called Kirby’s Dream Land.

There are two really great breakdowns of the game from Sakurai himself:

The first is one of my favorite videos from his youtube channel, which dives into the development stories behind the game.

The second is a shorter video is more about the design of the game and how Sakurai was considering the player experience.

kirby’s dream land nails game feel

If you go back to your Game Boy and play the game (or just use an emulator like I did), the first thing I thought went playing the game was: “this just feels good!”

Why is that?

First, the animations (especially when kirby is “small”) are very expressive, especially for the time the game was released and the fact that most of the animations are only a few frames. Compared to the Mario game that came out the same year, Kirby’s Dream Land has an extra layer of animation polish to it.

Watch a bit of this longplay of the game and see if you agree with me.

The next one is something that you can’t really appreciate without actually playing the game. The controls for Kirby’s Dream Land are both friendly and forgiving, but always responsive. In particular, the game really does well with jump velocity. The player can hold the jump button down to jump higher, and when the player releases the jump button, the jump velocity is reset to a constant fall velocity. This gives Kirby his characteristic “floaty” feeling even on small jumps.

Speaking of floating, being able to float at any time makes for fun gameplay. If Kirby falls for too long he starts diving, and if he hits the ground while diving, he will get stunned and bounce off the ground. But you can bail out of the dive by floating. This leads to a fun gameplay loop where you exhale out of a float to take out an enemy, and then you puff back up before you hit the ground to avoid being stunned.

final thoughts

Overall, Kirby’s Dream Land is not a challenging game, but it is a fun one. In addition to the animations and the gameplay, there are a lot of quirky enemy designs and bosses. Nobody really talks about this game when discussing great Game Boy games! In my opinion, it’s one of the best games for the console.