Holism: Pairing Up Powers in Kirby 64

Thanks to Hamada for edits.

There’s a great hall somewhere dedicated to the greatest powers in the world of video games. Mario’s jump. The Portal gun. The Hadouken. If this is a medium of verbs, actions that you perform to learn and explore, then they are the most intense verbs in the language. Kirby’s in that museum, too, just for his own round self. The mascot of HAL Laboratory can inhale anything and spit it out, letting him turn an enemy’s projectiles into his own and holding in air to float forever. But that’s just half the story; he can also swallow some foes and appropriate their powers. All he needs is the right monster to become a deft swordfighter, fire-breathing beast, or living jet plane.

Ranger, Kirby’s newest standard Copy Ability. Most games give him a hat along with the power, though not Kirby 64.

This is the standard. Kirby could suck in any enemy he wanted and spit them out from Day 1, and his second game added the Copy Ability mechanic. These allow him to pull entire movesets out of thin air and approach each level in different ways. And while not every Kirby game has these conventions—or even floating or swallowing—they are central tenets to Kirby the character. They’re what make him one of Nintendo’s most malleable and versatile characters, though less imaginative Kirby games do tend to rely on them as a crutch.

Not all of them, thankfully, since a power set that neat just asks to be explored or altered. Some sequels let you improve or alter the powers permanently. Some let you augment them. Ones that take Kirby out of his platformer roots can do wonders with them. The best trick comes from Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, the puffball’s debut on 3D Nintendo hardware.

Kirby 64, an early trendsetter for “2.5D” games.

As a 2D platformer of the late Nineties (well, 2000, but nothing’s more late-Nineties than the early Aughts), Kirby 64 is fairly standard. There are multiple 2D levels set in six biodiverse planets, most of which include some token 3D gimmick like an attack from the background. There’s the false ending you avoid only by collecting every glowing tchotchke. There are mini-games, which I adored as a child. These are all handled well, and other than some weird difficulty spikes and too strict of a lives system they cement the game as one of Kirby’s better outings. But these features aren’t wildly unique, unlike the inventive Kirby Canvas Curse or this year’s Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Instead—and somewhat rarely for the relaxed, leisurely Kirby—the game leaves its uniqueness to the combat.

It’s all in the hook: this time, Kirby can carry two powers at once. And not swapping between them, but actually fusing them into a totally new power. It’s an exceptionally cool idea from the start. Like in normal games, Kirby can absorb certain enemies and capture their abilities. But he can also spit the enemy (or “ability stars” if he’s already captured the power) at another enemy, and if they have a power, the two get combined into one that’s stronger and more distinct. This allows our hero access to dozens of attacks, and since the world is filled with enemies that give him powers, he can dynamically change or adapt with ease.

Combining Cutter (a sharp boomerang) and Bomb (a bomb) gives Kirby exploding shurikens.

It’s extremely cool for a lot of reasons. It allows an incredible amount of dynamism, where you can grab one power early on and combine it as soon as you can, wait for one you prefer, or keep with what you have. The powers themselves are also exciting and powerful; sticking Cutter and Needle together gives Kirby a terrifying set of bear trap jaws, while Cutter and Ice gives him deadly ice skates that alter his movement. Some transformations are rather demented; Kirby can turn into a bow and arrow, a refrigerator that spits food, or a stone owl. And because there’s so many powers available, trying as many as you can is exciting.

Certain features and changes were needed to make this work. The first and most important is limiting the number of “standard” powers. There’s only seven: Burn, Needle, Spark, Cutter, Ice, Stone, and Bomb. For contrast, Kirby’s Adventure kicked off the concept of Copy Abilities with twenty-four, and most sequels hit around that number (Forgotten Land, which probably merits a “Holism” article of its own, is an outlier in being close to Kirby 64’s number for its own reasons). It needs to be lower here because every Ability has to be able to fuse with itself and every other Ability, so just these seven lead to forty-nine Power Combos. Just one more would put that at a commercially on-brand sixty-four; a ninth would up it to eighty-one.

A handy-dandy chart courtesy of Nintendo Power.

A more subtle change is enemy variety. In Kirby games, it’s common for a Copy Ability to be exclusive to just one enemy, or maybe one enemy and one mini-boss. But if the point of the system is to regularly get old powers and flip them into new ones, it wouldn’t be satisfying to only get Stone from Rocky, the living boulder that usually gives the power. In an evolution of a practice in Kirby’s Dream Land 3 (to which this is a direct sequel), Kirby 64 has multiple enemies who provide the same element. Characters like Sir Kibble and Sparky and Poppy Bros. Jr., who almost always carry the powers on their own in other series entries, share space with other characters. It leads to a more varied cast.

Some of these bad guys were minor enemies in earlier games, most notably Dream Land 3. Some of them, like the Propeller, only got a power for this game specifically and lost it in sequels. And many were entirely original. Large swaths of the cast were summarily ignored for sequels, but they give this game an incredible amount of personality. Anthropomorphic hatchets, beaming cacti, chibi Zeuses, and birds wreathed in fire or ice have plenty of charm, as do the Kirby bad guys who’ve been around longer.

A few of the game’s enemies. The top row are longtime foes, the middle debuted in Dream Land 3, and the bottom are just some of the ones who are original to this game. Outside of the ones on top, almost all of these characters have gone totally unused since.

Alongside the martial abilities and strong cast list they bring, Power Combos are central to the “collect-a-thon” structure of the game, where Kirby has to collect seventy-two Crystal Shards to get the good ending. Many of these are out in the open or hidden behind environmental secrets, but almost every level has one blocked by a gate that will only break to a specific power. They’re color-coded, so a conspicuous black and blue checkerboard block tells you that you’ll need to have the Bomb / Freeze power to break it, while a conspicuous black block just needs any form of Bomb. Most are easy to see if you know where to look or what to look at.

In the first world, Pop Star, it’s simple; there are only two, and both only require one Ability. But every world from that point will start demanding specific combinations. Sometimes, those powers come from foes in earlier (and cut-off) rooms, forcing you to redo the level and prepare in advance. Sometimes, the powers are ones you can’t get in the level at all, and you have to track them down somewhere else first. Sometimes, they’re hidden in plain sight. It incentivizes replaying levels, though that can get a bit less satisfying when you’re just looking for the one thing you missed.

See that odd red and brown checkerboard pattern? Right above the mini-boss? That’ll only yield to whoever brought the Burn / Stone power into the fight.

The system is good for incentivizing trying new Power Combos, since you’ll have to fight with each one until you get to the lock they open. It’s rare for you to have access to two appropriate enemies right next to the thing you want to break, so you’ll just have to carry around that power for a bit and avoid dying. And what better way to avoid dying is there than to fight? Some are more useful for combat than others, but when you can turn into a giant lightning rod, summon a flaming sword, or lob obscenely powerful dynamite, traversal is much safer—and fun, too.

There are flaws in this, of course. For one thing, the “base” Powers are all dull and simplistic. Burn pushes you forward, Spark gives you a tiny shield, and Freeze sprays ice. The powers in Kirby’s Adventure weren’t much more advanced, but they had some extra features, and Super Star (the high point of the series’ 2D entries) outfitted them with moves and skills inspired by contemporary fighting games. Doubling-up can help; the giant Swiss Army Knife and homing rockets Kirby respectively gets from two Needles or Bombs have a lot on just one. But more often than not, it’s hard not to capture an enemy’s power and only care about the other power with which you’ll fuse it.

Single Cutter: slow and boring.

Another problem is more endemic to this kind of system, which is that a lot of the powers are just… bad. Again, balancing forty-nine wildly different moves is a lot, especially when they have to thematically fit the two original powers. Powers like Burn-Bomb (which lets Kirby become a firework) or Spark-Cutter (a double-bladed lightsaber in the vein of the recently released Star Wars Episode I) are great; they feel natural and fun. But then you have Burn-Ice (which turns Kirby into a slow, burning ice block that instantly melts) or Ice-Stone (which turns Kirby into a hard-to-control curling stone). These are sensible, even ingenious combinations, but they’re not enjoyable to use. Others are more reliable but painfully specific, like a lightbulb form that mostly exists to brighten up one room in one level.

Still, this is a very fun approach to power-ups, and an even better way to shake up the Kirby formula. By the time Kirby 64 came out, there had already been five mainline entries, four of which featured Copy Abilities. The formula was entrenched, and it would only get more so over time. Players slowly discover a couple dozen Abilities, almost all of which were staples like Sword, Fighter, and the seven from this game. They experiment a bit, gravitate to a few, and only deviate from that for the occasional obstacle that requires one specific power to surpass.

This generally means that innovation in the mainline Kirby games comes outside the Copy Abilities, his most famous and inventive aspect. Making a 3D game. Making an “exploration action” game. Giving Kirby a mech suit. Giving Kirby nine other Kirbys. Adding two planes of action. These are all fine, but I think Kirby 64 is special for how it zeroed in on Kirby’s best skill—his incredible appetite—as the jumping-off point. What do you do in Kirby games? You inhale, you copy, and you use. And in this Kirby game, you inhale, you copy, and you build on what you copy.