Kirby’s Dream Land: Simple Gameplay, Simple Beginnings
I’m going to tempt fate and say that this is going to be a short essay. Not as short as my “Under 500 Words” essays but short nonetheless because I managed to beat Kirby’s Dream Land in probably an hour, and if I hadn’t stopped periodically to break the game up over a period of days I probably would have beaten it in one sitting.
This is rather surprising since I have difficulty finishing videogames.
Recently (and I mean recently (it was only two days ago as I’m writing this sentence)) I finally completed Super Mario Bros for Nintendo Entertainment System(NES) on my Nintendo Switch. I’ve been playing Super Mario Games as long as I’ve been playing videogames period, and the act of finally beating this game was, well, honestly a tad anti-climactic. I’ll probably explore that in another essay in the future. What’s important (and relevant) for this essay is that the completion of the game arrived before I expected it, and the completion itself came with a kind of intellectual revelation:
There are a number of videogames who have progressed farther than their original game.
Revelation was probably the wrong word.
“Reminder” would probably have been better. Oh well.
Kirby’s Dreamland is comparable to Super Mario Bros in that it is a videogame that established a platform (in a literal sense) for everything in the series that would follow and allowed future games a wonderful foundation.
Kirby’s Dreamland (Hoshi no Kabi in its original Japanese title) was released for the Nintendo Gameboy on 27 April 1992 in Japan, 1 August 1992 in North America, and 3 August 1992 for the Phase Alternating Line (PAL) regions. The game is a 2D, side-scrolling platformer set in the fantasy realm of Dream Land. The player controls Kirby, the amorphous adorable blob with arms and legs who is trying to save Dream Land from the wicked King Dedede who has stolen all the food from the denizens of this adorable kingdom and is hording it for himself. With the goal of saving the kingdom Kirby begins his quest armed only with…well, his mouth.
Also Kirby was originally white, not pink.
I was going to try to find an organic way to make that sentence fit in with the general plot info and game mechanics but honestly I just don’t know how to. During development of the game the lead designer Masahiro Sakurai intended for him to be pink, but given the fact that he appeared on the original Gameboy which was sans color it makes sense why marketing for the North American release made him white. While researching for this essay I found an archived interview with Sakurai which gave a little more detail into the actual development of the game and also provided some excellent context for aspects of gameplay I’ll discuss in just a bit. I do want to note that the interview is about the Famicom game Kirby’s Adventure and not Kirby’s Dreamland, but they do discuss the original game. Likewise I felt it was important to point out that Kirby’s color in the general promotions of the game (including one commercial that’s weapons-grade 90s aesthetic) were originally white since literal decades of marketing and new releases in the series have continued to rely on that iconic pink.
Color aside, the most iconic element of Kiby’s Dreamland is simply the fact that Kiby can swallow just about anything.
I recognise that sentence, written in the year of our Lord Neptune 2024, sounds absurd. Similar statements might be “I’m surprised that Mario can jump,” or “I’m shocked that Link can carry a sword,” or that “did you know that any Final Fantasy games have Chocobos?”
Again it has to be pointed out that Kiby’s Dreamland was the first Kirby game and therefore foundational. Kirby’s ability to swallow enemies and spit them out was unique at the time when contextualized against other platformers. Mario could jump, throw fire flowers, and occasionally fly after acquiring special hats but the extent of his interactions with enemy npcs was that he would jump on top of them. Those were the “rules'' of platformer videogames, and Kirby’s ability to inhale enemies broke those rules.
Apart from the sheer novelty of that system, what's striking is how this ability to swallow enemy npcs and objects created the mechanic that’s still (to some extent) continuing today. Dreamland is filled with a wide variety of monsters and chibi-esque figures that either try to attack Kirby, or else are moving about and can become fodder or ammunition for Kirby’s ever-consuming maw. Many of the figures found in Kirby’s Dreamland would become staples of the franchise some of the notable examples being Sir Kibble, Scarfy, Cappy, Waddle-Doo, Poppy Bros Jr., Blipper, and of course Waddle-Dee. Kirby can inhale each of these characters in the original Kirby’s Dreamland and he can then exhale them as stars to attack other enemies or he can swallow them resulting in…nothing.
Seriously, swallowing a Sir Kibble or a Poppy Bros, Jr resulted in nothing.
I was shook…yo.
The biggest shock to me (because I didn’t bother to read Wikipedia before playing the game(then again why would I(that’s psychopath behavior))) was the swallowing enemies in Kirby’s Dreamland did nothing. It didn’t even heal Kirby.
The implication of the discovery was followed immediately by the revelation that playing and therefore beating this game would rely entirely on my ability to use my mouth.
And that sentence in no way could be misconstrued.
Put another way, succeeding in Kirby is mastering the art of sucking and blowing.
Again, there’s absolutely no way that sentence could be misinterpreted or taken out of context.
Playing Kirby’s Dreamland is classic platforming action as the player has to time jumps and movement appropriately so as not to land directly in the path of an enemy, but the act of inhaling and propelling enemies was and remains a revolutionary idea. Bordering on a shoot ‘em Up energy, Kirby’s movement becomes as much about moving through 2D space as it is grabbing enemy after enemy to fire away and thus clear the path forward. There’s a satisfaction in the tactile quality of Kirby’s movement and attacks that gives the little blob this tremendous energy, and that same quality has endured in every Kirby sequel.
In that same breath it’s important to point out, again, that Kirby’s Dreamland is short.
Really short.
Like, really really short dude.
To put it in perspective the website “How Long to to Beat” which provides players with average run times for various videogames, even breaking it down into playing the main story vs playing the story with “side missions,” gives Kibry’s Dreamland a total of 45 minutes to complete the main story. A completionist route will put a player at about one and a half hours, and then “Main + Sides” is listed at about One hour.
I have to address this short run-time, and not just because every review of Kirby’s Dreamland I was able to find at some point wrote about this. And most of that writing argued that the game being short was, simply put, bad. I have to address the game’s minute run-time because in the year of 2024 as I’m writing this there is a running philosophy in most videogame design, particularly from Triple-AAA developers that games need to be long.
I may be part of a vocal minority who are willing, and able to argue: just because a game is short doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Looking back at the interview with Masahiro Sakurai, the explanation for the game’s shortness is explained simply as a desire to make an easy videogame. Sakurai says:
—And why did you give Kirby the ability to absorb and copy enemy abilities for this game?
Sakurai: Kirby was originally designed to be a somewhat easy game, something that a young child could enjoy playing. However, after the GameBoy Kirby’s Dream Land was released, there was a lot of feedback from players saying “it was too easy and too short.” For the sequel I was thinking, how can I retain the easy parts, but make it so skilled players could have fun too? That was when the idea of copying enemy abilities came to me.
Writing can be a painful experience sometimes, and this quote is reason enough. I had actually typed up about three to four paragraphs offering possible explanations for why Kirby’s DreamLand is so short and then going back through this interview the explanation is plain as day. Masahiro Sakurai simply wanted to make an easy, fun videogame.
It was painful having to cut those paragraphs, not simply because of the time that went into the work, or because I had to quote Arthur Quiller-Couch, “Kill your darlings.” I wanted a more elaborate explanation for why such a fun videogame was not longer or more elaborate. This desire demonstrates to me how much philosophical influence and rhetoric exists in the contemporary videogame culture. A short simple game almost seems like it should not exist, or there should be some explanation for its simplicity.
Obviously, this is a false paradigm.
It’s easily rejected.
Pac-Man is a short, simple videogame. Asteroids is a short, simple videogame. Minesweeper is a short, simple videogame. Libble Rabble is a short, simple videogame. A Short Hike is a short, simple videogame. Super Mario Land is a short, simple videogame. Breakout is a short, simple videogame. Journey is a short, simple videogame. Portal is a short, simple videogame. Tetris is a short, simple game.
And Kirby’s DreamLand is a short, simple videogame.
Simplicity is often dismissed by critics and players because it comes across as easy, and is often misinterpreted as laziness on the part of the artist. But simplicity often reveals a planer motivation to encourage play and pleasure as an end unto itself. Playing a board game like checkers, or a tactile game like horse-shoes are not meant to be profound intellectual exercises. They’re meant to encourage play and provide a relief from the general anxieties of professional, biological, and existential realities. Another way of saying that is that I’m not worried about work, getting old and dying, or whether or not my life has meaning when I enjoy a simple and fun activity.
When considering the design of a videogame, a poem, a novel, a play, a film, etc. simplicity has a lot to offer artists and consumers of media because it can be a lovely reminder that life is complex, but that complexity is built around an accumulation of simple, individual elements that stack over time to create a larger whole.
Kirby’s Dreamland was a short game. But it was a short, simple game that established mechanics, characters, and aesthetics that would stack overtime to create a universe and series that is beloved to this day. Even if I finished it in under an hour, there’s still enough joy playing it that I know I’d be willing to come back and play it again, and not just because Kirby’s dancing is the sweetest damn thing.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
12.9.2023
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