Every Kirby Game Ever, Ranked

pcmag.com:

Although Mario is Nintendo’s platform mascot, over the years a chubby pink challenger has emerged as one of the company’s most endearing heroes. Introduced in 1990 with Kirby’s Dream Land on the Game Boy, the basic mechanics were there from the beginning. Our man could run, jump, and suck up enemies like a vacuum.

Since then, Kirby has starred in 35 games of his own, with the new Kirby and the Forgotten Land on the Switch being the first mainline game in the series in full 3D (click to read our full review). To celebrate the new game going on sale today, we fired up the consoles and played every one to rank the Kirby franchise. Here are our inarguable picks.

Make no mistake: Kirby’s Avalanche is a totally decent puzzle game. The problem is, it’s not really a Kirby game. In Japan, this was Super Puyo Puyo, the SNES entry in the long-running falling blob puzzle created by Compile. They just changed some graphics, gave it some new box art, and called it a day. It’s low on the list because the Kirbyness of it is virtually nonexistent.

The original Game Boy had a ton of Breakout clones for some inexplicable reason, and that’s what Kirby’s Block Ball is. Move paddles around the screen’s edges to launch Kirby into blocks and don’t let him hit the spikes. It’s pretty short and easy, which is common for a Kirby game, even with the ability to power the little guy up to break different kinds of bricks.

HAL and Nintendo started pushing Kirby into other genres right away. The second game he appeared in established him as a generic spherical object that could be used for, say, pinball. With three tables boasting their own effects and gimmicks, this was a decent simulation for the Game Boy’s hardware, but the blurry screen made it