Introduction: Masahiro Sakurai's cartoonish image drawn by himself when he was young became the second most popular model character in the Nintendo faction after Mario.
Star Kirby Discovery, which will be released at the end of March, is the first attempt to fully 3D in the 30 years since the series was born. In a post-apocalyptic world without human presence, Kirby explores and adventures in different areas by possessing cars, light bulbs, vending machines and other objects of our daily lives.
In the past 30 years, although Kirby has developed from the initial horizontal version of the game to dozens of horizontal version of the game, and dabbled in racing, brawl, match-3, drawing and other genres, the cumulative contribution of the work sales is as much as 35 million, but in terms of innovation with technological progress, the selling point of the original "Star Kirby" "everyone can easily get started", as if a curse, so that the work has never been able to go further.
Next, let's go back to the era of Japan's bubble economy and see how Kirby turned the tide like the "light star" of "Nintendo All-Star Smash Bros. DX", bringing the HAL company that was on the verge of bankruptcy to the front line of the industry, and being trapped in the "simple and cute" cute human design for many years, in a quiet period of time, finally ushered in this round of outbreaks that were waiting for.
The white devil who defuses the crisis
In the early 1980s, a company called HAL began its business in Chiyoda,Tokyo, Japan, covering all aspects of home computers, including hardware such as sound cards and scanners, tools and software for service developers, and even invented the "Joyball", which is known as the "first hand-dead gospel controller with continuous hair function in history". However, what supported half of the company was the most popular video game at that time. According to today's industry standards, halal's early games can mostly be classified as "black history", full of plagiarism of the hot-selling works on the market, whether you are "Pac-Man", "Little Bee" or "Space Invaders", all in the bowl, a change of skin is the source of salary for HAL employees when they spend next month.
HAL's corporate logo is a dog that is incubating eggs on its stomach
The "lack of originality" changed radically with the induction of a new employee named Satoshi Iwata in 1984. This year, HAL launched its first game on the Nintendo FC console - "F1 Racing", programmer Satoshi Iwata's talent began to emerge, and soon, as a producer, he perfectly ported "Rollo Adventure" from the MSX console to the weaker FC, players can spend less money and play the same game on high-priced hardware. The products made by "taking the right path" were applauded and sold, so that HAL has since transferred its main business to FC. Satoshi Iwata's technology, Nintendo's market, HAL's ambitions, all three added up to allow HAL to put almost half of its money into a text AVG called Metal Glory.
"Metal Glory" cassette, this game in 2000 also launched a replica version, interested players, I urge you to think twice
The story of "Metal Glory" comes from the science fiction theme comic "Fixallia", you can imagine it as the pixel AVG version of "Timeless Fortress", that is, the setting is complete, the scene is grand, the characters are vivid, the story is moving, the only problem is that with the technical power of the time, all of the above basically can not be intuitively conveyed to the player, not to mention the FC's primary and secondary school students-based user base, and can not accept the same amount of text as the "Metal Glory" novel, the game sales were tragically Waterloo. After losing half of the funds, HAL's then president, the founder Masahito Tanimura, lost the other half of the funds pressed on buying houses and speculating on houses in the ensuing real estate collapse caused by the Japanese economic bubble in 1991, leaving HAL with only two paths, one is bankruptcy liquidation and going back to each family, and the other is waiting for a savior who falls from the sky.
Hal used to produce a continuous hair handle
As a result, Nintendo stepped forward to take on the mission of the savior and issued three conditions, one is that HAL has since become a second-party developer of Nintendo, only developing games for Nintendo hardware; second, Satoshi Iwata has taken over the position of president to accumulate experience points for taking over Nintendo in the future; third, the next game developed by HAL must meet the standard of "everyone can play" and achieve big sales. In order to meet the third condition, Satoshi Iwata promoted Masahiro Sakurai, who had just entered HAL, and made the latter a round ball "POPOPO" with a short limb look on his notebook as the protagonist of the game "Everyone Can Play", because the game will land on the GB console, and white will become the ball's almost only color matching option.
Masahiro Sakurai summarized the main difficulties of action games such as "Mario Brothers", such as grasping the timing of the attack of the enemy with one's foot, and the death penalty for failing to jump the pit obstacle, etc., to absorb the enemy in front of him and inflate his body to float in the air like a balloon, and the level was also set up as simple as possible. "POPOPO", a strange-sounding name, was renamed "Kirby of the Stars" based on Shigeru Miyamoto's advice, borrowing the name of "John Kirby" of Nintendo's American legal counsel.
After the launch of the original "Kirby of the Stars", it achieved satisfactory sales on gb consoles, and a new legend began.
After the characteristics are established, a wave of continuous outbreaks is ushered in
For many players in the mainland who have begun to contact home consoles from FC, the sequel to "Kirby of the Stars" "Kirby of the Stars" is the first encounter with Kirby. In the game, released in 1993, the platform was changed, allowing Kirby to wear the pink epic skin that everyone is familiar with today, and the orange color painted by Masahiro Sakurai when he drew the original painting became the 2P color scheme in some later works. Compared with the original generation, Fountain of Dreams has very restrained the difficulty of the level, and Kirby has mastered the ability to copy the enemy's abilities in addition to the Star Absorbing Dafa. The built-in variety of mini-games is a preview of Kirby's colorful genre path later. The Knight of charm tower made his debut and established himself as a star in the popular villain of the Kirby star series.
The creator of Kirby of the Stars, Masahiro Sakurai
Two years later, "Star Kirby 2" once again chose the GB console at the time of his debut, and the producer was replaced by Masahiro Sakurai to the map designer Shinichi Shimomura in the game, and Rick the Hamster, Owl Gollum and Little Fish Kane, these three characters who were regarded by new players as passers-by in NS "Nova League" (mainly because the appearance is too ordinary), became the spokesperson for Shinichi Shimomura's rich level design and increased gameplay fun, and they can even transform with Kirby's inhalation of enemies, and the original generation said that "everyone can play", For the first time, this game generates learning costs and a threshold for getting started, proving that Kirby has a lot of potential to tap in addition to selling cuteness and eating.
Kirby of the Stars Fountain of Dreams
Bidding farewell to the black and white pixels of GB, the producer position of the super "Star Kirby Super Deluxe Edition" was exchanged again into the hands of Masahiro Sakurai, and compared with works such as "Mario" or "F-ZERO" that showed the function, Kirby landed on the super host slightly later, but this also gave Sakurai Masahiro more time to polish and think, and sure enough, this talented producer used a way that was unheard of by others, and crammed eight different ways of playing in the "Super Deluxe Edition", with very different styles. But the Kirby game, which fits perfectly as a whole, is like a musical concept album, which includes both "Cave Adventure" based on treasure hunting, "Revenge of the Knight of the Charm Tower", which focuses on popular character cards, and "Breath of Spring", a single work, which can be compared to the "main golden song" of the previous entire game.
"Super Deluxe Edition" has a very dazzling graphic performance at the time
It seems to be to break the wrist with the predecessors, Shinichi Shimomura's "Star Kirby 3" has raised the graphics technology to the extreme of the series, also on the SFC console, using the extreme high resolution at that time, maximizing the color expression of the pixels, creating a chalk-like hazy feeling, and the "dream land (Neverland)" with the name of the game's American version complements each other. The supporting character Guy added to the new system can be handed over to 2P players, or the AI can take over. After four consecutive works on three platforms of technical strength and gameplay advancement, "Star Kirby 3" began to show some fatigue, players see it as the arrival of the N64 console, the old platform works lack of motivation, so more eager to experience the freshness of Kirby in the 3D world, do not know that Kirby and 3D fate are not in line, the next thing is not as good as players imagine.
Lost in a hundred flowers blooming
Ending the pixel era of pastoral pastoral, Kirby of the Stars finally took the last train into a new 3D game environment. However, the new work "Star Kirby 64" of the N64 console is far from reaching the same period of "Mario 64" and "Zelda Legend of Time", inheriting the historical responsibility of the past and opening up, but instead completely exposing the shortcomings of the short process and simple gameplay to the 3D Kirby who is rough in modeling and even barely keeps at least round and cute. Those players who have developed consumption habits on the handheld must also spend more than twice the previous price to start a plate of the N64 cartridge of "Star Kirby", and the player's reputation is naturally plummeting.
The mosaics of Kirby 64 of the Star seriously affect Kirby's normal look and feel
Nintendo in this period is facing the cruel reality that it is finally no longer the king of the home console industry, and has no time to set a longer-term goal plan for "Star Kirby", so it retreats to the second place, taking the handheld machine as the main position of Kirby, since the competitor Sony advocates how friendly to mild users are all day long, then Kirby's simple and relaxed tone has naturally become a ready-made move to use the other way and also apply to the other body.
Under such a guiding ideology, "Star Kirby" returned to the handheld platform, GBA's "Star Kirby Fountain of Dreams DX" as a remake game that lacks new elements, it is not attractive to old players at all, but combined with the portable and lightweight hardware attributes of the GBA, and a new generation of child users have not touched the freshness of the original, but have achieved good sales.
In terms of the production team, Masahiro Sakurai set up his own company after flying solo, no longer responsible for kirby-related game development, HAL also put more energy on the blockbuster super masterpiece "Nintendo Star Brawl", "Star Kirby" more often handed over to outsourcing or multi-development team joint development, resulting in different styles, the quality of the game is even more sudden, of course, there are good works "Mirror Adventure", can be shot to change a place in the end or let the work lack of continuity to dig further.
The Great Adventure of the Mirror, which is regarded as a "god work" by Kirby players
There is no continuity, then play scalability, with Kirby as the theme of racing, match-3, puzzle, brawl and other games, on the basis of the GBA and NDS on the basis of the multi-genre continued to output, so that "Star Kirby Super Ultimate Deluxe Edition" added a few mini-games to dare to come up with a remake to sell again; and "Collection!" "Kirby" can be seen as The Kirby version of "Made of Walleo", which makes the mini-game a collection sold separately; the "Triple Deluxe Edition" of the integration package nature of "Kirby Fighter" and "The Emperor Of the Emperor Emperor Bounce" because of its high popularity, it is extracted from the integration package, and put on the eshop to sell a single enhanced version to those players who have "multiplayer leisure play" needs, cute, simple, cheap, mass production, these core players see the headache elements, which constitute the main theme of Kirby's works in this period.
A mud cart heading to spring
NS in 2018 released the "Star Kirby Nova League", and did not depart from the previous consistent style and gameplay, "League" emphasis on multi-person horizontal version of the level, just to meet the mainland NS main consumers are very concerned about the "same screen multi-person" needs, this work with this selling point, self-sale so far, it firmly occupies the NS shelf in my store prominent position (it is next door, naturally is "Breakup Kitchen").
In contrast, the latest work "Kirby of the Stars" for the first time made the series a 3D action game from the inside, box-style semi-open scenes, providing a sense of space that the Kirby series has never had, and it is precisely because of this that most of the transformation skills that previously served the 2D horizontal level are bound to make corresponding adjustments, the most obvious, behind the joy of "holding the mouth", is the high mobility attributes of cars, aircraft and other items, only in this way can Kirby move at a fast pace in a relatively wide scene.
Kirby's "mud car" that lingered in players' minds on its debut
In my opinion, "Discovery" still does not set a high threshold to target any player, just like the "Soul" series must be difficult enough to prove its bloodline purity, "Star Kirby" will not make itself into another "Mori Hi Gang", the player's progress stuck in the fourth level of a certain continuous platform jump with a very low fault tolerance rate, but to use Kirby's mouth to eat a lot of mixed appetite, to create a contrast effect of mechanical industry products being ruthlessly covered by fan skins. When "Kirby 64" challenged the next generation to lose, the sense of cheap handheld games became impossible to talk about as the traditional handheld withdrew from the historical stage, and the mud car that drove to the spring of "Exploration and Discovery" was about to drive full horsepower and rush to a new future.
Conclusion: If "Eldon's Ring of Law" is because of the difficulty to dissuade those who intend to try, then "Discovery" is to try to avoid players from withdrawing too early due to the game is too simple, it seems that the kindness of The pink demon of Kirby, the general manufacturer really can't hold it.
![Masahiro Sakurai mentioned the next game in an interview: I hope everyone forgets me first[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)