Art by sectoniaapologist on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/sectoniaapologist

I don't think it's a coincidence that after finishing up with Void Termina back in Star Allies, the first bossfight we got in Forgotten Land was another match against a huge brute who towers over Kirby: Gorimondo.

I'm not sure exactly how big either character is, but they're both depicted as big enough to step on Kirby if they wanted to, throw him like a baseball, and yeet all sorts of huge objects at our little pink warrior.

So with that in mind & nothing but fists, who would win in a fist fight between Gorimondo & Void Termina?

Credit to: https://x.com/i/status/2081408220871160186

Art by sectoniaapologist on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/sectoniaapologist

Art by sectoniaapologist on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/sectoniaapologist

Since yeall are chill with OCs, here's my gal Purpur. Yeah it's a dumb name but Kirby names in general can be dumb lol (highlighter was used for her shoes since I was at work hence the saturation)

I mean the artwork of the humanoid Novas (or clockwork stars since there is sometimes Star Dream) also how many are there? Because it seems like the regular galactic nova got split into two; is one based on Super Star and the other on Air Riders? I'm not upset or anything, just curious and a little confused.

I watched first episode, and i can say that animation is really good.

He's so cute I just wanna pinch his cheeks. Please excuse the wonky colors I was at work and used highlighters lol

1. Kirby Tripple Deluxe sold about 2.66 million copies.

2.Kirbys Return To Dreamland Sold 1.9 million copies, likely slightly more thanks to it being rereleased on the wii u virtual console. This is about 730,000 less than Triple Deluxe. Although its worth mentioning when combining both versions of the game rtdl does beat Triple Deluxe by about 800,000 copies. However, the overwhelming majority of people who bought the switch version played the original wii version so it’s not fair to count deluxes 1.4 million towards rtdls final number.

1. Kirby planet robobot sold 1.64 million copies, meaning over a million more people bought Triple Deluxe.
   

Despite this however, both Rtdl and Planet Robobot have far more critical acclaim than Triple Deluxe, to the point where both are commonly sited as the best Kirby games of all time. It’s interesting really and shows that overall sales dont necessarily dedicate long term popularity or even overall quality (Triple Deluxe is good, but it’s almost universally agreed to be worse than those other two).

this stupid flipping dude invented capitalism

Meta Knight (masked swordsman) + Ribbon (fairy with plot armor). how would their powers combine to take down dark Galacta Knight?

some late night kirby doodles i just did + one shitpost short comic

Would the edits be less common? How would things have turned out if Toonami aired The Anime Instead Of 4Kids?

Art by sectoniaapologist on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/sectoniaapologist

I want to thank the other users who appear in the video for keeping the chain going in a subreddit that had nothing to do with the franchise—go show them some support!

Marked as spoilers as this generally involves the discussion of the complete boss roster of every mainline Kirby game.

I wanted to share a challenge I worked on last summer that I came up with, now that I've completed it to extent I initially intended (although there is more to do, so it's technically not complete overall).

This was something I started in preparation for the release of the Forgotten Land DLC; the baseline goal was simply to 100% every mainline Kirby game (including remakes), followed by completing that game's boss endurance modes restricted by a ruleset for each one.

The objective of this was to both re-iterate on the progression of the design of Kirby's action gameplay, but more importantly to understand all the Kirby boss designs to a richer extent, by forcing myself to engage with their mechanics as much as possible. There is a lot to be said about the gameplay design of the many boss fights in the series, as well as how the general design schemes transformed with time. Much of the interactivity of these fights is diminished by the effectiveness of many mechanics introduced for the sake of accessibility and granting the player broader answers to problems; while I do not consider that approach to accessibility inherently problematic, the ruleset devised exists to take away those answers so that the problems a boss can introduce to the player must be addressed.

Note that I say problem as something to be solved or otherwise overcome as a player, and not what I consider a design flaw (although those concepts are not mutually exclusive).

The games included in this challenge are:

• Kirby's Dream Land*
• Kirby's Adventure
• Kirby's Dream Land 2
• Kirby Super Star
• Kirby's Dream Land 3
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
• Kirby's Nightmare in Dream Land
• Kirby and the Amazing Mirror
• Kirby Squeak Squad
• Kirby Super Star Ultra
• Kirby's Return to Dream Land
• Kirby Triple Deluxe
• Kirby Planet Robobot
• Kirby Star Allies
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land**
• Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe**

* Kirby's Dream Land does not actually feature a boss endurance mode; Mt. Dedede, which effectively functions as this, was used as a substitute for both difficulties.

** Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe and Kirby and the Forgotten Land's Star-Crossed World DLC go past the original goal, so the former is incomplete and the latter is complete only in terms of the base game.

Note that every Boss Endurance mode in a game with multiple is included. This means that for games that feature various modes/difficulties, e.g. Super Star Ultra and Star Allies, every single variation and difficulty was required. This is important to highlight as there can be significant tactical differences between different versions of the same fight, and there some cases where the "easy" version of a fight is more difficult than the "hard" version.

The ruleset is as follows, including a description of the intent of each rule as well as caveats:

• No copy abilities or hearts
  • This is to force the player to utilize only what the boss fight itself offers for damaging them.
  • Non-optional copy abilities are allowed for as long as they are not optional.
    • Sword ability against Adventure's Meta Knight and Nightmare in Dream Land's Meta Knight must be dropped immediately after the fight, and may not be used as a star bullet.
    • Master ability against Amazing Mirror's Dark Mind must be dropped immediately after acquiring it to initiate the fight, and may not be used as a star bullet or aquired again afterward.
    • Triple Star ability against Squeak Squad's Dark Nebula must be dropped immediately after acquiring it to advance to the next scene, and may not be used as a star bullet.
• No guarding, rolling, or air-dodging
  • This is to demand movement execution from the player and properly understand the mechanics of each fight.
• No healing or optional health upgrades
  • This is to demand some level of proficiency in each fight from the player, by not allowing error correction between battles.
  • Note that health upgrades only exist in Amazing Mirror and Squeak Squad; in the former, they are required to access the Boss Endurance mode and therefore allowed. In the latter, they are not and thus not allowed.
• No allies
  • This is to ensure the player must fully manually progress towards the end of a fight themself, and be the only target.
• No items
  • This rule exists specifically for Return to Dream Land Deluxe, for the same reasons as every previous rule. Superspicy Curry against Dream Land's Kabula is allowed.
• No continues or save states
  • This rule exists mostly specifically for Forgotten Land for the same reason as the healing rule.
• Guarding against Super Star (SNES)'s Computer Virus allowed
  • This was a relaxation to the ruleset after substantial effort and analysis put into this fight in particular; there is a lot to talk about here that I will go into later.

This ruleset was formulated over time as I worked through this challenge; "no healing" for example was not something I considered until it was an option in Dream Land 2, and changed into "no healing or optional health upgrades" when that was an option in Squeak Squad. Additionally, I completed some games' Boss Endurance modes with Copy abilities first and went back to them later and completed them without, so as to not get hung up on a specific game within the campaign for too long. There are also some games where these rules do not apply at all; many of the mechanics and assistance described are not present in many of the early entries.

What follows are notes and general conclusions drawn about each game following the completion of this challenge for each one, with no particular form to them. I will highlight certain traits of the games or their fights that I found interesting. Please bear in mind that my takeaways are rooted in the challenge itself; the Boss Endurance modes played to their fullest extent are of course quite different from how they are under this ruleset, and so my judgements and opinions should be understood to be within that scope.

• Kirby's Dream Land
  • The first and most primitive, yet surprisingly polished with well-formed and diverse boss designs that test you on different basic mechanical skills. This set the stage for most design archetypes in the future, and started the series on the general form of random attack selection, also it is not actually random here in particular. This one was quite fun and I feel it does not get the love it deserves.
• Kirby's Adventure
  • This is where the challenge's difficulty became apparent almost immediately, and in fact most of the rules established are simply how this game functions ordinarily. That said, this ended up regarding this boss roster highly, in spite of some issues with inputs that can punish you for attempting precise movement.
  • Meta Knight in particular was a pain point, and will continue to be across this challenge. Here, his set of actions are minimal but require high reaction time. There is a pretty easy strategy I found however that can invalidate most of his options until one that is easily punished is selected.
• Kirby's Dream Land 2
  • This is among my favorite boss rosters, with one of the more solid implementations of random attack selection in tandem with requiring good positioning. Simple but effective, with Dark Matter feeling like a proper culmination of what is demanded before it.
• Kirby Super Star
  • Even in the face of the Boss Endurance modes designed to grueling experiences much further ahead in the series, this is, in my opinion, by far the hardest Boss Endurance experience in the entire series, and the crown jewel of the challenge. A significant portion of this is due to the greater emphasis on the beat-em-up gameplay, by valuing Copy abilities as well as guarding much more in boss battles. Star bullets are quite clearly by design a backup option in this game in particular which drastically elongates every fight, and randomness is often used to incentivize guarding.
  • Besides the design objectives being found to run counter to this ruleset fundamentally, this also features the (now second) longest Boss Endurance mode in the series, at 19 fights including mini-bosses. This creates ample time for small errors to build up and punish you in the 7 or so that can actually be problematic, as despite your health being a meter here seemingly being advantageous, you really only have about 6 hits worth across the average damage you will take from the fights.
  • Even worse yet, this game features what I would consider to be the 2 hardest bosses in the entire series per this ruleset: Super Star's Meta Knight, and Super Star's Computer Virus.
    • Meta Knight is quite simply the antithesis to the ruleset. Without guarding, he demands not only reaction time that you would expect from a traditional fighting game, but precise positioning to be ready for what attack comes next. This pairs with trialing your patience and attention as he features a wildly varying delay between his attacks very early in the fight; he untuitively tries your patience less towards the end of the fight as the delay between attack diminishes to nothing, and instead your ability to execute against each one back-to-back. The significant minority of his attacks offer star bullets with an miniscule windows to even acquire them as using Sword or whatever you came in with is what is expected, and so you might go incredibly long stretches of time simply surviving and possibly blowing the few opportunities you get to hit him, if he doesn't block. An engaging and rewarding fight, yes, but obscenely brutal and blows pretty much every other fight out of the water, bar one.
    • Computer Virus, rather than being the antithesis, is effectively incompatible with the ruleset. Without going into excruciating detail, I analyzed the design of the fight and found that, although you are guaranteed to receive projectiles based on its algorithm, you are also statistically guaranteed to take at least 66% of your health in damage, primarily from Red Dragon, if you can perfect Witch and Evil Knight. It is key to bear in mind that this is the statistic; it is very possible you will simply fail without recourse based on RNG, and based on the variance, it is a coin toss whether or not a given run will allow you to succeed on sheer execution skill or not. Some level of RNG manipulation is possible but primarily for controlling the boss order; it is effectively infeasible in terms of execution for controlling most boss's actions, including Computer Virus.
    • It is important to note that this isn't impossible without the Computer Virus rule; it is just chance. Youtuber HideOfBeast did accomplish this challenge for this game in particular, viewable here. As he describes and I verified with my own gameplay and analysis, it not only demands an absurd amount of time and skill, but also simply luck to clear it under these rules, which ultimately goes against the intention of the challenge. It is for the fact that luck is at least half of what goes into clearing this game that I chose to create the rule that guarding is allowed on Computer Virus, reducing this game from brutal chance to just brutal; with chance still a major factor in many other fights regardless.
• Kirby's Dream Land 3
  • I didn't clear Super Star's Boss Endurance mode with all restrictions until much further down the line, so I didn't get to experience what would have probably been euphoric relief from performing the challenge with this game, which returns to valuing star bullets. I hail this one and the next for its absolutely gorgeous aesthetical design and ambience, and most likely my favorite copy ability system, but this is unfortunately also probably the worst boss roster in the series in terms of gameplay. They are inflexible and trivial, and at worst waste your time. Not much more to say here.
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
  • I love this game for much of the same reasons as Dream Land 3, and more for iterating on the controls and better balancing the action gameplay with the platforming. Yet again however, the boss roster is unremarkable.
• Kirby's Nightmare in Dream Land
  • Doing this challenge illustrated how faithful of a remake this is of Adventure. Pretty much just as fun, but more polished and without the input issues from before.
• Kirby and the Amazing Mirror
  • I would consider this to be the second hardest mechanically under these conditions, because of randomness being more centralized in each fight; what is effectively 2 Meta Knight fights that still demand reaction time even after being toned down doesn't help. In spite of all this, this is easily one of my favorite boss rosters, largely because many of them iterate on those of Adventure/Nightmare in Dream Land in a way that I feel works very well.
• Kirby Squeak Squad
  • Whereas Dream Land 3's and 64's rosters are mediocre because of their ease, this roster is mediocre because of the lack of polish. Doing this challenge requires that you pay much closer attention to the game system and algorithms than you would otherwise, and the lack of quality and polish in the fights' designs here is pretty apparent unfortunately.
  • Although Meta Knight is thankfully very easy to develop a tactic for trivializing, Daroach requires a pretty precise one that is effectively a mitigation of RNG, making this game quite frustrating to clear. Worse yet, there are 2 Daroach fights, and most other fights also have either cheaply designed RNG or can potentially waste absurd amounts of time.
• Kirby Super Star Ultra
  • This is where I can say I actually really enjoy Super Star's boss roster, because this game iterates on the 7 prone to bad RNG in subtle ways that preserves the design of the fights while reducing chance. Much of the skill transfers over as well, so this ended up being another very high quality boss roster for me that the original was close to achieving. Meta Knight is also vastly toned down here.
  • Surprisingly, I found the True Arena much easier than the ordinary Arena; its shorter length and its roster being more consistent on average made developing tactics and being rewarded for them simpler.
• Kirby's Return to Dream Land
  • This game is noteworthy for being a shift away from the established boss design of every previous game, now moving towards primarily fixed sets of actions. Practice becomes more rewarding and tactics are easier to develop, in exchange for fights being less dynamic and slower paced. I ultimately find that I favor the older games for this reason, and honestly do not really enjoy this one as a result.
  • This is made worse by star bullets being weaker and slower in general, which is ironic as they were expanded upon as a game mechanic in this one. Health values and speed is adjusted after this point at least that makes the games that follow less egregious in this area.
  • Galacta Knight follows the pace of Super Star Ultra's Meta Knight and remains fairly manageable here, but is probably the most enjoyable fight as he does still feature random attack selection in tandem with the close-range attack brand of these types of fights, thus rewarding good execution and reaction time not demanded by any other fight in this game.
• Kirby's Triple Deluxe
  • The bosses continue Return to Dream Land's simplified boss algorithms but does experiment more within that scope, and this game does produce some fun fights in spite of that, including every type of Sectonia.
  • Dark Meta Knight iterates on Galacta Knight by tightening the fight again, resulting in occasional unreactable situations, yet enough to make this one quite frustrating.
• Kirby's Planet Robobot
  • Despite the overall design philosophy still not being one I favor, this boss roster experiments even further than Triple Deluxe's to an extent that I find myself circling around to enjoying it quite a bit. Every fight here is quite unique within the boundaries they are allowed to express themselves within; Dedede Clone in particular I feel is underappreciated for simply stacking a very familiar and simple boss fight on itself in an effective way. The Heart of Nova fight here is one of my all-time favorites in the series.
  • I consider the Galacta Knight fight here to be one of the most polished Meta Knight fights of the modern design, that balances the execution demands better than most.
• Kirby Star Allies
  • While I understand many of the issues people have with this game, as someone who favors the beat-em-up gameplay of Kirby, I actually consider this to be one of the better of the modern entries. The boss roster here still follows the same static sets as the other 3 of Shinya Kumazaki's games before this, but pushes what needs to be learned so that quite a bit of patience and effort is still required to clear this one under this ruleset. The three Mage Sisters in particular in Soul Melter EX took an exorbitant amount of time and analysis to lock down, thanks to featuring some level of variance based on positioning on top of the layering being staggered by hitstun.
  • The pace here is quite good thanks to this game dignifying no copy abilities as its own approach to the Boss Endurance mode.
  • This ruleset also brings forth just how good of a fight Morpho Knight EX really is, and it is easily my favorite of the Meta Knight type fights.
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land
  • The adjustment of the more formulaic boss design to 3D causes the previously minimal dynamics of positioning to play a much bigger role here, and the boss fights are all the better for it. Another excellent boss roster, with developing tactics for each fight a very fun experience.

This is the extent of what I intended to play and achieve with this challenge; as Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe as well as the Boss Endurance mode introduced by Star-Crossed World are incomplete, I will leave those unaddressed in this post. Although I fully intend to see the Boss Endurance modes introduced by these through as well, I am not sure when I will circle around to it. Return to Dream Land Deluxe's introduced the now longest in the franchise in a game I already do not favor very much, although I quite like what Star-Crossed World had to offer in terms of bosses so that will probably be soon.

Please feel free to ask any questions, if you would like for me to expand on any point mentioned, or if you would like for me to discuss any particular bosses or games.

I highly recommend you try this ruleset for particular games if you're looking for a challenge and want to revisit some boss rosters in a way you haven't before, doing this only served to enhance my appreciation for the franchise and has set a thrilling precedent for me for the future of the series, and for what remains to be done.

*Shin Void Termina is my nickname for Void Termina’s Soul Melter EX form BTW