Every Kirby Game, Ranked

– March 31, 2022

Updated March 2023 to add Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe

First appearing in 1992, the Kirby game franchise has gone on to span 15 main games and over a dozen spinoffs, with cumulative sales ranking it among the best-selling game properties of all time despite (or because of) being limited to Nintendo devices. Those games center on the titular character, a cute 8-inch-tall pink sphere (his species has no official name) hailing from the Planet Popstar and created on our planet by Masahiro Sakurai (then of HAL Laboratory, the Japanese developer of several Nintendo-exclusive series that continues to make Kirby games to this day).

Games in the main Kirby series are platformers (typically side-scrollers) that are usually distinguished from the competition by Kirby's unique abilities including inhaling his enemies and copying their powers. In the gallery on this page, we rank all 15 of the games in the series from worst to best by Metascore, which captures the consensus views of professional critics. (And, at the very end of the gallery, we rank all of those spinoffs as well.)

All photos courtesy of Nintendo unless otherwise indicated.

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62* Kirby's Dream Land (Game Boy, 1992)

(#16) It's safe to say that it wasn't immediately obvious that Kirby would be a game franchise that would last for over three decades. Nor would it be obvious that one of Kirby's main calling cards would be his ability to copy the abilities of his enemies; that wouldn't be introduced until the following year in Kirby's Adventure. Instead, this casual, black-and-white 2D platformer lacks the relative sophistication of its successors, leaving it as the worst-reviewed entry in the series. But Dream Land would go on to sell over 5 million units, launching an enduring franchise in the process.

In addition to the lack of copy abilities, Dream Land also stands out from the rest of the series for Kirby's appearance: He's white, not pink, at least on the box art used in some countries including the United States. The Game Boy screen itself was only greyscale, of course, leaving Kirby's true color to be revealed through marketing. Nintendo head Shigeru Miyamoto wanted him to be yellow—still the color of Player 2's Kirby in many games in the series—but Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai wished him to be pink. He eventually got his way, but not until after the international artwork for this game was printed.

“An overly easy, shallow disappointment of a game. While it only took me about an hour to get through the scant five levels of this one (and that was with me dealing with occasional distractions), that time seemed to drag on eternally.” —Honest Gamers

* Scores for this and all Kirby games released in the 1990s prior to Metacritic's launch come from our former (now discontinued) sister site, GameRankings, and are marked with an asterisk throughout this gallery. The GameRankings methodology differs from ours in some minor respects but is similar enough to enable accurate rankings on this list.

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