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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81 Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land (Game Boy Advance, 2002)

(tied at #5) A remake of the 1993 NES title Kirby's Adventure, Nightmare in Dream Land is also the franchise's first installment on the Game Boy Advance. While gameplay and level design was mostly similar to the original Adventure (if a bit harder), the presentation was all new, taking advantage of the GBA's improved graphics and sound. And Nightmare came with some additions including four-player co-op and three new sub-games, including one that makes the long-running side character Meta Knight (no relation) playable for the first time.

“Finishing the game takes just a few hours, and after you're done, there's little incentive to play again... Still great fun and better than most platformers out there.” —EGM

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