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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82* Kirby's Dream Land 2 (Game Boy, 1995)

(#4) The third game in the series was a direct sequel to the first, released, like that game, for Nintendo's handheld Game Boy. Here, Kirby has three animal friends (an owl, a hamster, and a sunfish, who help out in the air, on land, and underwater, respectively) who aid him in his attempt to defeat the evil Dark Matter. The addition of Copy Abilities (lacking in the original Dream Land) seems to have made a big difference, as scores were much higher for the sequel than for the original.

“Even though its low level of challenge makes it seem smaller than it actually is, its length and numerous power-ups to experiment with makes it ideal for repeat playthroughs.” —Nintendo Life

* score from GameRankings

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