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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85 Kirby and the Forgotten Land (Switch, 2022)

(#2) Released in the spring of 2022, the newest Kirby game finds the pink puffball inside a fully 3D world for the first time in the main series. The result is one of the best Kirby titles to date, and a big improvement over the previous Switch release in the main series.

“Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a huge step in a new direction for the series. Many fans will say that despite enjoying recent titles, the formula had been growing stale and repetitive especially after Star Allies. Forgotten Land at its core is still Kirby, and feels like the traditional adventure, but adding this extra layer to levels, exploration and combat opens up a whole new way to experience the journey like never before. It’s not only utterly charming in that lovable Kirby way, it’s also a fantastic look at the kind of new creative ideas we’ll hopefully get to see from here on out. ” —Hardcore Gamer

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