Every Kirby Game, Ranked
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.
(#15) The final Nintendo-published game to be released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Dream Land 3 is a sequel to both the original Kirby game as well as 1995's Kirby's Dream Land 2. Both of those previous games were Game Boy titles, but the move to a console didn't help Dream Land 3 connect with critics—nor did a switch to a hand-drawn, pastel-filled art style unique to the series. It probably didn't help that the game came out immediately following the best-reviewed title in series history—and one that implemented co-op play much more fully than Dream Land 3's lackluster implementation featuring the blue blob Gooey.
“While Kirby's Dream Land 3 isn't the most dynamic and memorable of the pink puffball's adventures, it does have a variety of unique ideas that set it apart.” —IGN
* score from GameRankings