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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71 Kirby: Squeak Squad [aka Kirby Mouse Attack] (DS, 2006)

(#14) The first main series Kirby game released for the DS (though the spinoff Canvas Curse was released for DS the prior year), Squeak Squad gets its name from a group of mice thieves who steal Kirby's cake, leading the pink one on an adventure throughout Dream Land. Gameplay is very similar to previous Kirby platformers—so much so that critics found it overly familiar and simple.

“Virtually every Kirby game since the original has had some kind of feature to add some depth, but there’s nothing like that here. Without that hook, Squeak Squad is a gussied-up throwback to the original NES game, that just doesn’t hold up today, but should be a hit with the little ones.” —GameTrailers

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