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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77 Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (N64, 2000)

(tied at #10) The first and only installment for the main series on the Nintendo 64, The Crystal Shards was criticized a bit for its brevity and lack of difficulty. (The latter, in particular, prompted some critics to complain that it was a game best suited to young children.) But many reviewers liked the switch to 2.5D graphics, the new locations, and—in particular—the introduction of Power Combos enabled by triggering two Copy Abilities simultaneously

“A short but sweet platformer that, unlike Kirby, definitely does not suck.” —EGM

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