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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80 Kirby & the Amazing Mirror (Game Boy Advance, 2004)

(tied at #7) The rare Kirby game not to feature Kirby's rival King Dedede, Amazing Mirror is also notable for being the final game in the series developed under the guidance of series creator Masahiro Sakurai. Set mainly in the evil Mirror World, the game finds Kirby split into four, each a different color, and their adventures feature Metroidvania-style nonlinear exploration, a first for the series.

“The gameplay is solid, and even players who might otherwise be turned off by the game's cute style and cartoonish presentation could find themselves falling in love with the pink marauder and his band multicolored friends.” —eToychest

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