The RetroBeat: 1996’s Kirby Super Star remains the pink hero’s best outing

Kirby Star Allies is not very good. The pink puff ball’s debut on the Switch is a boring and safe experience that brings few new ideas to a franchise that really could use them. But I still love Kirby. And while Star Allies is a disappointment, it has me thinking about my favorite game in the series: Kirby Super Star, which came out for the Super Nintendo in 1996.

Kirby Super Star doesn’t get the same amount of love as other Nintendo heavy-hitters for the SNES, like Super Metroid, Super Mario World, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. But it’s one of my favorite games for the system. At a time when Kirby was still a young series (Kirby’s Dream Land debuted just a few years earlier for the Game Boy in 1992), Super Star refined the core gameplay while taking creative chances with level design and presentation.