Past meets present: Kirby's Super Star Stacker

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Kirby’s Star Stacker was released worldwide on the Game Boy in 1997. While that version of the handheld was coming up on its twilight years, the fact Game Boy games could still be played on the soon-to-be-released Game Boy Color meant that there were still plenty of Game Boy-specific titles, or ones that could play on both systems but have their latent Color-specific features unlocked if played on one of those systems, coming out. Which is a tidy way of explaining why Kirby’s Star Stacker did get said worldwide release, but its sort of sequel, sort of remake on the Super Famicom that released in 1998 stayed in Japan: the Nintendo 64 was in its second calendar year in North America by the time Kirby’s Super Star Stacker released in Japan, where it was known as Kirby no Kirakira Kizzu. The N64 probably would have been around two full years old by the time a localized version would have arrived on the SNES. So it did not.

As it was, Kirby’s Dream Land 3 was the final first-party game released on the Super Nintendo, and that was in November of ‘97. The final third-party game (Frogger) would release in 1998, and production of the console would cease in 1999. Meanwhile, in Japan, Nintendo kept on producing first-party titles throughout 2000, with the final one, released on November 27, the enhanced director’s cut of the Famicom’s own late-life HAL game, Metal Slader Glory. Consider for a moment that the final first-party N64 titles — Dr. Mario 64 in North America and Dōbutsu no Mori, better known stateside as Animal Crossing — released within six days of each other in April of 2001: that’s less than five full months after the Super Famicom’s last game! Nintendo kept supporting the Super Famicom throughout nearly the entirety of the N64’s own lifespan, but such attention was not given to the console by Nintendo of America. So, Japan received Kirby’s Super Stack Stacker in 1998, and while releases weren’t exactly a constant on the SFC at this point, it still wasn’t as odd as it would have been had it also come out in America.

Nintendo of America bailed on the system quicker than not just Japan, but nearly everyone else. While the SNES was discontinued in North America in 1999, Japan kept making new Super Famicom systems until 2003, as did South Korea. And while Europe bailed in 1998, before even Nintendo of America did, the United Kingdom kept making their little gray and purple boxes until 2005. And yet, no Kirby’s Super Star Stacker there, either, but refer back to greater Europe ditching the console in ‘98: that probably had a lot to do with the absence of the little pink guy’s last SFC outing.

Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that Kirby’s Super Star Stacker is finally available outside of Japan, legally, for the first time since it released 25 years ago. You still can’t buy it, as it’s part of the SNES portion of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service, but at least it exists at all. Of course, it has been on the Japanese version of NSO for some time now, long enough for me to whine about it a little over one year ago in this same space, but hey. At least that’s taken care of now.

The goal of Kirby’s Star Stacker is to earn stars by making matches of three or more of the same kinds of blocks, which, in Star Stacker, are all representations of Kirby’s friends from Kirby’s Dream Land 2: Rick the Hamster, Kine the fish, and Coo the owl. You can make matches of two of the same character blocks, but that will just erase those two, and won’t earn you any stars, which you need to progress in various ways in the different modes. Stars are contained within star blocks, and you want to sandwich those in between two Rick, Kine, or Coo blocks, and maybe create a cascading combo that clears huge chunks of the play area away in the process, too. If the middle columns reach the top of the play area, you lose, but you’re still good to go if it’s just the sides — you’ll spend a lot of time building up and out in order to setup combos that clear loads of space and award you even more stars in the process.

The game has four different modes. Round Clear has five difficulties ranging from "Normal” to “Insane,” the last of which has to be unlocked by completing the previous difficulties, and each of which is represented by a different, fitting Kirby facial expression. They all take place in different environmental regions that’ll look familiar enough to Kirby fans. Once you’ve collected a certain number of stars, the round you’re in ends, and you move on to the next one. Challenge mode is your standard endless puzzle mode, and Time Attack gives you three minutes to earn as many stars as possible.

There is a Vs. mode, too, but it requires two cartridges and linked Game Boys to play. Which is one reason why Super Star Stacker is the superior title. Kirby’s Super Star Stacker lets you play multiplayer on one cartridge and system since it’s a Super Famicom title, and the standard single-player mode is more story-focused, with Kirby trying to defeat foes via puzzle as he progresses through the game. It’s cute, and Kirby gets to be friendly and Kirby-like — hear that, Kirby’s Avalanche?

Plus, the art used in the game has upgraded from Kirby’s Dream Land 2 to Kirby’s Dream Land 3: no offense to Dream Land 2 meant by any means, but Dream Land 3 has the greatest distinctive visual style of any Kirby going. It all looks like it was drawn with colored pencils, and the techniques were possible due not just to HAL’s skill but their familiarity with the Super Famicom. So Super Star Stacker is a visual upgrade for more reasons than just the jump from monochrome 8-bit to color 16-bit, and getting to hear more SNES-era Kirby tunes through better speakers is a welcome change, too.

Super Star Stacker has all of Star Stacker’s modes, but adds the aforementioned story mode, which does the pretty typical puzzle game featuring characters thing of having you, as the protagonist Kirby, facing off against various in-universe characters until you finally get to the big bad and resolve the puzzle-oriented crisis at hand. There are just three base difficulty modes in Super Star Stacker instead of four (when you’ve completed everything on the toughest difficulty, you can unlock “Insane” just like you did in the Game Boy Star Stacker) but there’s still plenty of challenge: everything is noticeably, sometimes regrettably faster on the second tier of difficulty, and there’s still one “normal” one to go after that. So while the story mode is a little short in the sense you’ve got just the seven stages to play before you have to face off against King Dedede, good luck playing through all seven of these on the tougher difficulties in a hurry. Oh, and Super Star Stacker’s story mode scores you via time, not points, so even the ability to clear the story, even on harder difficulties, isn’t actually enough to be considered “good” at the game on its own.

Not only do things speed up the further you go in the story mode, but more and more brick blocks show up. These can be removed just like anything else, sandwiched in between two of the same block, but they don’t reward you stars when they break, and they just take up space in the play area. And space becomes more and more of a luxury the more difficult the level or setting you’re using is. Which is especially the case in Vs. or story’s head-to-head modes, since the success of your opponent will negatively impact your own space situation. The better they’re doing, the worse your life is about to get: that’s puzzle games for you.

One other thing Super Star Stacker has going for it is that you can create user profiles, so that your individual progress is saved and others in your home can play. This didn’t matter so much if you were just emulating the game over the years, but now that it’s on Nintendo Switch Online once more, you can setup any friends or family members who just want to play a round or two with you at a time and have that all kept track of separate from your own progress.

There is one downside to the release of Kirby’s Super Star Stacker, and it’s that the game is still in Japanese even with its appearance on Nintendo Switch Online. Luckily, it’s easy enough to figure out what the game has to offer even without being able to read Japanese — you can figure out which game modes are which through trial and error, and the user profile screen does have a tab for the English alphabet. The rules tutorial, though, you’ll have to figure out the meaning of without being able to read, and you won’t get the story bits in a readable form, either, if you can’t read Japanese. At least you can still look at and appreciate the art.

There is an English language version of Super Star Stacker out there, thanks to an unofficial translation released back in 2019, so if you really want to experience the game that way, you can. That’s the reason I had any familiarity with this edition of Star Stacker in the years prior to the very recent official release, and it even comes with a lovely new title screen that changes the logo from its Japanese form to one that says “Super Star Stacker” in the same bubbly Kirby font. Maybe Nintendo didn’t put Super Star Stacker on the SNES Mini, but you surely could, if you had the desire to learn how to do such a thing so you could use the original controller and some scanline filters on a game you could read the text of.

Super Star Stacker on Nintendo Switch Online is now the only official version of the game available in any form, since Star Stacker was on the Nintendo 3DS shop as a Virtual Console title, but that’s since closed down, and the game hasn’t been added to the Game Boy portion of NSO yet. Maybe Nintendo will get around to fixing that, too, but at least, in the meantime, the superior version of the game is available. Now if only Nintendo and HAL would get around to releasing a collection of classic Kirby games from this era that you could buy, so you weren’t reliant on a subscription service to play them. That’s the real Kirby dream land.

Portions of this write-up originally appeared in Retro XP in a ranking of Kirby’s spin-off games.

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