Kirby Fighters Deluxe Review

It sure looks like Smash Bros entirely populated by Kirbies, but that’s not quite it. Kirby Fighters Deluxe is an expansion of sorts, of the Kirby Fighters mini game found in Kirby Triple Deluxe. In Triple Deluxe, Fighters worked well as  a neat little distraction to play when you wanted a quick break from the standard Kirby platforming gameplay of the main game. As a standalone game though, Fighters Deluxe feels half baked.

At first glance Kirby Fighters Deluxe looks to borrow a lot from Super Smash Bros, and this isn’t entirely untrue. Fighters takes up to four players, and tasks them with beating each other up with special abilities until only the victor is left standing. Rather than giving players choice of characters to use, each player can choose a specific Kirby power. These powers all have their own hats, and a surprisingly diverse moveset to play around with. While you can absolutely just mash attack and do well enough, there is reward for players who check out each ability’s movelist and experiment a bit, and Fighters Deluxe definitely gives you a more compelling reason to explore the varied moves of each ability than Triple Deluxe. It’ll give you an edge in multiplayer, and is near essential in the harder difficulties of single player mode. There are twelve abilities to play around with, though two of them are only unlocked if you also own Kirby Triple Deluxe.

The single player mode of Fighters Deluxe is about as basic as you can get. A series of battles fought one after the other, with ever increasing difficulty. These battles are broken up halfway through and at the end, by boss battles which are new to the Deluxe version of Fighters. Cracko and Dedede feature as boss characters, but they don’t really bring much interesting to the table as far as how they’re defeated. They do help to break up the monotony of endless Kirby fights, though. Once you complete the single player mode with a particular ability, you unlock a ‘rare’ version of that ability. This version plays exactly the same as the standard, but has a new look. It’s something to unlock through single player, but offers little reward beyond showing your friends in multiplayer.

Multiplayer is where Kirby Fighters Deluxe becomes far more interesting. There’s no online play, unfortunately, but with Download Play enabled local multiplayer you can set up a brawl with up to three other 3DS playing friends. Those friends will be limited to only a few abilities, but it’s still nice that they can play at all without a separate purchase. There are some new items and mechanics that have been added to Fighters Deluxe which are particularly useful in team battles. Players can now be on teams of 2v2, and they can share health by ‘smooching’. First appearing (to my knowledge, at least) in Kirby’s Fun Pak, if a player has picked up more health items than they need, they can share the excess with their team mate in a way not dissimilar to how a mother bird feeds it’s young. There is also a Team Cannon, which needs to be grabbed onto by two players, charged and then fired in a wide and powerful blast that will blow away any opposing Kirbies that get caught in it’s way. Another neat feature is Ghost Kirby. When a Kirby is defeated, rather than just idly sitting and watching the rest of the battle pan out, they continue playing as a ghost who can attack other players and recover health to rejoin the battle. It’s a great way to stop defeated players from getting bored and accidentally closing their system, ruining things for everyone.

Kirby Fighters Deluxe is not a terribly compelling game by yourself. If you’re really stuck for something to play you might get some enjoyment from challenging yourself at the higher difficulties and unlocking rare hats, but there’s not much more to it than that for the lone player. If you have some 3DS owning friends you can play with locally, Fighters Deluxe might be worth a look. Thanks to Download Play, it’s relatively easy to get a match up and running even if only one player owns the game. It won’t have anywhere near the lasting power of a Smash Bros, for example, but there are worse ways you could spend $9.