Kirby Super Star, released as Kirby's Fun Pak in PAL regions, is a platforming video game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo. The game was advertised as featuring eight games: seven short subsections with the same basic gameplay, and two minigames. Kirby Super Star sees players take on the role of Kirby, who can float around the screen, inhale blocks and enemies and spit them out. By swallowing certain enemies after inhaling them, Kirby can copy their abilities and use them as his own, becoming able to perform a wide range of attacks. A unique feature of the game is the addition of helpers. When Kirby is in possession of an ability, he can choose to transform it into a helper character which can be controlled by a second player or the computer AI.
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There are times where the art direction is very detailed and makes great use of perspective to indicate scope (like Dyna Blade's nest in the mountains or Meta Knight's ship looming in the orange sunlit skies), but there is an overuse of prerendered and image-based graphics that leave a weird uncanniness. For example, those weird flat green mountaintops in Cavios, those swinging bells in Gourmet Race, and those terrible compressed cloud JPEGs in the last area of Great Cave Offensive. They all clash pretty heavily with the otherwise lovely spritework of bosses and other characters.
Although I may not always like its presentation, it is distinctly charming for its era. I think the soundtrack is what truly elevates it to that weird dreamy status a lot of early Kirby is shrouded in (like pre Nightmare in Dream Land), especially the Dyna Blade subgame. My personal favorite subgame was Milky Way Wishes, although Revenge of Meta Knight is very close behind it.
