Looking for angry Kirby

Angry Kirby was once an unlikely example of the difference between Japanese and American sensibilities. When he was home in Japan, Kirby’s cheerful, round face was rarely seen without a welcoming smile. In the US, something was different: Kirby, the epitome of kawaii with a puffy pink marshmallow face, had a dangerous, evil streak.

It started with an infamous 1994 print ad (embedded below) in which Kirby posed for a mugshot: covered in bruises, eyes full of uncontrollable rage, cheeks covered in stubble. After a decade of changed, but undeniably cheerful art, the box covers took on the same rebellious vibe. Starting with that of 2002 Kirby: Nightmare in dreamlandKirby’s American box art added sharp eyebrows and intense facial expressions that were absent from the Japanese versions. Over time, fans came up with the nickname Angry Kirby.

After Kirby: Squeak Squad in 2006, Nintendo of America’s box art became less consistent, with American releases alternating between making the Japanese versions louder and using the same art – and some Japanese versions also receiving the angry look.

Since 2012, Kirby has been using the same art at home and abroad, whether that’s gleeful rage while piloting a mech in 2016 Kirby: Planet Robota jubilant, cross-stitched grin for 2019 Kirby’s Extra Epic Yarnor a look of awe at the horizon in 2022 Kirby and the Forgotten Land. And of course happily waving to 2023’s Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxea Switch re-release of a 2011 Wii title that replaced Kirby’s serious look.

What has changed? What took that smile away, and what made Kirby smile again?

You may not have heard of Leslie Swan, but if you play English-language Nintendo games, there’s a good chance you’ve heard her voice, and an even better chance you’ve played a game she localized. She also served as localization director at Nintendo of America from 2000 to 2015, where she led the Nintendo Treehouse team responsible for the English versions of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, Kirbys Epic yarnAnd Kirby: Triple Deluxeshe was also the voice of Princess Peach Super Mario 64 And Mario kart 64.

Speaking to Polygon, Swan says that Kirby’s look in the early 2000s was intended to show determination, not anger, a change intended to broaden the character’s appeal among the dominant demographic of tween and teen boys. If Kirby: Triple Deluxe director Shinya Kumazaki told GameSpot in 2014: Cute Kirby was popular in Japan, but not in the West.

“Cute, lovable characters are popular among people of all ages in Japan,” she says. “In the US, however, tween and teen boys are often attracted to tougher characters. We all thought the Kirby game mechanics were a lot of fun, and we wanted Kirby to reach as wide an audience as possible. At Nintendo, we embraced the idea of ​​the little guy facing the biggest, baddest enemies and somehow, while the player is in control, triumphing. Think Link versus Ganon. Kirby had a lot of cool transformations in the game and could be very tough. We thought he should be depicted as a fierce, tenacious pink puffball. I don’t think we have ever found the work of art so angry, but rather determined against all odds.”

Initially, the barrier Kirby faced in reaching pre-teen and teenage boys was not a problem. Kirby’s dreamland was released for the Game Boy in 1992, when Swan was editor-in-chief at Nintendo Power. The console’s monochrome display allowed Nintendo to avoid the pink problem. Famous, Kirby’s American debut cover shows a cheerful Kirby with a ghostly white hue, not his signature marshmallow hue – which was not seen in the game until the following year Kirby’s Adventure on the NES.

“Back in the day, there weren’t many young girls playing video games,” Swan says. “A blow-up pink character for guys trying to be cool wasn’t going to get the sales everyone wanted. (…) When we first released those games, they were on the Game Boy, black and white, right? So the color didn’t matter to us. And then it was like Okay, now we have this pink puffy character. So how do we position the character more attractively?”

When localizing Kirby games, Nintendo took a careful approach to translating dialogue. Characters like King Dedede, Meta Knight and Waddle Dee are written with humor, but Swan’s team avoided being overly cute and reflected the tone of American children’s cartoons.

Swan says Kirby’s flexibility – a character who can be anything, do anything, and certainly eat anything – and the colorful, cartoonish surreality of his adventures in Dream Land were a gift to the localizers. As the character gained more skills and innovative additions such as Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble‘s accelerometer motion control or Kirby: Canvas Curse‘s brush touch controls, the series’ popularity continued to grow. All without the need for the heavy localization work required for more culturally grounded series like Fire Emblem.

Despite the changes in the cover art intended to appeal to boys, Swan says that over time the series became increasingly appealing to all genders and ages.

“As localization evolved and technology evolved, the games became richer because their stories became richer,” says Swan. “And I think that was very true of the Kirby franchise, because originally Kirby was just a puff ball flying around, but then the story started to develop and it had all these other very attractive characters.”

Krysta Yang worked in marketing at Nintendo of America from 2007 to 2022 and is now co-owner of marketing agency Never A Minute and The Kit & Krysta Podcast. She says that in its early days, Nintendo consciously tried to shed its image as an outrageous “kiddie” company.

“There was definitely a period where Nintendo, and even gaming in general, took on a more mature/cool factor. (…) Having a game labeled ‘kiddie’ was really a curse,” says Yang. “Nintendo still needed to focus on its kid audience, but there was a shift in trying to make its characters more broadly appealing to a wider audience. An example is the marketing for the Nintendo DS. Kirby Super Star Ultra (in 2008): The marketing was aimed at making Kirby a more appealing character, especially to boys, so the marketing slogan was ‘Super Tuff Pink Puff.’

“There was a conscious effort on the marketing side to make Kirby seem more badass and to focus more on the combat in the game, so that Kirby (wasn’t) seen as something just for young kids,” Yang says. “It was definitely a bit of a departure from the smiling, happy, cute Kirby, but it didn’t seem completely out of place either, since Kirby games are very action-oriented!”

Yang adds that Kirby’s personality was not central to Nintendo’s recent marketing approach for the series, pointing out that promotional material for the 2022 release Kirby and the Forgotten Land instead placed a greater emphasis on gameplay and skills. “There’s an ongoing effort to make Kirby a more complete character, but it’s true that most people still see Kirby as cute versus cool,” she says.

Both Yang and Swan note that Nintendo has adopted a much more global perspective in recent years. Nintendo of America’s marketing and localization teams are more closely tied to the Japanese office and developers than ever before, they say, and regional variations like Kirby’s album art or ads like jailbird Kirby are no more.

“The audience hasn’t changed at all,” Yang says. “It was a change in business strategy to achieve more global marketing. It’s good and bad. Being global means consistency for the brand across all regions, but sometimes regional differences are not taken into account, which in my opinion can lead to very boring, safe marketing for some Nintendo products.”

Shibuya-based localization studio 8-4 has been working with Japanese developers, including Nintendo, to bring games to the West for nearly two decades. Speaking to Polygon, co-founder John Ricciardi says he thinks Angry Kirby was a genius move to appeal to American boys as he was at the time. Since then, Ricciardi believes that regional changes in album art, such as Angry Kirby’s, are becoming less common for two reasons.

First, the industry grew from its early days when Nintendo’s American subsidiary rejected international prospects Donkey Kong‘s cartoon vibes in 80s arcades dominated by games like tank battle simulation Combat zone and military defense game Missile Command.

“We had marketing people coming in from completely different industries, taking the limited things they knew from their own companies to try to apply to video games and try things out,” says Ricciardi, wincing at the early American covers of Mega Man that resembled Spaceship Troopers. “Some things worked, and a lot of things didn’t.”

Ricciardi’s second reason: the audience has also matured. Forty years ago Pac Man And Donkey Kong In the first American arcades, players have now grown up surrounded by characters and sensibilities from Japanese pop culture, yearning for games, movies, manga and anime from all over.

“There was a time in the past where many games were ignored for fear that the localization costs were unjustifiable in terms of ‘Is there an audience for these types of games?’ for visual novels, etc.,” says Ricciardi. “Now we’re seeing a lot of that stuff being localized.”

In Pure invention: how Japanese pop culture conquered the worldLocalizer Matt Alt argues that the success of Japanese cultural exports is not due to foreign consumers’ demand for more Japanese products; it’s that globalization, and the easier access afforded by the Internet, has meant that foreign tastes have come to resemble Japanese sensibilities, and that foreigners are now sharing new ideas about what is cool, nerdy and, especially relevant to Kirby, cute.

That may be a happy coincidence for Nintendo, but it seems fitting that the sardonic, disaffected youth culture that was prevalent in the US in the ’90s and ’00s and that gave Kirby his determined frown has given way to a more serious present.

Regional cover art variants persist, but they are rarer and don’t often involve a total personality makeover like that of Mega Man or Kirby. By 2020, Yakuza: Like a dragonIchiban’s Western cover was actually the happiest: Ichiban’s sunny outlook was barely visible on the Japanese cover, while internationally he had a grin on his face that was as warm as Kirby’s ever was. Tastes change. Happiness is cool, a smile is cool, kawaii is cool. Kirby is cool too, and we finally know it. No wonder that little pink puffball’s smile returned.