DISCLAIMER
This the first of four English translations of the four “Nintendo Dream” interviews with staff from HAL Laboratory about various topics related to “Kirby Star Allies” that are available on the magazine’s site. All these translations were primarily done with the DeepL Translator tool, with some tweaks and small translations from my part to make them better, plus with some notes when applicable. I want to stress that I’m nowhere near being good in Japanese, nor am I a native English speaker to begin with, and again the translations were all based on translations from the tool I mentioned, that is an AI translator, so don’t take this as a serious translation neither a good one, but rather a “good enough” one for the sake of the Kirby English fandom, as these interviews contain really cool things about the game, but were never translated by anyone (understandably so, they are all very long, and translating is hard). So please read them expecting some sentences to not look the best, and don’t treat anything here as a confirmed translated fact; there may be mistakes. In particular, due to how pronouns work in Japanese, certain sentences could have wrong subjects, such as some sentences with “I” could be actually meant to have “we”. But, regardless, I’m confident in them; I reviewed them a lot, and did my best, so they are for the most part accurate.
For further clarification, these are not all the interviews about Star Allies from Nintendo Dream, they are only the ones that are available on the magazine’s website. There are others that were only present in physical copies of the magazine, but I don’t have access to them.
Kirby Star Allies Vol. 1: Interview Direct from Yamanashi, Part 1 (from the May 2018 issue)
“Kirby Star Allies” for the Nintendo Switch can be played by yourself, with friends, or with up to four people. This is a multi-part interview with the developers conducted for the Nintendo Dream magazine. At the Yamanashi Development Center of the game development company Hal Laboratory, we asked the general director and other members of the production staff about the secrets of development and their thoughts. We delve into the appeal and production intentions of this “culmination” game!
＜HAL Laboratory Profile (from left to right in the photo above) >
Mr. Yuki Endo, Level Design Director
Level Design Director. Mainly responsible for creating stages in games (level design), and directing enemy characters and gimmicks mainly related to maps. Also supervises sub-games.
Mr. Shinya Kumazaki, General Director
General Director of the “Kirby” series. For “Star Allies”, he is in charge of directing the game design and organizing the whole process.
Mr. Tatsuya Kamiyama, Sequence Director
Sequence Director. He is in charge of organizing the overall flow of the game’s progress, and is mainly in charge of menu and world map direction, AI-related matters, and Friend Abilities. Also supervises movies.
Release of “Star Allies” to mark Kirby’s 25th anniversary
— First of all, please tell us how the project for “Star Allies” started.
Kumazaki: After the development of “Kirby: Planet Robobot” for the 3DS was finished, we started planning the “Kirby’s 25th Anniversary Orchestra Concert” and other events while putting together the title lineup. During the 25th anniversary, I thought it would be important for people to enjoy Kirby games constantly along with events such as fairs, so I decided to launch “Team Kirby Clash Deluxe”, “Kirby’s Blowout Blast”, and “Kirby Battle Royale”. So our goal was to release it during the 25th anniversary… but it was like we were either going to make it or not (laughs).
Everyone (laughs)
Kumazaki: This was the first time for the Yamanashi R&D Center to develop for an HD console. This was the second game for HAL Laboratory, since the Tokyo R&D Center made the “Kirby and the Rainbow Curse” game for the Wii U. So we had to start from the beginning to figure out how many man-hours of work would be required and what scale we would need to work on.
— The timing of the completion of this project was not by chance the 25th anniversary, but it was made to coincide with the anniversary.
Kumazaki: That’s right. This may be the first time that the release schedule has been decided from the midway stage of development. Until now, we’ve been working with Nintendo to decide how to release “Kirby” in order to enhance the brand as a whole, and we decided on the release date around the time it was completed.
Kamiyama: Of course, with Nintendo’s input, we decided to release the game at a time when the Nintendo Switch lineup would be settled for the New Year holidays. I’ve never made a game with such a tightly defined release date before.
— I thought it was going to be a lot of fun because it was going to be like the finale of the 25th anniversary.
Kumazaki: I feel that it is important to deliver products to customers when they want them.
The definitive version of the classic “Kirby” game that fulfills a long-held desire.
— So where did you start in the early stages of development?
Kumazaki: When we started planning the game, we still didn’t know the full extent of the Nintendo Switch. We made the game as it was gradually revealed to us, but the royal Kirby had a destiny to fulfill…. We had to make sure that the customers would think, “This is Kirby!” It has to be of a quality that stands out from the rest. On the other hand, we also wanted to make two Kirby games for the 3DS to provide customers with even more new surprises, so we had several other game plans and options. We had various planning ideas, but this time we combined the appeal of the “Share and Play” hardware with the game design. I thought it was a great match with the theme of “Let’s have fun together”, so when we found out the performance of the hardware, I thought, “This project will work!”.
— I had the impression that this was the first time in a long time that a full-length Kirby game that everyone could play together in front of the TV had appeared.
Kumazaki: I have my own personal feelings about making “Kirby” for consoles. Back in the GameCube days, there was a period of 11 years when there were no new “Kirby” titles for consoles. There were three “Kirby” projects that didn’t make it to the world at that time, and the first of them was a game that used the difficult-to-play helper system.
— According to what I’ve heard before, you were working on another game for the Nintendo DS at that time, weren’t you? Endo-san and Kamiyama-san…?
Endo: Kamiyama and I were in the same group, and we first got involved in game development with the third “Kirby” game that never made it to the world. Before that, we had heard that “Kirby” had been made to be played with helpers, but it didn’t turn out well, but we were new to the company, so we didn’t know why it wasn’t finished. I actually played it, and I was like, “What went wrong?”.
Kumazaki: It’s hard to say why we couldn’t complete the project, since the development team at the time was working as hard as they could. If I had to say, I would say that it was difficult to put it together as a product. However, I thought that today’s HAL Laboratory would be able to accomplish this, so I took on the challenge.
Endo: Indeed, I don’t think I could have made “Star Allies” without my previous development experience. …Actually, when we finished the development of “Kirby’s Return to Dream Land”, we had finally completed a game that could be played by four people, but Kumazaki told me, “Next, we’ll make a game that you can play with Helpers”.
Everyone (laughs)
Kumazaki: After “Return to Dream Land”, I was ordered by the company to make two more games, both of which were for handheld devices, so they didn’t become “the next” Kirby games, but after making “Triple Deluxe” and “Planet Robobot”, I had done almost everything I wanted to do with the classic Kirby games. The last thing we wanted to do was to have a helper system that would allow us to switch players freely. I also wanted to create an action game that could be played by one person or by four people with CPUs, on an HD console.
— So you’ve finally achieved that with “Star Allies”?
Kumazaki: Yes. This is the end of the current 2D “Kirby” concept that I’ve been thinking about. I wanted to make a game where I could say, “This is it!”
— This is a product that fulfills a long-held desire.
Kumazaki: I had my doubts about whether we could really launch the game. First of all, Endo and I made the first experimental version of “Star Allies,” and from then on we shared the workload even more than before, but it was just a huge amount of work.
Kamiyama: I knew it would be a difficult development, but when I tried it, it was really difficult. I wondered how much more I would have to think about just because my colleagues would be my helpers. I think I was able to balance this amount of work because of the development experience I had accumulated so far.
Kumazaki: Development was an all-out effort, but even so, I thought it would be really great to be able to celebrate the 25th anniversary together with Kirby fans at the same time as the software. I think the development team, including myself, was able to create a Kirby game that could meet those expectations at a time when we were at our peak. “Star Allies” was made without thinking about the future of “Kirby”, and in a sense, we spared no expense in making it, so it’s the definitive version of what we would have designed if the final episode of the mainline “Kirby” series had been like this!
New surprises for the helpers and four players playing together.
— Kamiyama-san and Endo-san, where did you begin when you started the actual production?
Endo: The first thing we did was to experiment with the “Kirby” stages without any new mechanics to see what kind of stages would work best for four people playing with a group of helpers. We tried pulling back the camera angle a lot, splitting up into two groups and going down different corridors, and stepping on switches to help each other out. We thought about how we could create a new structure with the maps, but we felt that we wanted a new surprise in the design. Then one day, in front of the programmers we were working with, Kumazaki said, “Let’s try this!” He started drawing on the whiteboard. He drew a picture of Burning Leo lighting Kirby on fire with his sword raised. When I saw that picture, I thought, “Oh… this could work!”
— Is that the beginning of the “Friend Abilities”?
Endo: Yes. The whole development team felt that this would make the game more interesting, and the project was completed in a flash. We were very busy after that (laughs).
— Were the “Friends Actions”, the big moves performed by four players, also created in an attempt to include surprises?
Endo: Setting swords on fire is something that can be done with two people, but we wanted to do something special and fun that only four people could do. Actually, even before we lit the swords, we were experimenting with a “Friend Star” action where the four players would join together and move forward.
Kumazaki: It’s one of the current Friend Actions, where four players fly in the sky together with a star.
Kamiyama: I was working as the director of “Blowout Blast”, so I joined the development of “Star Allies” after that project had settled down. At that time, there was not even a prototype of the Friend Abilities yet, and we were in the middle of creating the “Friend Star” as an experiment in cooperative play with friends.
Endo: The “Friend Star” had a great feel to it, so I started thinking of other ideas like four players rolling in a circle, or four players building a bridge, or any other scenario that would be in a cinematic sequence.
Kumazaki: However, we had two options: we could either use the “Friend Star” as the main focus and mass-produce various vehicles and combined action sequences to create an extension of the Friend Actions, or we could add attributes to the copy abilities to make them mutate in various ways. There were two possible paths, and we decided to push the Friend Abilities.
Endo: We were just starting to get a feel for the Friend Abilities. From there, we were able to put together the overall direction of the game.
Even if you’re alone, you’ll feel like you’re playing with friends.
— So you focused more on variations of the Friend Abilities rather than something completely new.
Kumazaki: Yes. I can think of a lot of elements to make it a completely different action game. It’s just like a new IP, isn’t it? But since we were making a “Kirby” game, I didn’t want to neglect the fun and elements of the previous “Kirby” games. On the other hand, it would be less surprising if it was just an extension of the Kirby games we’ve already had. That’s why the “Friend Abilities” are a multiplication of the copy abilities to create new changes with many friends, and we aimed to make “Star Allies” a game where you can enjoy the various mutations that occur when playing with four people.
— I enjoyed the many surprises and discoveries of the combinations.
Kumazaki: “Kirby” is a rough game, so it needs to be both pleasant to play and challenging enough to be an action game. I think this is what gives “Kirby” its broad and deep appeal. At first glance, it looks like a nostalgic Kirby game, but when you play it, you’ll find that it’s completely new and different.
— By the way, the Friend Abilities, which combine copy abilities and attributes, reminded many people of the “Copy Ability Mix” in “Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards”. When you play with it, it’s a completely different thing, but did you have any kind of awareness of it for this game, which you pushed as a “culmination”?
Kumazaki: As you’ll see when you play the game, it’s more of a compilation of the entire “Kirby” series than a stand-alone “Kirby 64” game, and we focused on the fact that the gameplay changes depending on the composition of the Friends.
— How did you go about creating such a fun environment to enjoy with the Friends?
Endo: What I always think about is that I want players to experience a great adventure through “Kirby”. In addition to that, this time I wanted the game to be fun to play alone, but also fun to play with four friends, or even if the four don’t get together, you can still have fun by having the CPUs.
Kumazaki: I think there’s a gap between the Kirby games that core customers and light customers want. For people who are good at games, they want a faster tempo, and I think they don’t think they need the Friends like they did with the helper system in the past.
Endo: One of the features of this project is that it was created in such a way that a wide range of people can enjoy the Friend Abilities.
— How exactly did you go about creating it?
Endo: First of all, I tried to create something that can be solved by combining the power of two people. In the past, in the Kirby series, you could just cut the string with a sword, but this time, you can’t solve it with just that. It requires the cooperation of the Friends… but even when the development team tested it, no one could solve it (laughs).
— The newness has become the difficulty….
Endo: That’s right. So we decided to teach the player how to do it on a signboard once the first trick was introduced, even if the answer was obvious. But that wouldn’t satisfy the customers who were looking for a deeper level of gameplay, so we decided to structure the stages in such a way that they would know the answers and then apply them further. In this way, we made it possible for both beginners and advanced players to enjoy the game. So, at first glance the stages look like Kirby stages, but this map structure is quite new to us. It was very difficult, and it took us a long time to make this decision. The early stages in particular have been reworked quite a bit.
Kumazaki: The first world is always recreated many times. In particular, 1-1 is often recreated three or four times.
Endo: That’s right. Again, we made World 1 and had everyone on the development team play it, but we still thought it would be too difficult. We decided on a policy of changing the map structure so that we could teach them with signs and let them experience and then enjoy the stages after that, and so we reworked everything.
Kamiyama: This time I was allowed to have a lot of monitors during development. I found areas where I stumbled, and took a bunch of monitors to adjust the balance and build up the number and types of enemies, the content and locations of signs, and the movements of the AI.
— I was impressed by the kindness of the guides, but I was also impressed by the cleverness of the Friends. They even lit a fuse for me…
Endo: There are times when the AI, or CPU Friend, solves a puzzle on its own, but players will be frustrated if it doesn’t, so we were careful to strike a balance between the two. For example, Kirby can either be the one to cut the wire or the one to light the fire, so I consulted with Kamiyama after creating the maps and adjusted the AI so that the Friends would solve the puzzle in both cases.
Kamiyama: When the player has the ability to solve a puzzle, we wait for the player to do so, and when only the CPU can solve the puzzle, they take the initiative. We had a lot of trouble drawing the line between how much the AI should do and how much it shouldn’t do to make the play experience enjoyable. In fact, the AI-related parts were added later, so after the maps were finished, we had to think, “Are we really going to let the AI do this?” (laughs) For those maps, I thought about how I wanted the AI to support the player’s ideal play each time, and tried to balance the game so that the player could play without feeling stressed.
Endo: We could make a smarter AI if we wanted to. However, if the AI is too clever, the player will be baffled. So we created maps where the player can imagine, “This is how it must be solved!” We’re happy if the Friends solve the puzzles, but we don’t want them to solve them all.
Kumazaki: We adjusted the AI to the image of an upper elementary school student playing with friends while thinking.
Endo: I hope that even when you’re playing alone, you’ll feel like you’re playing with all your friends.
— In addition to the puzzles, it’s also nice that they respond properly when you ask them to add an attribute to the weapon you have.
Kumazaki: It’s like an RPG, where you select from a menu and give detailed instructions, but in an action game, you don’t have that sense of tempo. The signal can be summed up as “I want to use a Friend Ability,” so we adjusted the extent to which the Friends can make decisions and move without compromising the tempo, and left the player to think about how to use the attributes they acquired.
— On top of the “I really want you to do this now!” you can take away the Friends’ abilities, or you can manipulate them with a “piggyback”. It’s amazing how divisive that is and how many options there are.
Kumazaki: We had to think about cutting some things to meet the deadline, such as making piggybacking exclusive to multiplayer instead of CPUs, making sure that Friends can’t throw hearts, and a system for rescuing fallen friends. But I felt that none of this was essential to the overall comfort of the multiplayer.
Kamiyama: I had a hard time making adjustments because there were many times when I unintentionally piggybacked on the CPU. The picture of unique friends piggybacking on each other is very attractive, so I went through a trial and error process to try to preserve it.
Endo: In “Super Star”, the “Normal Beam” is used to remove helpers, but this time, it’s done by holding down the button. This time, we used three basic buttons: “Inhale,” “Jump,” and “Throw Heart.” There was some confusion when I used the fourth button to discard copy abilities and delete friends. In the beginning, I had a lot of friends, but before I knew it, I was down to just one. While I was pressing various buttons because I messed up, everyone disappeared (laughs).
— (laughs)
Endo: To avoid this, we made it so that you can press and hold the button to bring up the info, then discard the ability, and then delete the Friends. For the core users who are looking for comfort, we also made it so that you can delete Friends by simply pressing the minus button. You can also throw hearts at not only enemies, but also at ability hats and discarded abilities to turn them into Friends.
— Even the position of the heart throw can be adjusted manually.
Endo: You don’t want to get hit by a discarded ability and transform on your own.
Kumazaki: Seeking a sense of speed in action may lead to a tendency to make mistakes, but we still want to play at a fast pace. That’s why we’ve tried to keep the tempo down in some areas. The monitoring results also showed that many customers get confused when things unfold quickly. For example, if you’re familiar with Kirby, you’ll immediately know that you need the Stone ability when you see a stake buried in the ground.
— It’s a familiar trick since “Kirby’s Adventure”.
Kumazaki: But we have to consider that there are no such theories, and we give them time to think carefully. It takes time for users who are new to the game or who haven’t played in a long time to realize from the various abilities, “Maybe I can use Stone or Hammer?” And it takes time for them to realize that. The presentation of the bosses and gimmicks are also made to make the player wait for a while. Of course, we also consider the needs of those who want to clear the game quickly, so the demo can be skipped, and in addition to the action, we put a lot of thought into the overall tempo.
Kamiyama: You can switch the number of players at any time and play seamlessly, and you can also play alone or in cooperation with a reliable CPU Friend. We’ve done a lot of work to make the game as stress-free and free as possible for our customers.
— So you went all out for freedom and comfort.
Kamiyama: We also made it a point to create a mood of adventure with the Friends. The Friends danced together and walked around the world map together. We tried to make the Friends appear in as many places as possible so that they would be in the spotlight. We hope that the more you play, the more you will become attached to the Friends. On the title screen, there are Friends that you’ve already made friends with.
Endo: We created the entire game so that people would think, “It’s nice to have Friends”.
Comfortable and catchy, Friend Heart
— How did the idea of hitting an enemy with a heart to make it a Friend come about in the first place?
Kumazaki: It was born from the idea of making four-player simultaneous play more comfortable. In the beginning, we called it “Kibi dango” (laughs).
— Kibi dango?!
Kumazaki: When I was talking with Nintendo, they suggested that if I gave them candy or other food, they would become friends in return. Or you could catch them with a net and make them friends (laughs).
Everyone (laughs)
Kumazaki: As expected, I decided to make something a little more in keeping with the Kirby world. At that time, I already had a plot for the story, so I thought it would be easier to understand if I combined it with the story, and the “Friend Heart” was born. “An evil heart flies in from across the galaxy, and a good heart flies out to Kirby”. If the game design and story match, and the world view becomes familiar, it will be beautifully integrated.
— Are you saying that it was originally created to be comfortable to play with?
Endo: That’s right. We thought that “swallowing an enemy, copying it, and then creating a helper with that ability” would be difficult to understand as a control.
Kumazaki: Inhaling enemies and pressing the down button to “swallow” them is familiar to those who have played the game before, but it’s not intuitive to newcomers. When Kirby’s mouth expands, they immediately spit it out. On the other hand, you can’t throw away the comfort of having helpers appear instantly.
Endo: When we hadn’t even decided on the heart design yet, we made it so that if you threw something Kirby-like, the enemy would turn into a friend. As we tried different things, we began to feel more comfortable.
Kumazaki: It’s hard to notice, but “throwing hearts to turn enemies into friends” is a pretty bold thing to do. It’s something that threatens the identity of the mainline “Kirby” series, which is based on inhaling and swallowing.
— You’re right…!
Kumazaki: That’s why we were actually very worried. We wondered what it would be like to have a traditional Kirby that didn’t do any inhaling. We wanted to give the player as much of a chance to inhale in as possible, and I wanted to make sure that the game had the persuasive power to make the player feel like they were playing Kirby, even when they were playing with more friends by hitting them with hearts.
— It is very easy to see how to throw hearts.
Kumazaki: Yes. Moreover, it’s not often that we are blessed with something that matches the game design and is also catchy in appearance. If we prioritize surprises and make things flashy, they may be catchy for children, but there’s a concern that they’ll look too tasty for discerning gamers. In this respect, the Friend Heart matched both Kirby’s cute image and the comfort of action games. In previous games with four players playing at the same time, the sense of tempo was an issue, so we were wondering if we could somehow overcome that problem this time.
— It’s nice to be able to add more Friends with different abilities, even when Kirby has a copy ability.
Endo: If the player was to create Friends based on their own abilities, just trying to get four of them would be a huge challenge.
— The heart solved many problems, didn’t it?
Kumazaki: I just thought that some people might be embarrassed if they saw Kirby with his heart in the air.
— (laughs) After the first announcement, there was no image of the “heart” being pushed out, but did you mean that you handled it in a way that wasn’t too embarrassing?
Kumazaki: I think the strength of “Kirby” is that it’s an action game that can be enjoyed by women and small children, but on the other hand, there are also people who support the deep storyline and the climax in the latter half of the game. As a game that can be enjoyed by people of all ages, we made the opening to the game cute, but when you enter the game because of its cuteness, you find yourself on a great adventure to save the world (laughs).
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