Kirby and the Rainbow Curse

Just this Friday, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse released in North America to general critical acclaim. We awarded it a 7/10; while praising the excellent art style, we felt there were underutilized gameplay applications of the clay theme.

As part of the buzz surrounding the game's release, GameSpot recently conducted an interview with seven key members of the development team to shed light on development. The team's responses to questions were interesting, if not a bit head-scratching.

First, GameSpot asked about the role that clay plays in the game. Kazuhiro Yoshikawa and Teruhiko Suzuki - the game's supervisor and art director, respectively - answered this question and the response was rather surprising. They stated that the clay style is merely surface level and that it's more of a way they wanted the player to perceive the world of Kirby in this iteration. This explains some complaints about the clay theme not being integrated into gameplay in any meaningful way; it apparently isn't meant to, as the world technically isn't made out of clay.

We weren't really thinking about Kirby being made out of clay in his own worldview, but rather, we're just using clay to express his softness and his ability to transform. So, you wouldn't actually see him picking up clay from the environment, in the same way that you wouldn't see him dissolve if he happened to fall in water in this game world. This was a very important idea that was defining some of the boundaries for designing the gameplay... We just wanted to find a way to bring some of the expressiveness of that clay animation and that stop motion animation style, not necessarily referencing the actual material. So you won't, for that reason, find Kirby mixing with other bits of clay in the game for various gameplay mechanics."

The next question was how the clay theme did impact gameplay and Kazushige Masuda - the game's director - answered this one. He said the main thing they focused on was transformations, as the clay theme would make Kirby appear more malleable.

When we were thinking about how to use clay as an art style for this game, the way that we were connecting it to ideas for gameplay was from the direction of clay being soft and mutable, something that you could shape into a lot of different forms, and so we had these ideas for Kirby molding himself into the shape of a tank or a submarine, and that these kinds of animations would be easy for him because he's made out of clay.

In response to this, Gamespot asked why transformations were limited and copy abilities were omitted. Hal Laboratory's Shinya Kumazaki answered this, saying that speed was a bit more of a focus in Rainbow Curse and that copy abilities wouldn't fit that type of gameplay as well.

I think you'll remember that in Kirby Canvas Curse, Kirby did have the copy ability, and that made sense in certain types of side scrolling action games, but it's something that we really use only when we think that it's really necessary. As you may recall in Kirby: Canvas Curse, there were only 10 copy abilities, whereas by comparison, a lot of the traditional Kirby platformers will have as many as 20 copy abilities. This time, in Rainbow Curse, because Kirby is rolling faster and that's a little bit more the focus of the gameplay, we decided that it wasn't as good a fit, you have a different function for the gameplay here, so the demands for gameplay mechanics were different. I feel like, in the kind of game this has become, this was definitely the right decision.

Masuda-san chimed in on this and noted the differences between Canvas Curse and Rainbow Curse, highlighting the distinction in size between the DS and GamePad screens and how that impacted the player's ability to move the stylus.

If you played the Nintendo DS game, Kirby Canvas Curse, you'll notice this game where you flick using the stylus on the touch screen to move Kirby through levels rather slowly. This time around, because the screen on the gamepad is larger than on the Nintendo DS of the time, the player can draw longer lines, and as a result of that, we can allow the character on screen to move faster, and we feel that really makes the gameplay feel a lot better. So this was something that was definitely on our minds as we designed gameplay and game worlds. You'll also see a lot faster stylus movement, and we also think this affected game design quite a bit.

If you're interested, the full interview can be read here. Do you agree with some of the design decisions, and what do you make of Kirby's latest adventure? Sound off in the comments below.

[source gamespot.com]