Kirby: Planet Robobot

Though the Kirby series is well known for branching out frequently into new and different gameplay styles, the core platforming series still firmly remains centered around Kirby's cope abilities. Ever since Kirby's Adventure, dozens of copy abilities have made their debut, though many have a tendency to disappear for a few games before being brought back in a later entry. Kirby: Planet Robobot had a solid balance of new and old abilities, and the Director of the game recently talked about how abilities were chosen for this game.

The third and final "Ask-a-thon" was just published on Miiverse, wherein Shinya Kumazaki answers questions asked by fans on Miiverse. When the question about copy abilities came up, Kumazaki cited time and hardware restrictions as a contributing factor to the amount of abilities that made it in. Furthermore, balancing becomes an issue if too many copy abilities are included, so the team tries to keep it to 25 or less. Here's what he had to say:

In the past 5 or 6 years, we've gained over 10 new abilities so we're always struggling to balance out the old and new ones. We were also restricted by development time and hardware limitations. But even from the perspective of game balance, once you go over 25 copy abilities, you start to see an effect on the frequency of each ability per stage and on the balancing for the new Robobot elements. Even with the limited number of abilities that made the cut, the command inputs make up for it with a wide variety of actions so it isn't such a problem.

The rest of the interview can be found here; there's plenty of interesting topics discussed, such as how Kumazaki's pet cat provided the voice of the final boss.

What do you think? What's your favorite copy ability? What did you think of Planet Robobot? Drop us a comment in the section below.

[source miiverse.nintendo.net]