Kirby Battle Royale
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 Happy 25th Anniversary, Kirby! Now to fight your toughest rival...yourself!
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Kirby Battle Royale is a multiplayer battle arena/party game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS. It was released throughout November 2017 in PAL regions and Japan, then two months later in North America, and is a celebration of Kirby's 25th anniversary. The game is also the second-to-last Kirby game released for the 3DS, the final one being Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn.
Story
King Dedede makes a Kirby Printer to create clones of Kirby in attempt to prove he's better than Kirby in a Cake Royale. Kirby must battle with his teammate, Bandana Waddle Dee to win the grand prize - a large cake.
Qualities That Compete in Dedede's Cake Royale
- The idea of making a Kirby party game was a decent idea, with this game pulling it off rather nicely with its MOBA-style gameplay.
- There are ten gameplay modes Kirby and friends can participate in, each with their own set of rules and gameplay:
- Battle Arena: Fight opponents in a typical top-down battle arena game, with or without a partner.
- Apple Scramble: You and your partner must collect as many apples as you can before your opponents do.
- Coin Clash: Collect as many coins as you can while avoiding the ghosts who possess players until they tag a rival.
- Attack Riders: Players steal chips from others, and can ride a Mega Wheelie to zoom around the battlefield and collect even more chips.
- Crazy Theater: Players must solve logic puzzles, including math problems, dodging asteroids, counting fruits, etc.
- Rocket Rumble: You and/or your partner must collect more rocket fuel cubes than the opposing team so you can blast off to a higher height to fuel your rocket.
- Robo Bonkers: All players launch rockets at a robotic version of Bonkers before attacking it, with the player or team with the most points at the end winning.
- Slam Hockey: An air hockey game that incorporates elements of Tin Pin Slammer from The World Ends With You, in that you and/or your team must throw the hockey puck at your opponents to slam them out of the rink.
- Ore Express: Players must load the most ore into three sets of train cars before their opponents do.
- Flagball: A keepaway-capture the flag hybrid game where each team must guide the ball to their flags in hopes of collecting seven of them.
- Excellent graphics that are a step up from previous Kirby games on 3DS, and even use cel-shading to give the game more depth.
- Kirby can choose from fifteen Copy Abilities (Sword, Bomb, Beetle, Spear, Fighter, Ninja, Whip, Parasol, Hammer, Doctor, Tornado, Ice, Mirror, and Sleep), and the player can unlock three additional characters (Waddle Dee, Meta Knight, and King Dedede) to use in battle. Each ability and/or character has a unique move set that accommodates a 3D space and can be customized using Spray Paint (body colors) and unlockable Hats.
- Decent soundtrack composed by Megumi Ohara and Shogo Sakai that fits in well with the battle arena-style gameplay, despite being mostly forgettable (see BQ #3).
- The game's Story Mode, Dedede's Cake Royale, is a fun single-player mode in which Kirby and Bandana Dee are invited to participate in the titular Cake Royale while King Dedede aims to stop them using his Kirby Copy Machine.
- Dededestroyer Z, the final boss of Cake Royale mode, has an awesome design that resembles Mecha Dedede from Kirby's Dream Course and the Dedede Clones & D3 from Kirby: Planet Robobot.
- This is the first Kirby game to include online multiplayer, meaning you can now play against/with players from around the world! However, you can also play local multiplayer using Local Wireless or Download Play, or just play in Single Player mode if you like solo action.
- The game received DLC in Europe (while not as big as Kirby Star Allies), which are two additional copy abilities - Mirror and Sleep. They were added as a result of a poll where people could vote for their favorite copy ability to get into the game. However, the US version did not receive any DLC as both abilities were shipped by the time of the US release.
- Speaking of DLC abilities, it's nice to see Sleep as a usable ability for the very first time, whereas it was considered a useless one-time ability in every other Kirby game.
- Overall, it's a decent way to celebrate Kirby's 25th anniversary, along with Kirby's Blowout Blast.
Bad Qualities
- While it is nice to finally have online multiplayer in a Kirby game, online play has several issues, much like another online multiplayer-focused Nintendo 3DS game:
- There is a lot of noticeable lag and disconnections throughout gameplay.
- There is no Friend List or any way to create a custom lobby; you can only do ranked Quick Matches, making it impossible to host tournaments in-game.
- While not that big of a problem, there is no way to report trolls or grievers for Team Battles, meaning that you may be partnered with someone who isn't a team player.
- You can select your Copy Ability/character prior to mode selection, but the mode is randomly selected from what your opponent chooses. This means you may pick up an ability/character who excels in a certain battle mode, only to get a game where you have a disadvantage with said ability.
- The battle modes aside from Flagball and Slam Hockey are relatively similar to each other, adding on to the repetitive gameplay. Ore Express for instance is extremely similar to Apple Scramble, as you have to pick up items and bring them to a certain dispenser to score points.
- Because the game doesn't play in 3D, it has longer loading times than most other Kirby 3DS games.
- While still decent, the soundtrack is largely forgettable compared to most other Kirby games.
- Similar to Mario Party: The Top 100 (although not as big this time), for an anniversary game, the game somewhat fails to acknowledge all of the main games in the series. There are no references of anything from Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, and there are minimal references to Kirby's Dream Land 3, with the only reference being Rick, Kine, and Coo appearing in the audience of the Slam Hockey arenas.
- Cake Royale mode is very short and can be 100% completed in 4-6 hours. There is also no post-game content or AT LEAST an Extra Mode, which is questionable for Kirby standards.
Reception
Kirby Battle Royale received mixed reviews from critics and mixed-to-positive reviews from users (scoring 57/100 and 7.1/10, respectively, on Metacritic; the lowest-ranked Kirby game, critically-speaking).
Trivia
- Along with Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn, this is one of two Kirby games on 3DS to run at 30 fps rather than 60 fps.
- Coincidentally, two Kirby games on Switch (Kirby Fighters 2 and Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe run at 60 fps instead of the usual 30 fps most games on that system use.
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