The Kirby Lands:
The History of a Game that Nobody Played
A Commentary by FnrrfYgmSchnish



For those of you who don't remember it (which is probably a lot of you), The Kirby Lands was pretty much my "newbie game." It had bad graphics and lots of music ripped from Final Fantasy games (mainly 3 and 6, but also a few songs from 4 and 5 here and there.) The mapping was really terrible, the maptiles themselves (most of which are way too dark, for some reason) were even worse, and the battles were seriously unbalanced... mainly because I had gone back in a few years after uploading the finished version and added in some new features like poison and stun (without really knowing how they worked), resulting in situations like the supposed-to-be-super-easy first boss Grande Snail suddenly becoming near-unbeatable if he uses Regenerate more than once. There were way too many playable characters, including nonsensical cameo appearances from people like Sailor Jupiter who really had no reason to be in the game's world. Also, the custom font I made for it is really horrible.



All that said, it was still a complete game, and even now it's the only game I've ever finished all the way to the end aside from mediocre 48-hour contest entries (Frankfurter's Quest for Soap) and really-freakin'-horrible 48-hour contest entries (Xutt's Tournament.)

Why'd I decide to write an article about it? Well, besides being my first and (so far) only complete game, it's also gotten next-to-no attention from... well, anybody. Apparently it did have some fans back in the early days, as it somehow managed to end up around the middle on one of Reasonably Septaweekly's Top 30 lists (though, since I didn't follow the OHR magazines back then, I didn't find out until years later.) That's pretty much it, though--the game doesn't even have a single review, despite sitting on Castle Paradox's gamelist for almost seven years. But now, it's time to take a trip back in time (and through the Num Warps) and return to the Kirby Lands! Watch your step, and try not to do anything that might make Killer Kirby angry.

The Very Beginning

When did The Kirby Lands begin? Some might guess 2003, as that's when I uploaded the game to Castle Paradox. Others might go back as far as early 2000, when I uploaded a very incomplete version to my own website and visited the OHRRPGCE Help Me board for plotscripting advice. A rare few might even say it started in 1998 or 1999, when I attempted to make an early version of the game (which never got anywhere) during my first try with the OHRRPGCE. Actually, all three of these guesses would be incorrect, as the true origins of The Kirby Lands are in the distant past, in a time when "OHRRPGCE" was nothing more than an unpronouncable string of letters and everyone still used Windows 3.1.

Yep, the beginning of The Kirby Lands can be traced back as far as the early '90s. The fall of 1994, if you want to be really specific. I was in the third grade, and I had recently made up a creature known as the "Numnum." Numnums were white, pointy-nosed, oval-shaped things with enormous mouths (full of sharp teeth) and two big, round eyes on top. They were basically an updated version of some creatures I made up during the previous year (known as "Yum-Yums"), but with a design more similar to a different character I had come up with more recently, "Mr. Numnum." Mr. Numnum levitated a few feet off of the ground at all times, but other than that he looked pretty much the same as a regular Numnum (and he was the very first character to use Num Power, though I had called it "Numnum Power" at the time.)

At first, I had the Numnums fighting against the Alligator Teacher and various other monsters that I had made up earlier (such as Beefoes, walking slabs of beef with knives and guns), but since the Alligator Teacher was based on Earth and Numnums lived on another planet, I decided that I needed to come up with a new enemy for them.



For some strange reason, I was inspired by the game Kirby's Dream Land and basically ripped off the design for Kirby, keeping most of his skin white (because at the time, the only full-color picture of him I had seen was the box art for Kirby's Dream Land, and I didn't know he was really supposed to be pink) but giving him red feet instead of white ones. My species of "Kirbys" (and no, that's not a typo; I've always disliked when people pluralized Kirby as "Kirbies" for some reason) started out as the rivals of the Numnums, a bunch of barbarians with spears and swords and such that were always trying to take over the Numnums' land and eat all of their food. And they ate with forks and knives, by the way--I didn't give them the "vacuum" ability that Nintendo's Kirby had, since I figured that was just his special power and not something that every member of his species had.




Later that year, I also created a second species of round, white-skinned, funny-looking critters which I called "Blurbys." I'm not entirely sure where the idea for the Blurbys came from, though originally they formed a sort of "rock-paper-scissors" triangle with Numnums and Kirbys--Numnums could eat Kirbys, and Blurbys could beat up Numnums. It wasn't exactly a perfect rock-paper-scissors triangle, though, since Kirbys couldn't really do much against Blurbys at the time. Before too long, I completely threw out that concept and had them on a roughly equal level, though Kirbys were still usually the weakest of the three.



As you can see here, the designs of the Numnums, Kirbys (now known as K'hyurbhis), and Blurbys have changed a bit over the years:



Sometime later that year, I got tired of just having nameless armies of Numnums and Kirbys fighting while the Blurbys watched from the sidelines, and decided to make some big-name heroes for each side.



Probably the first of these guys to show up in the things I wrote and drew at the time was Nummy, a Numnum chef who inexplicably had human-like legs and arms despite the fact that all other Numnums didn't even have legs yet. A picture of him (which is the oldest Numnum picture I could find; it's from way back in 1994) is included above, so you can see just how ridiculous this looked... as well as a look at Kow, one of my even-older characters who still hasn't found his way into a game. Though he did cook a mean Kirbymeat ravioli, Nummy never showed up in The Kirby Lands, so I'll talk about the other two major characters from this time period instead--Supernum and Killer Kirby.

Supernum vs. Killer Kirby



Supernum was basically like something out of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, except Numnum-themed--he was actually a human, but when he used the power of the Num Coin, he transformed into a 6-foot, 220-pound armored warrior with the head of a Numnum and a snazzy orange cape. Originally, he had a ridiculous variety of different weapons and gadgets that he could use--the two most consistent being the Num Gun and the Numnum Sword, though there were also oddities like the "Computer Nummer" (which was capable of cracking passwords and bypassing other forms of security, and could plug into any computer), the "Super Big Num" (a giant robot in the shape of an enormous Numnum with clawed, bird-like legs), a spaceship, and even "Num Land Mines." I came up with dozens of different powers for this guy, such as the ability to grow to massive size in order to fight huge guys like Killer Kirby face-to-face, though there was always one specific power that Supernum didn't have: flight. But really, who needs to fly when you can just open up a portal through space and get somewhere in a fraction of a second instead? As time went on, Supernum himself became more powerful, drawing on more and more of the "Num Power" contained within the Num Coin. As a result, he didn't need to rely so much on the gadgets anymore (though he still used the Numnum Sword pretty often, and occasionally whipped out the Num Gun in certain circumstances) and instead switched to blasting his enemies with explosions of orange energy.



It's probably not a coincidence that he became less gadget-based and more power-based right around the time I started watching Sailor Moon in addition to Power Rangers. This kind of thing happened a lot back then--I never made fan-characters for the the things I watched and read, but there was always some sort of influence from them slipping into my own characters. And, oddly, Supernum seemed to be the one that got most of it. When I really got into Star Wars around 5th grade, Supernum added--what else?--a spaceship to his arsenal. He never did have lightspeed, however; instead, his ship moved over great distances by creating portals in space known as "Num Warps." Funnily enough, it turns out that in real life, using "wormholes" is probably a much more realistic method of crossing long distances in space than traveling at the speed of light, since the only problem with them is figuring out how the hell to create one (as opposed to all the time-warping and dying horribly that might be involved when you try to move something at the speed of light.) Of course, I didn't know that back then--I just thought the idea of Num Warps was a lot cooler than just going really, really fast.

Of course, if it was just Supernum against the Kirby armies alone, the Kirbys were utterly screwed. Though Supernum did fight earlier villains like the Alligator Teacher, he had already beaten her down and sent her off to jail (presumably some kind of high-power Numnum jail, since it would be kind of ridiculous to think someone like her could be confined by a puny human prison) after only two fights; there needed to be someone more powerful on the bad guys' side to balance him out. I went back and found an old picture of something I had called "the killer Kirby," which was an enormous Kirby-looking monster with strange lines on its face and a giant fork-like weapon known as a "Shicker," and expanded that into a whole new character.



At the time, I described him as being "20 feet tall and 20 feet fat"--this guy was big, and he had strength that matched (and far exceeded) what you'd expect from a guy with that kind of weight behind him. Now the Kirbys had a real leader, though I never did come up with a better name for the guy than "Killer Kirby"... I figure it's just something he calls himself to sound more dangerous, rather than his given name. Whether it's his real name or not, he certainly lived up to his reputation--the guy just couldn't be stopped.



The thing I've always liked most about Killer Kirby is that even though he was never supposed to be one of those "hardcore" or "ultra-serious" characters, he was still a very powerful enemy and he was always a very real threat to the heroes. One of the things I really hate about people on the Internet is their tendency to assume that a silly or cartoonish character must be weaker than someone who's from a game with tons of gore or a more serious storyline. These are the kind of people who think that Mario would lose in a fight against any generic FPS hero, just because the generic FPS hero... has a gun. No superpowers, no abilities beyond the level of a normal human, just... a gun. And usually it's not even some high-tech future gun that makes the guns we have now look like Super Soakers in comparison. A normal gun isn't really impressive when you consider that Mario has enough arm strength to effortlessly shatter bricks with his bare hands, enough leg strength to jump several times his own height without even needing a running start, and enough speed to outrun cannon shells... and that's without any power-ups. Once things like fireballs, flight, and super-size are involved, the FPS guy might as well just give up before Mario even shows up for the fight--a regular guy with a gun, no matter how skilled, is simply no match for a freakin' superhero. Even Batman, whose only power is the ability to be taken seriously despite the fact that he's dressed up as a small furry animal, wastes these kinds of guys by the roomful with little effort. Just because Mario's a silly character from a kid-friendly series doesn't mean he's not capable of stomping any old "dude with a gun" character just like yet another wimpy, slow-moving, dim-witted Goomba.

But even though Killer Kirby wasn't the type of villain that was surrounded by a cloud of violent, angsty seriousness, he never degenerated into the "Bowser" type villain, either. He could crack jokes, or even become the butt of a joke every now and then, but even at his goofiest moments Killer Kirby was never just some annoying punk that the good guys could quickly trounce and send on his way. If one of the good guys assumed he was incompetent just because he made a fart joke or clumsily knocked something over, they were in for a world of hurt. And when he did get serious about something, he could pull off some major world-conquering plans without seeming really unrealistic--another difference between Killer Kirby and the Bowser-type villains. There wasn't any Super Mario Galaxy-style "there is no freaking way that incompetent ol' Bowser could ever pull that off" suspension-of-disbelief breaking when Killer Kirby was around, because Killer Kirby was actually big enough and bad enough to believably pull it off no matter how far his evil plan reached. Whenever the good guys became more powerful, Killer Kirby was still a couple steps ahead of them, and it wasn't because of some magical item he found or some random unexplained power boost--he was just that far ahead of 'em to begin with. There was never a point in my early storylines when Killer Kirby was the lesser of two threats. When Killer Kirby was around, there were no other threats. The other guys only made their move when Killer Kirby was momentarily incapacitated or busy rebuilding his empire.

All the other bad guys--whether they were an entire planet's worth of conquering hive-mind aliens, a retired teacher-turned-sorceress who somehow managed to absorb all magic that existed in an entire world, or ancient sealed evils from several million years in the past with the power to destroy entire continents--knew not to mess with him. When the good guys managed to get him to back off for the time being, they didn't chase him down and try to kill him, because they knew that even with his plans ruined and his strength lessened by the previous fight, he was still stronger than they were. Trying to go after him when they, too, were still weakened from the last fight would be a suicide mission, so they just let him go until the next time. The only time in my early storylines that he was ever truly defeated in battle was when fighting the equivalent of two Supernums simultaneously, and even then he didn't die--he faked his death and escaped, returning one year later, stronger than ever, with robotics replacing the parts of his body that were too badly damaged. He also ended up blowing up a Pizza Hut restaurant during the course of the battle. The guy just could not be stopped, at least not for long.

Supernum: The RPG

Somewhere around mid-1995, when I was in the 4th grade, I became completely fascinated with the original NES Final Fantasy. Just as Power Rangers led to me creating Supernum and various other TV shows and movies led to shifts in his powers, Final Fantasy caused the video game ideas that I would draw out to change drastically. Up until this point, I had never planned out anything even vaguely resembling an RPG; my ideas for games starring Supernum, the Numnums, and other characters were always either arcade-style quartermunchers or action-adventure games along the lines of Super Mario Bros. 3, Metroid, or Zelda 2. But in 1995, I was looking through my NES games and rediscovered that little poster that came with Final Fantasy, showing every monster in the game along with its stats, weaknesses, and special attacks. I filled up almost an entire notebook with "stat sheet" type things for all sorts of enemies--random encounters like evil Numnums and flying butts, minion-type bosses like Barney, and more, all the way up to the major bosses like the Alligator Teacher, Ex-Teacher, Killer Kirby's head scientist Dr. X, and (of course) Killer Kirby himself. This notebook, filled with stats and small, crudely-drawn pictures of hundreds of enemies, is what I really consider to be the beginning of The Kirby Lands.

Of course, in 1995 there was no such thing as the OHRRPGCE. If I remember right, the OHRRPGCE hadn't even been thought of at the time. The only RPG-creation program out there back then--as far as I know, anyway--was RPG Maker 95, and I didn't even find out about that one until around 1999 (it probably wouldn't have run on that old 486 laptop we had back then, anyway.) So for years, the plans for a Supernum RPG were confined to the pages of that old notebook, with its sketchy black-and-white ink pen drawings and Final Fantasy-esque enemy stat blocks.

The (Unfinished) Kirby Lands

Fast-forward to several years later, in THE FUTURE (also known as the summer of 1998.) For years, I have not drawn or written about Supernum, my creativity instead focusing on a trio of magical mushrooms (who fought against those invading aliens that I mentioned earlier) and a turtle that made fart sounds using his tongue (he made a cameo appearance in The Kirby Lands.) But when I discovered the OHRRPGCE, the very first idea I had for a game was one based on my old Supernum game ideas.

...well, actually, no. The very first idea I had for a game was some poorly-thought-out thing starring various Pokémon (a Dratini and a Magikarp, as well as some others; I can't remember the rest) that literally went nowhere. Seriously, I didn't even get any graphics drawn for it before I lost interest. But the first idea that I ever actually started on was a game titled The Kirby Lands. This was definitely not the same TKL that can be downloaded on Castle Paradox or Slime Salad now, however--the characters included Supernum (in his human form, named Eddie; he wouldn't actually get to transform into Supernum until near the end of the game), his sister Julia, a young Kirby named Kirber, a random Yoshi who had absolutely no reason to be in the game, and Viney the Great Victreebel, who looked like a regular Victreebel but was actually more powerful than any Pokémon, up to and including Mewtwo. I had also planned for Nummy to show up in the game (joining the party later after Viney left to... do some sort of important Victreebel stuff, I guess), though if I remember right I never did actually make the graphics for him. In addition to the differences in playable characters, the random enemies that showed up were... well, random. The first enemies you'd encounter were little blue jellyfish creatures (this was on land, by the way) and Jigglypuffs, which attacked you with the fumes from their toxic markers. Though the characters and enemies were very different, the basic plot (that Killer Kirby had set up a new castle in a small region known as the Kirby Lands, and was trying to conquer it) was pretty much there already.



Though this version of The Kirby Lands was destroyed in a hard drive crash and never finished, it did contribute one big thing to TKL as we know it--its setting. Until this point, all my plans for Supernum games had focused on Nummorro, the homeworld of the Numnums (originally called "Numnum Land" back in my early-'90s stuff.) With the creation of the Kirby Lands, I had a new setting for a game that didn't need to go by the rules and established locations that I had set up for Nummorro over the years. And on top of that, it wasn't nearly as big as Nummorro, meaning that I could make a game set there without needing to make a ludicrously huge world map that took ages to cross. Of course, I ended up doing that anyway--anyone who thinks Okédoké or Puckamon have needlessly huge maps should check out the maps in The Kirby Lands... but make sure you have some kind of emergency heart-attack medication nearby first, just in case. Anyway... since the Kirby Lands were just a single large island trapped within the Num Warps and cut off from the rest of the universe, rather than an entire massive planet, mapping became much easier.

The Other Unfinished Supernum Game
The next thing I came up with after getting a new hard drive was, yet again, a Supernum game. Two of them, in fact. First there was Supernum: The Prophecy of the Numnums, a game I attempted to make using RPG Maker 95 using basically the same storyline as the old version of The Kirby Lands but set on Nummorro. However, that one nonsensically included a bunch of characters based on people I knew from a certain AOL Pokémon forum (which no longer exists) and it's probably better if I don't mention much about it. Instead, I'll talk about the one that actually would've been worth playing if it were ever finished, Supernum and the Eight Orbs of Power.

This was the first OHRRPGCE game I made that actually got somewhere. And, strangely, it had much better graphics than The Kirby Lands despite being made almost a year before I even started on that game. I'm not sure how it happened, but Supernum and the Eight Orbs of Power looked more like a poor man's Wandering Hamster and less like a horrible MS Paint-scribble newbie game. I did have a bit of a problem with the "transparent-color is not black even though it looks like it" thing, so some of my hero graphics looked a little off... but on the whole, this game somehow had much better graphics than anything else I made for years. There were actual walls in the dungeons, for example, rather than the strange-looking "walls and outlines smashed into the same tile" thing I did in The Kirby Lands. I'm not sure if TKL's graphics were just horribly rushed, or I didn't put much effort into them, or what... but regardless, somehow my pixel-drawing ability dropped about a dozen levels in the year between Supernum and The Kirby Lands.

Anyway, Supernum and the Eight Orbs of Power almost got finished. Just a few more months of work, and I could show the world Supernum's quest to restore power to the Num Power Orb so that he could regain his powers and be strong enough to defeat Killer Kirby the next time he attacked. Everyone would be shocked to find out that the mysterious girl with the pink cat on her shoulder, who claimed to be a guardian of the Orbs that was trying to put them all back in their rightful place so that power would stop draining out of them, was actually the villain all along--her plan being to restore the orbs, then absorb the power of all eight and mutate into some horrible monster with enough strength to dominate Nummorro even though Killer Kirby was almost fully recovered from his last battle. The girl's plan was actually going to succeed in the end, and as she ran off to her tower to absorb all of the Orbs, the player would think that Nummorro was doomed... but then, the Num Power Orb, having bonded with Supernum, would reject Kayana's will and instead strengthen the heroes to the point where they could fight her off.



But then, in the summer of 1999, a terrible thing happened. My dad was installing a new solar power system to act as a backup in case the main power went out, and in order to test it... he turned off the main power. The computer, of course, had not yet been configured to run on this new solar backup... but nobody had bothered to tell me that. I had custom.exe open at the time, toiling away making the graphics for the final dungeon of Supernum, when suddenly the screen went black. When the power was back on again, I opened up supernum.rpg and found that it had been corrupted beyond repair. My most recent backup was three months old, and was back at the very beginning--the first town was mostly done, and you could travel north to the Altar of the Orbs to begin your quest, but that was just about it. I had lost two entire continents, plus several small islands, a buttload of graphics, several dungeons, and a handful of boss battles that were somehow pretty well balanced (better than the ones in TKL, anyway) considering my inexperience with the OHRRPGCE. Supernum and the Eight Orbs of Power was dead, and there would be no way I'd ever be able to finish it after losing that much. For months afterward, I pretty much gave up on the OHRRPGCE.

Click here for the second half of the article.