Collection essentials #204: Kirby’s Dream Course (SNES)

Here’s another one of those games that I REALLY wish I had owned or at least played as a kid.

This is the second of many Kirby spinoff games to be made, the first being Pinball Land on the Game Boy, which I own but did not put on the list. This one isn’t your typical video game spinoff. In fact, it’s one that’s hard to even classify. It’s normally classified as a sports game because it’s loosely based on golf, but never in your life have I played a sports game that felt so little like sports!

On a very basic level it does seem very similar to golf, with the core concept being that you’re playing a course with separate “holes” trying to get the best score possible. But when going against another player, you’re actually trying to get a HIGH score in Kirby’s Dream Course, not a low score like in real golf. Upon starting a match, you’ll see a series of enemies standing around in the level, but no hole. Your goal is to hit Kirby into each enemy to eliminate them. When there is just one enemy left, they will turn into a hole, which you need to shoot Kirby into to move on. Kirby has a limited amount of stamina, and he will lose a point of it with every shot, but regain a point whenever he defeats an enemy. The single player campaign involves trying to clear courses with a limited amount of stamina. Versus mode has two Kirbys going for the high score, with the only penalty for running out of stamina being that you have to skip a turn.

How do you score points in versus matches? Well, upon eliminating an enemy, a star appears that’s the color of your Kirby, and those stars are worth a point each. When the hole appears, there are two stars that appear above the hole, making the hole more valuable than a regular enemy. Now, if the opposing Kirby touches a star, they change it to their color! That can greatly turn the tides, but touching a star does NOT increase stamina, so trying to do that too much can result in skipped turns, putting one at a disadvantage.

There are a huge number of ways that you can hit Kirby, providing a game that’s fairly easy to pick up but difficult to master. You can shoot Kirby straight, add a curve of various degrees, or you can even shoot him into the air and put spin on him to affect how he rolls. Kirby’s “copy ability” from the main games appears here too, as Kirby can gain a usable power by defeating certain enemies, such as the ability to drop/stop like a rock during a shot or gain more distance by turning into a tornado. There’s not a huge amount of variety in this game’s copy abilities, but they’re still a nice touch. There are of course many things to interact with or avoid in the courses along the way, and I’m not going to be listing all that stuff in this brief post. Play the game and see it all for yourself!

This is a truly excellent two-player game and one of my go-to choices when with a friend. What makes it great is, for one thing, even if someone has never played the game before, they’ll still have a chance, because to dominate at this game you really have to play it an awful lot and memorize very precise details. Also, failure in this game can be very amusing. There are so many possibilities when you take a shot in this game, and having your aim or estimations just a little bit off can yield wildly different and humorous results. 

This game is currently playable for free on Nintendo Switch if you have an online subscription, which is great because that means you can easily play it online with a friend. It’s a shame that they never made another Dream Course game because I feel like there’s more they could do with the concept, at the very least making it possible for more than 2 players to compete! Until they do, the original will be a regularly-played and treasured essential.