Released in 2006 for the Nintendo DS, Kirby: Squeak Squad has always been an odd one out in the Kirby franchise. It’s the second Kirby game outsourced to Japanese studio Flagship, which closed its doors the following year. In a way, it feels like a filler game from an uncertain time for the franchise. It was the first traditional game in the series released following the departure of Kirby series creator Masahiro Sakurai, and it was the last traditional game before current series director and Master of the Deepest Lore Shinya Kumazaki was given the reigns with fandom darlings Super Star Ultra and Return to Dream Land.

What we ended up getting out of these odd circumstances was a perfectly serviceable Kirby game. It was the first game I ever played in the series, actually. I enjoyed it thoroughly in 2007, and I enjoyed revisiting it in 2018. A lot of people who grew up with it consider it one of their favorites, and I can’t blame them.

But it feels underwhelming in some ways, and in hindsight it also often feels drab, lonely, and even a bit unsettling. It has many odd design and aesthetic decisions, and a lot of recycled assets from the GBA games that preceded it, all of which make it feel like it lacks a coherent creative vision of its own. This is what stood out to me the most when revisiting the game a decade later. In this piece, I’d like to go in-depth, and explain why Squeak Squad feels so deeply weird as a Kirby game, even if on the surface it may not stand out.

Kirby, moments before The Incident.

The Premise

Oddly enough, while Squeak Squad isn’t particularly popular compared to other games in the series, its simple plot has become the poster child for the narratives of the Kirby platformers.

The game begins with Kirby about to enjoy a slice of strawberry shortcake, which is suddenly stolen. Kirby, master of deduction that he is, immediately pins this on his longtime rival King Dedede. That poor, sweet, innocent penguin, who has never done anything wrong. Over the course of the first world, Kirby rushes to Dedede’s castle and fights him, only to realize that the real culprits are the titular Squeaks, a band of thieving mice. The Squeaks are actually after some sort of legendary treasure locked away in an ornate chest in Dedede’s possession. (I guess they just stole Kirby’s cake because they could.)

Kirby doesn’t really understand what’s going on here, but he assumes his cake is as important to everyone else as it is to him and that it must be what’s locked in that big chest everyone’s fighting over. Dedede then hurls him like a bowling ball at the Squeaks and they all end up in a gargantuan and surprisingly sunny cavern somehow (minus Dedede, who gets to stay home). And so Kirby sets off on a quest to recover his cake from some naughty mice, and along the way accidentally helps free Satan from his prison.

(We’ll get to Satan later.)

Squeak Squad revolves around treasure. Most levels contain three treasure chests containing various unlockables — two easier to miss small chests, and one large chest that you have to fight the Squeaks for at the end of the level. Most chests are technically optional, but five include items required to unlock the last two worlds. This is one of the main gimmicks of the game. It was slightly unique for a Kirby game at the time, with only Kirby 64 and the Great Cave Offensive subgame in Super Star placing this much emphasis on collectibles. Unfortunately for Squeak Squad, every Kirby game these days is littered with collectibles, and most of them have better level design than their DS predecessor. (I will admit, however, I got a kick out of a level that tricks you into thinking it’s two empty screens long, and you have to fly up to an off-camera area to actually find the bulk of the level and its three treasures.)

Some of these treasures lead to some of the biggest annoyances with Squeak Squad. Multiple levels in the game feature a fork in the road, with one path leading to a treasure chest and another (or multiple others) leading to your precious time being wasted. Either you pick the correct path on your first attempt, or you have to replay the level if you want to get the treasure. Several levels also feature puzzles and challenges where a chest can be dropped into a bottomless pit, and you have to rush to catch it in midair. These chests can make you painfully aware of how small Kirby’s hitbox actually is and how precise your alignment with a falling chest has to be.

Treasure chest-related annoyances can also come in the form of the “treasure scuffle” segments capping off most levels, where Kirby and the Squeaks fight over a large chest.

I honestly can’t decide whether or not I like these segments. On the one hand, they successfully make it feel like a frantic, sometimes even slapstick fight over the treasure — if you’re carrying any treasure you’ve found, then getting hit by a Squeak will immediately make Kirby drop one of his chests, which one of the Squeaks will then attempt to take to their hideout. Likewise, you can hit a Squeak carrying a chest to make them drop it, or just have Kirby inhale it right out of their hands. Once the Squeaks have retreated, there’s a brief period where you can chase them into their hideout and fight for the treasure there, but they’ll eventually board up the entrance for good.

The treasure scuffles are often exciting due to the very real possibility that you’ll lose your loot, but this can also make them frustrating. I can’t say I enjoyed having to replay a level and recover a set of chests I had already collected just because a Squeak knocked them out of me and right into a pit. On the other hand, the Squeak minibosses can all be stun locked easily with virtually any copy ability attack, and in many levels you can just grab the large chest and run right over to the exit without fighting them.

The treasures themselves in Squeak Squad are rather interesting, though, because they offer a wide variety of tangible rewards. These range from keys to unlock bonus levels, to ability scrolls that upgrade your copy abilities, to life ups, to spray cans that can change Kirby’s color scheme (although none of the alternate palettes hold a candle to pink). I appreciate that most aren’t just random trinkets, even if things like the boss trophies aren’t exactly useful.

So that’s the premise. There’s treasure in this one, and Kirby has to fight some rats for it. But if you’ve played other Kirby games in the past, you may realize that something is missing: any sort of friend or ally for Kirby.

Pictured above: Kirby and seven of his closest friends, none of whom appear in Squeak Squad.

You Aren’t Here to Make Friends (Because There Are None)

Squeak Squad certainly isn’t the only game to have Kirby go it alone, but it’s an increasingly rare thing to see.

Dream Land 2 had Kirby’s three animal friends, and its sequel Dream Land 3 doubled the number of animal friends and added Gooey as Kirby’s player two. Super Star allowed Kirby to turn just about any copy ability-giving enemy in the game into a friendly helper. Kirby 64 famously had Kirby accompanied by Ribbon the fairy, a friendly Waddle Dee, the human painter Adeleine, and a very tsundere King Dedede who totally doesn’t secretly want to be Kirby’s friend. Modern games will, at the very least, have Bandana Waddle Dee hanging around. Even in Flagship’s Amazing Mirror, Kirby was accompanied by three differently colored clones of himself who roamed the mazelike mirror world doing… something. The list goes on and on. Kirby’s friends have become such an integral part of the series that being able to play as them is one of the main hooks of the latest game in the series, Star Allies.

This is one of the things that makes Squeak Squad feel so lonely to me. Kirby has to travel through a series of often drab environments, perpetually pestered by rascally rodents, with not a friend in the world.

Speaking of those environments…

Dirt

The Kirby series, in my opinion, has some of the best art direction in the game industry. I may be a bit biased, as a big fan of colorful sparkly cutesy things who thinks more games should aspire to look like Lisa Frank illustrations, but I’m definitely not alone in my admiration for the artistry constantly on display in this series. Even as far back as Kirby’s Adventure on the NES, Kirby has dazzled players with highly varied, colorful, whimsical fantasy environments, many of which push the limits of the hardware they’re on. Even stock video game tropes such as the grass level or the water level are often made beautiful and unique in Kirby due to its striking art direction and stylistic quirks.

While Squeak Squad is no slouch with its frequently lovely visuals, as a Kirby game? It’s hard not to think of it as the one with all the dirt.

Squeak Squad borrows many of its art assets from its GBA predecessors, Nightmare in Dream Land and Amazing Mirror, which marked a shift in art direction for the series. The landscapes are still dreamy, but less in a fantastical Candy Land way and more in a “vaguely surreal and intangible” way. Backdrops are generally “realistic” paintings of distant, misty landscapes with surreal skies and the occasional bit of impossible topography, rendered mainly in soft pastels and always kept a bit blurry and misty. The foregrounds, on the other hand, sport some gorgeous texture work, but they often keep things very… literal, compared to the whimsical, cartoonish, heavily stylized visuals found elsewhere in the series. There’s less inventiveness at play, less cute flourishes. Colors are often rather subdued, and textures are kept more on the realistic side of things as opposed to using fanciful patterns and shapes.

Some of the more visually pleasing areas in Squeak Squad.

It can be a downright gorgeous game at times, don’t get me wrong. The grassy fields of Prism Plains are crisp and vibrant, and the sparkly airborne castles and star-sprinkled clouds introduced in Cushy Cloud represent the usual look of the series wonderfully.

The level types you’ll actually be seeing for a majority of Squeak Squad.

The problem with Squeak Squad, really, is that it relies very heavily on its blandest tilesets: the caverns dug out of plain brown and grey dirt, the drab ancient ruins, the odd wooden structures in the forest. You see these tilesets and recolors of them constantly. There’s nothing really all that wrong with them on a technical level — the pixel art here is all great, and these settings do make sense for a treasure hunting themed game. But they do nothing to show off the unique charm of the Kirby series. You could stick the above environments in Wario Land 4 (a game I also love, don’t @ me) and they would blend right in.