Kirby for the SWITCH!!

[Dekkadeci]

I probably should have made that section earlier, but interviews with HAL Laboratory staff members have revealed some more choice tidbits about Kirby Star Allies. Interviews get pretty spoiler-riffic in general, though, so all the interview items are in spoiler tags:

Spoiler

• We'll note that Zan Partizanne (barely) keeps her English name in Japanese, while Francisca is called "Fran-Kiss" and Flamberge is called "Fran-Rouge" in Japan. HAL Laboratory has revealed that this use of "Fran" and "Zan" was supposed to imply that Zan Partizanne is not from the same biological family as and does not share her surname with the other two. (Fans indicate that the Three Mage-Sisters consistently do not address each other as if they share a family, regardless of language.)
• Turns out that the positioning of that proto-Morpho Knight concept art in that 20th anniversary book was misleading: that butterfly knight was originally designed for one of the Kirby GCN games, except all of them got cancelled, so that art was shelved for ages. Whether the concept artists blatantly based proto-Morpho Knight on Meta Knight's black-bodied and red-caped design from Kirby's Adventure, we'll never know, but they probably never seriously considered butterfly wings or that trademark horned mask for Meta Knight.
• This should prove interesting game design-wise: HAL Laboratory indicates that they got wise to fans figuring that Galacta Knight was a likely secret boss candidate for the latest Kirby games, and they missed the days when the secret boss would actually be secret. (Thus, this is a good portion of their motivation to get a new boss as the sub-final boss for Kirby Star Allies.) They also batted around their awareness that butterflies in the latest Kirby game cutscenes have been representing peace and a return to happy normalcy, while this clashes with what they'd heard about butterflies folklorically while growing up (probably them being spirits of the dead and therefore a bad omen, according to Japanese folklore). So, the bad omen cutscene butterfly came first, and the idea to finally use that Morpho Knight concept art for the resulting boss came later.
• Interviews with the sound team reveal that Void Termina's voice was constructed from 4 staff members saying "Kirby, iroha" without being told what those voice clips would be used for. Huh, I guess they're not all distorted versions of Kirby's voice clips.
• HAL Laboratory originally intended to slap another planet onto story mode for the Wave 3 DLC update, but positive reception to the Dream Friends put them on the direction to creating the Heroes In Another Dimension game mode instead.
• HAL Laboratory was indeed angling to make Kirby Star Allies an easier Kirby game than the latest ones. They aimed to let kids be able to slog through story mode a la Kirby's Dream Land...and it clearly worked too well.

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