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Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Friend Bounce Returns to Kirby Star Allies!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - It's unclear if Nintendo knows that the Friend Bounce ever existed.

Today, Nintendo of America announced some news about Kirby Star Allies via this tweet:

You see that, right there? They proper noun Friends, but refer to them as allies. What are these guys actually called?! Anyway, here Kirby apparently carries around a portable trampoline made out of a spider web, and the friends/allies/helpers/partners can jump off that and be able to get a good lift from it with some invincibility/damaging frames.

Much like Kirby having Copy Ability-based Helpers to assist him coming from Kirby Super Star, the Friend Bounce concept also comes from there. Observe this video filmed by me from Kirby Super Star Ultra:


So why does the header question if Nintendo knows this feature comes from another game, and what is with that video's quality?

First of all, in order to perform the Friend Bounce in Kirby Super Star Ultra, you need to press A to jump on the top of your partner's sprite (basically their head?), and then you need to hold up on the Control Pad in order to perform that WHEE bounce that sends you up high. There is no spider trampoline, you just go up. You can do it in mid-air if your Helper is there, and you get invincibility frames and can damage enemies during the upward part of the jump. You also can go fairly high, and chain multiple Friend Bounces together.

Apparently, players can play through the whole of Kirby Super Star and not even know that the Friend Bounce is in there, because it is actually very inconvenient to use and isn't really that useful. It's one of those cool-to-have techniques.

It also doesn't exist in the instruction manuals for Kirby Super Star or Kirby Super Star Ultra. You can go read every page (and they have good artwork since they were both physical instruction manuals at one point) and you won't find the Friend Bounce or any reference to it. You'll find everything else Kirby and the Helpers can do, but not the Friend Bounce. You might get a kick out of comparing the terminology used in Kirby Super Star vs. Kirby Super Star Ultra, since they call the same action different things.

Kirby Super Star Ultra Suppin すっぴん Normal Beam cancel a Helper
Apparently, whatever a Suppin is, it is a woman's face without makeup. I'm not entirely sure what implication that is supposed to have for Kirby's Helpers?
That's probably why they changed it to a Normal Beam in Kirby Super Star Ultra.

Since the Friend Bounce is not in the instruction manual, then could it be possible that HAL Laboratory is not even aware that it has ever existed in the franchise before? No documentation means no memory.

One major difference between the Friend Bounce in Kirby Super Star and Kirby Star Allies is that it appears to require the new Spider Copy Ability to actually use it in Kirby Star Allies, hence the spider web trampoline. What if you're not a Spider? ...Stay tuned...


A lot of the friend abilities and team-up mechanics and copy mixing parts of Kirby Star Allies doesn't make the most amount of sense on paper or in the small trickle of information Nintendo and HAL are providing the public, but since KoopaTV is apparently going to write an article about tiny pieces of information on this game, then anticipate much more coverage to come.


Your friends not only can enable cool abilities, but also new attacks... like Curling!
It turns out the Friend Bounce in Kirby Super Star Ultra was documented on the Japanese website!
Friend Bounce and lots of other things await in Kirby Star Allies, which was fully reviewed here!

8 comments :

  1. Correction's Corner: "You'll find everything else Kirby and the Helpers can do, but that the Friend Bounce."

    The reason I know about the Friend Bounce is that I've been trying to finish "The Great Cave Offensive", and honestly, I feel like some treasures require the use of Partners. They're definitely useful in navigating terrain. Anyway, I'm only missing one treasure chest, so hopefully I'll be able to find it this weekend.

    Although, I thought allies had unlimited jumping like Kirby. It's possible that it could either be intended for a technique for speedrunners, or maybe just to show off the Spider's moveset.

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    1. ...Yeah, that's a pretty bad typo since it's supposed to read "but not the Friend Bounce." and the fact that it's not there was supposed to be the major revelation and value-add for the article.

      I brought up The Great Cave Offensive when writing this with Rawk since I said it is a huge help when completing some treasures in it, and he said he didn't know it ever existed and he got all the treasures.

      In Kirby Super Star, partners have a "Continuous Jump" (which is in the instruction manual!) where they can maintain effectively infinite horizontal distance, but they'll have to button-mash to actually gain height after a bit. It can still be done, just inefficiently.

      Delete
    2. I finally found the last treasure: "Kong's Barrel"! I wanted you to be the first to know.

      (Also, I learned that the Friend Bounce could break blocks when playing on the SNES Classic.)

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    3. Did you need the Friend Bounce to get Kong's Barrel?
      Thanks for the heads-up!

      (Yup, as said, it can damage enemies, which also includes blocks.)

      Delete
    4. No, but you did need either an upward attack or a Friend Bounce to get one of the last treasures (somewhere between 48 to 53, I take long breaks when playing The Great Cave Offensive casually).

      Actually, I think Kong's Barrel was one of the easier treasures to get. All I did was jump on the right switch.

      Delete
    5. Per Rawk's surface analysis, the whole point of Great Cave Offensive is to encourage the player to become quite familiar with all of the Copy Abilities and all of their unique mechanics and what they can do and what makes each one special.

      So yeah, everything is meant to be solved by a (nearby) Copy Ability, not Friend Bouncing.

      Kirby Super Star Ultra updated/changed a lot of the treasures to be more relevant for its time period, so your experience may vary slightly from mine.

      Delete
  2. As more and more information is released, the more I think that this game should be titled "Kirby: Super Star Allies." At this point, I would not be surprised if Marx reappears.

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