posted: 2024-06-03
The Future is Colorful - A Discussion of Kirby's Dreamland 2 DX
One of the main reasons that up until this past month I hadn’t replayed Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (Dream Land 2) was its visual presentation. As a Gameboy game released in 1995, Kirby’s Dreamland 2 is perfectly serviceable in its base visual presentation on a two-color LCD screen. Even on a Gameboy Advance screen, the way that I first played the game as a youth, the game’s visuals are ever-so-simple to process. You got three colors, one for each of the animal friends!1 These are, again, entirely fine ways to experience the game.
But I’m going to be honest with you: Kirby’s Dream Land 2 is not a game I would choose to replay on a whim. I find the game to be charming and simple, sure. I quite enjoy the introduction of Kirby’s animal friends, Rick, Coo and Kine. But to me, Dream Land 2 is ultimately an early Kirby game with controls only as good as the Gameboy allows. These controls are functional, but reflect how far Kirby has come in almost 30 years. Kirby can only fly by tapping the Up direction on the arrow pad, rather than with multiple A-presses. Kirby doesn’t have any kind of slide movement. Kirby can’t even do is trademark kickflip move because the Skateboard copy ability isn’t even the game (which is WACK). It isn’t noticeable through most of the game, but these small differences lead to an unnecessarily difficult experience, especially against late game bosses.
And y’know, it sure doesn’t help that the game doesn’t look that inviting.
Just imagine what would happen if you judged every game by its file select menu...
Enter Kirby’s Dreamland 2 DX, a romhack that modifies Kirby’s Dream Land 2 from a Gameboy game to a Gameboy COLOR game! As described by it’s romhacking.com page, the romhack offers “Full Colorization”, minimal slowdown to reflect the differences in hardware, and “Extra Visual Snazz”, among others. This “extra visual snazz” is what initially caught my eye: “smoother fade effects, some color animation, and other little details to push the hardware just a bit more”. These manifest in the experience by having the health bars change from yellow to red when Kirby has a single slice of health left, or by having the entire interface change color when Kirby pairs up with an animal friend.
I won’t lie, these are things that, while neat, are not the end-all-be-all reason why I would play any old game. Had this not been Kirby’s Dream Land 2, I don’t think I would have given this romhack a whirl. But it was Kirby’s Dream Land 2, and I was looking for a reason to start yet another video game, so I figured why not, the last time I had played the game through had been during the Bush administration.
It’s hard to communicate just how crucial graphics are to the experience of playing games, and that the context of the graphics matters almost just as much. I recall some of the most simple areas in Dream Land 2: little ramps and mounds with a checkboard pattern that had otherwise no contextual presence. These rooms could have been in World 2, or in World 6. Even off the top of my head, I cannot tell you where these rooms are without replaying the levels themselves due to their self-similarity through their monochrome color palette. With the power of the remake I can now tell you that there’s one in Red Canyon and there’s one in Iceberg. How? They added color.
It's incredible how much heavy lifting the color red does here.
What shocks me the most is the way that the colorization makes the world really come alive. Like looking at a colorized black and white photograph from a century ago, adding color to Dream Land 2 breathes life into a product from a bygone era. And wow does game look incredible!2 The two primary standout sections are easily anything and everything to do with Red Canyon and Cloudy Park.
Red Canyon
It's incredible how much heavy lifting the Rick the Hamster does here.
As its name implies, Red Canyon is red. This is in stark contrast to the deep green color it presented in the original release. But no! Red Canyon is RED! It’s also orange, and yellow as well. The geography and landscapes of Red Canyon are decidedly NOT green. In fact, the patches of green that litter the ground are more easily understood to be little weeds. Even the sky is Red in Red Canyon! I cannot express enough how magical a sunset is in a game like Kirby’s Dream Land 2. Do you understand the Simone Biles-level of mental gymnastics I had to execute during my playthrough in 2009 when I saw that the level “Red Canyon” was in fact, green? My trapezius looked like Kine the Sunfish.
Cloudy Park
What a backdrop! And for just a level select?!
I actually said the words “Oh wow, that looks really good!” when I first entered Cloudy Park’s level select map. Yes, I know, it’s hard to imagine the feeling of amazement brought on by something like a level select screen. But, my dear reader, let me be the first to say that there were a set of coloring choices that astonished me. For one, the choice to have the primary mountain be purple while having the surrounding clouds be a pale yellow was absolutely perfect. The clouds look like they’re letting patches of sunlight enter and refract off of the water inside, creating this soft comfortable yellow. This soft glow lies in stark contrast to the actual mountain, a deep dark, purple, tall and imposing, the obstacle of the world. But there’s a third color too: gray. Purple, yellow, and gray normally wouldn’t inspire much in me, and yet, when I say the stone spires in the background of the world map, I was amazed. I didn’t even remember there being spires in this map screen, and yet, there they were. The way these spires naturally fit into the background is, of course, an impressive feat done by the original game, but in this recoloring, they’re even more impressive. And this is before I even selected a level. I seriously hopped around this level select screen for a minute just appreciating the tiny color choices because of how interesting and inspired they felt.
Dark Castle
Purple, gray and black. Oh yeah, that's some darkness alright.
The final level, Dark Castle, becomes far more imposing because of its lack of color variety. Whereas in the original games, Dark Castle continued with the same color palette, albeit with perhaps darker shades, here in the remake Dark Castle uses exactly three colors: purple, gray, and black. These are dark and imposing coming off of the previous six vibrant areas. The level select map in Dark castle is fittingly ominously dark. The skyline in each tower section of each level is gloomy and purple. Each corridor in the castle is sterile and gray. The final sections of the tower are wrapped in black. the colorization of the hack makes the final zone in the game feel truly imposing, a trait it had been lacking in the original release.
But What Does This All Mean?
It’s safe to say that I enjoyed my experience playing Kirby’s Dream Land 2 DX, and it comes from the updated graphics. I was never asking for a remake of Kirby’s Dream Land 2 in the style of, say, Kirby’s Return to Dreamland, or even Kirby’s Nightmare in Dreamland. I’m pleased that this colorization hack exists- it preserves the original controls and visual design of the original game while adding a new feature which provides new context. The colors are applied with aplomb in a way that elevates the original experience into something new and exciting. So again, it’s safe to say that the updated graphics were why I enjoyed my recent playthrough of Kirby’s Dream Land 2 DX.
And who do I have to thank for this novel experience? A single person: kkzero. Thank you kkzero.
Upon reflection, my time with Kirby’s Dream Land 2 DX fills me with optimism. I was able to have a wonderful time revisiting an old experience through the efforts of a single fan. A single person on the internet who dedicated their free time to colorizing am almost 30-year-old game gave me, a random gamer a wonderful experience. I feel so lucky that I get to exist in a period of gaming culture where fan and small-team projects are becoming just as viable of a means of playing games as buying games from a large-scale publisher. Fan and independent games are the lifeblood of the gaming community in this day and age, and I want to appreciate that often-thankless effort.
kkzero is an active modder in the romhacking scene, they have colorized more Gameboy games than just Dream Land 2, and I’ve had the chance to have a look at some of their other works as well. Shoutouts to King James Bible DX in particular. They also made Samus Goes to the Fridge to Get a Glass of Milk which seems like a game with my sense of humor, so maybe I’ll try that one next.
That’s the magic of romhacking: there’s always something new to discover. I think what excites me most from this experience with Dream Land 2 DX and the other major romhack I’ve played this year, Linda Cube Again, is that a dedicated fan project is just as impactful to me as a Triple-A game launch, hell sometimes moreso. I seek out that joy. I want to enjoy my time spent playing games. It’s the creative efforts of capable and caring fans that deliver me fun experiences in gaming, and I hope that more people can have the chance to experience this for themselves. When a romhack additively transforms the experience for the better, to me this deserves the recognition, even if it may be but a footnote in gaming history.
What matters is that there are individuals who do the small things for the random gamer to discover. I am always excited when I find some passionate creation that generates a new gaming experience. The passion of the fans is what will keep the legacy of these older games alive for years to follow. It’s why I’m optimistic. The future is colorful.
I do not think the three colors are for the three animals. It’s just convenient that it works out this way.↩︎
no you freak (/derogatory), of course this game doesn’t look like a modern game on modern consoles, I’m just saying that the game looks really great for its technology limitations. Stop thinking a that a game’s gotta look one way or another for it to “look good”.↩︎