Stone Ability’s Soft Underbelly

Kirby’s Stone Ability is iconic and featured in almost every game of the series. Kirby’s ability to turn into stone was even chosen to be part of his Super Smash Bros. move-set, out of all his other abilities. However, despite the nigh invincibility of Stone Kirby, it has quite the setback.

Stone is a simple ability, with the press of a button Kirby transforms into various heavy objects like boulders, statues, and 1 ton weights. Players use this by floating above enemies and transforming, falling upon the enemies’ heads and inflicting damage. Besides from this, and an uppercut move added in Return to Dreamland, Stone is purely for defense.

Sure, invincibility to enemy attacks is useful, but there is a limit to its usefulness when you are stationary. In recent games, the ability to slowly hop forward was added, but it does not get rid of the main issue. What Stone lacks is maneuverability.

Besides from specially designated areas designed just for the Stone Ability to slide down slopes, you’re movement is heavily restricted. Kirby is an action platformer series, the type of game where maneuverability is paramount. Enemies jump and fly, platforms float, and there are deadly pitfalls everywhere.

Only being able to attack from below or from the front is extremely limiting in a game that is full of diagonal situations. And navigating such areas with this ability is slow. Everything about this ability feels slow. The only time this ability isn’t slow enough is when you can’t stop falling and you fall into a hole and die.

The reason it is so slow is that you both lose all momentum once you fall, and then you have to press a button to change back and move again. This may sound like it isn’t much of a big deal, but when you are fighting a wave of enemies who are able to move freely, the difficulty curves fast.

The series has tried to help Stone Ability’s problem. In Crystal Shards mixing Stone with other abilities to create new hybrid abilities helps this slowness.

One of my favorite combinations is Stone and Cutter, which allows you to turn into statues of Kirby’s animal friends from the early Dreamland games. The bird in the middle was especially fast, as it could fly and roll around.

Other games tried to add more, like with the level element pegs which you could hit down with both Stone and Hammer to solve puzzles. New moves were also added like the uppercut and the extra combo moves in Star Allies.

However, in a game series with many timed sub-games like Gourmet Race, Rainbow Run, True Arena, and Guest Star encouraging the metagame of completing levels as fast as possible, Stone Ability is a great outlier compared to the much more common and mobile Cutter, Sword, Fire, and Fighter Abilities, for example.

Stone Ability has been around for much of the series’ lifespan. But, just because it is traditional doesn’t mean that it cannot be improved. Some may say that all of these factors are just a way of balancing the ability. I think that, while this is true, the ability feels so out of place the way it is now, that it needs to be changed in order to become an integral part of Kirby instead of just tacked on as something extra.