Kid Icarus Uprising – Nintendo’s Best Non-Nintendo Game

 What’s the most charming well written Nintendo game? Paper Mario? Nope. What Nintendo game has the best voice acting? Fire Emblem? Nope. What Nintendo game gives you the most injuries? Mario Party? Nope. The answer to all those questions is Kid Icarus Uprising which most of you would same, “Isn’t that the game Pit from Smash Bros is also in”. Kid Icarus Uprising is a 3DS game that’s a sequel to the NES and Gameboy game and was released March 2012. The game was developed by Sora Ltd and directed by Smash Bros director, Sakurai and it’s pretty clear that this game takes a lot of inspiration from Smash and Smash takes a lot of inspiration from Kid Icarus. This blog isn’t going to be a review of Kid Icarus Uprising, but more about why Kid Icarus Uprising is Nintendo’s most unique game that we’ll probably never see. 

 

 You can’t talk about Kid Icarus Uprising without gushing over the writing and voice acting. These two aspects were my main inspiration for writing this piece since it’s something we’ve never seen from a Nintendo game and for the purpose of writing this without any problems, I’ll be talking about the North American version of the game. The voice acting and writing all starts with the fact that Nintendo hired actually popular writers and voice actors since they had SNL writers and voice actors from the Union. Nintendo never does this and it shows with the quality of writing and voice acting in this game. Every character feel fleshed out through writing and voice acting with the humour being turned up to 11.

 

 The game breaks the fourth wall so much that I feel like the building just fell over. The main characters of Palutena, Pit, Dark Pit, Viridi and Hades banter and mesh so well that I kind of just want them to do a podcast instead of wage war on each other. Palutena is an absolute jerk to Pit but her relationship with Pit is hilarious and very heartwarming at times. Palutena even calls out Pit for having romantic feelings for Palutena when she says her non existent all seeing eye can see everything and every though Pit has. I can write this shit down and make it funny but if you’ve experienced it for yourself, you know what I’m talking about. Dark Pit is so edgy that it’s amazing he’s a Nintendo character. Viridi is my personal favourite character since despite her child like design, she’s a fucking evil badass. Hades is the most likable villain that Nintendo’s made and he’s so witty that I just want to go drinking with him instead of killing him. Then you have your one-off characters that appear only a couple of times throughout the games that are somehow fleshed out enough as characters that I know what they’re about despite only seeing them for 20 minutes. 

 

 Kid Icarus not only exceeds in writing and voice acting, but it excels in graphics and gameplay. The game is stunning even today despite being stuck on a system that apparently can’t count, like seriously 3 is not before 2. The gameplay is amazing with it being engaging and exciting, if only the controls didn’t kill your hand. But having excellent graphics and art styles isn’t something new for Nintendo so I wanted to talk about something else I feel was different from the usual Nintendo game these generations and that’s the amount of content they put into this game. 

 

 Kid Icarus and Super Smash Brothers both put more content then needed into their game which makes sense since they’re both Sakurai games. Usually in Nintendo games, there’s never really much past the main game story and when they do it’s like Splatoon that has a single player that more like something you can do on the side. Kid Icarus has a full fledge story mode in the center with a very deep multiplayer that many people actually played more than the main story. Along with those, you have many achievements, a deep weapon system, idols with a lot more in the vault, plus a well-done street pass feature. The replayablity of this game is insane since many levels have branching paths and items to find, along with a difficulty scale that you can use to make levels harder or easier. You can play levels with different types of weapons which they all play incredibly different to. I wish more Nintendo games did this so they can bring me back for more each time, games like Kirby have the base game but don’t really much else otherwise and cut really use aspects that make the game more replayable or more modes or achievements.

 

 Kid Icarus Uprising is my absolute favourite 3DS game for how unique of a game it is when it comes to it’s quality writing and voice acting with the addition of so much content. I really wish we got more games like Kid Icarus Uprising or maybe even a sequel, but unfortunately, I don’t see it happening since Sakurai is so focused on Smash and even Hades says that the next games going to be in another 25 years. We’ll just add the Kid Icarus franchise to the long list of Nintendo’s dead franchises.