Have you ever noticed that the food graphics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders is flat “billboarded” stock images of food?

This artistic decision from director Masahiro Sakurai has persisted through 8 games over nearly 25 years. I've seen a few folks online remarking about the “JPEG” or “PNG”-like quality of the images in the most recent release: Kirby Air Riders.

While researching every game with this art style and all 150+ unique food images I ended up fixing wikis, reviewing a seasonal KitKat flavor, and preserving an uncatalogued image of tempura soba.

Burgers from Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001), Kirby Air Ride (2003), Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008), Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018), and Kirby Air Riders (2025).

Where it all began! Super Smash Bros. Melee for the GameCube started off with 28 distinct food items, often found in “Party Balls”. Each type of food had a different “nutritional value” and “yumminess quotient” according to the in-game trophy dedicated to the food items.

Melee included many foods specific to Japanese cuisine, such as unagi (eel), omurice, soba, dango, and gyūdon. I do distinctly remember growing up as a “culinarily sheltered” kid in the midwest United States and not understanding what many of these food items were.

Kirby Air Ride for the GameCube had significantly fewer distinct food items (12) compared to Melee and maintained many of the same food stock images from Melee, including the apple, burger, chicken, curry, omurice, onigiri, and ramen. Nigiri was included, but the image was changed from a sushi board to a plate.

The stock images had their saturation increased and the black borders around the images are thicker, sometimes 2-3 pixels instead of only 1 pixel for Melee.

I paid $50 plus shipping on eBay for this PNG. This is the closest I'll get to NFTs.

While researching the foods in Kirby Air Ride I discovered a wiki description of a “tempura soba” item that I'd never heard of and wasn't included in the Spriters Resource spritesheets for Kirby Air Ride. Turns out that this item was changed to a “hotdog” in the NSTC-M and PAL releases of Kirby Air Ride.

I was unable to find a non-blurry image of the tempura soba sprite online, so of course I had to preserve this sprite myself. I purchased a Japanese copy of Kirby Air Ride, dumped the ROM using the FlippyDrive Disc Backup Utility, and ran the ROM using Dolphin with “Dump Textures” mode enabled to archive the sprite directly from the game.

In the process I also learned that the cover of Kirby Air Ride changed between the Japanese and international releases. The Japanese cover art features a smiling happy Kirby where the international cover has Kirby with a furrowed brow and serious look.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii has only one more food item compared to Melee (29) and introduces 11 new food items including bread, cake, candy, chocolate, cookie, melon soda, parfait, peaches, pie, pineapple, and steak.

About half of the Japanese-specific foods from both Melee and Kirby Air Ride were replaced: curry, omurice, onigiri, and ramen.

Super Smash Bros. Wii U and 3DS have the same total number of food items as Brawl (29). These games change the food art style completely, again! It's brighter, saturated, and looks delicious.

The soda item was changed from a melon cream soda to a dark cola with lemon. The omurice was changed to a pair of fried eggs with bacon. These games are also the only ones without the “burger” food item.

Super Smash Bros. for 3DS uses the same food artwork used in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U downscaled to 64x64 pixels from 256x256 pixels with some minor editing.

Super Smash Bros. Wii U and 3DS added the “Mont Blanc” food item, which is a French dessert that is popular in Japan. I've seen multiple guides and wikis mistakenly label this food item as “noodles” due to the “vermicelli” shape of the puréed chestnuts. Yummy!

While researching and writing this blog post I happened across “Mont Blanc”-flavored KitKats. These are apparently a limited-time flavor for autumn. The KitKats are creamy and have plenty of chestnut flavor, but they are very sweet (apparently Mont Blanc is quite sweet, too, so this is to be expected).

Mont Blanc food item from Super Smash Bros Wii U, 3DS, and Ultimate

“Mont Blanc flavored limited-time KitKats”

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate uses the same 29 foods from the Wii U and 3DS and adds 9 more foods for a total of 38. Many of the newly added foods are call-backs to food items in previous titles, below highlighted in pink.

The 9 new foods in Ultimate are burgers, cheese, corndogs, donuts, dumplings, daisies, pizza, pineapple, and steak.

It's clear that the “Sozaijiten” stock images were still in use even in 2018: 17 years later! The apple, cheese, and chicken stock images for Super Smash Bros. Melee match the stock images used in Ultimate.

Kirby Air Riders released for the Switch 2 has the most foods of any game with this art style with 45 distinct food items.

Massive thank-you to Charles Bernardo for sending me carefully cropped images of the food in Kirby Air Riders.

Kirby Air Riders is the first game in this series to use completely new models for all food items: not even the apple or cheese are the same from any previous game. Kirby Air Riders is also the first game in this series not to have a “roast chicken” item, breaking from an established video-game food trope.

Kirby Air Riders adds a new food-centric mode called “Gourmet Race” where riders earn points by consuming food as quickly as possible in a small arena. Gourmet Race introduces a new food concept: “Large Foods”. Large food items are worth 15 points instead of 1 point per food item. There are 14 large food items, some presenting as “upgraded” versions of regular-sized foods.

The large food items are: a bunch of 12 bananas instead of 3, a bread-basket, a double cheeseburger, a whole cake instead of a slice, donuts, a fruit basket, a board of nigiri instead of a plate, fruit parfait, pizza, popcorn, salad, rainbow shave ice instead of blue only, a tempura bowl, and a whole watermelon instead of a slice.

There are 16 total food items that only appear in a single title across the 25-year span of games. Kirby Air Riders and Super Smash Bros. Melee have by far the most unique food items with 8 and 5 respectively.