Before you read, please note that this is a bit incomplete and I need to finish it :p This covers where I started to a brief degree so I am leaving it here for now!
Kirby Super Star is my favorite game ever, not only on the SNES, but in general. The game has so much creativity and is unique among the rest of the Kirby series, and is by far my favorite Kirby game and my most played Kirby game to date.
My love for this game started when I was a child, as my first game in the series was Kirby Super Star Ultra on the DS. I've beaten it several times casually. This introduced me to the classic Kirby Super Star on Wii Virtual Console (and of course I played that one to death too). No other Kirby game can compete with the charm and uniqueness of Kirby Super Star.
Now come 10 years later and I'm bored out of my mind during the pandemic breaking out, and I find out about the art of speedrunning. This led me to buying a capture card and set up a Twitch account to start broadcasting my progression toward the top of the board. KSS was not my first game to speedrun, but it was my first game I have taken seriously. I genuinely grinded my ass off to get good.
My goal since the beginning was to get top 10, and then eventually best in North America. I was able to accomplish one of these goals. Even if I am no longer top 10, I was able to achieve it at some point and I am happy with where I have ended off. I have burnt myself out of KSS, and I no longer wish to play it in a competitive sense. Runs were very stressful, and the end of the run was reliant on RNG. It wasn't good for my mental health, and I was getting tired of the grind. I put the controller down after my top 10.
KSS has one of the highest skill ceilings of any game I have ever played. The amount of grinding the top runners go through cannot be understated. Runners such as Yotta, Mikan-Chan, Nenbutsu, and zzzhonki are some of the strongest people I have ever met and played alongside, and who still somewhat actively play. These people were either funny, charming, or mysterious, and there is no other community that can top it. The KSS scene felt like a sub-community inside the larger Kirby series speedrunning scene. I was the only English speaker, as everyone else spoke Japanese. It was hard to overcome the language barrier, and at times I felt excluded from certain things. However, this gave me the opportunity to represent the English-speaking side as "the guy who plays Kirby Super Star", and to this day I'd still say I claim that title. One of my best accomplishments with this game was to be able to participate in Summer Games Done Quick 2021 (warning, it's cringe).
The closest bond I grew inside of the KSS community was Nenbutsu. We have had many conversations, even through the language barrier. Him and I were rivals in the scene, with times very close to each other. Once I quit, he was able to beat me. He told me that it was going to be difficult to continue going without me to compete with, as it gave him a sense of motivation, but he was still able to continue. He is very diligent and is still competing for the best times. Please consider following him on Twitch, he deserves the support and still plays to this day. I am very proud of him.
Celabeat, who has retired speedrunning altogether, was a great mentor and one of the leading pioneers of the KSS scene. He has made several tutorials and helped me get into the swing of things. He still somewhat comes back to the game to strat-find, and he is amazing at doing so. In my eyes, he is the icon of Kirby Super Star, even if he doesn't want me to think that way. He now enjoys drawing digital art, and I think you should check out his profile!
I appreciate you reading my story. However, this story is only the beginning of my journey, when I realized that I can play other games besides Kirby Super Star. So continue reading if you'd like to hear more about me!