“Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros & Kirby Air Riders

Have you ever noticed that the food graphics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders are 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.

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.

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 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 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 15 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 prime rib steak, a tempura bowl, and a whole watermelon instead of a slice.