The purpose of this page is to document all of the known tricks of Kirby's Dream Land for the Game Boy.

When ascending, holding "up" creates a lot of lag. Hold "A" instead.

When beating bosses, pressing "up" for 1 frame cancels the explosion sound and thus reduces lag.

The more sprites are onscreen the laggier the game can become. The objective is to get rid of enemies by inhaling and swallowing quickly, in order to reduce lag.

When you drop on the ground, a small star may appear which can create lag. You can prevent this star from appearing by pressing "down" in the right moment.

Usually, damage boosting is slower than walking due to the occuring lag frames. So damage boosting only saves time when there isn't much lag. It saves notably more time still if there is a door or a warpstar at the end of the boost.

When you inhale an enemy from afar you can't move until the enemy has reached Kirby. Only if you are close enough there will be no delay whatsoever.

In any case, once an enemy has reached Kirby's mouth, there will be a short animation before you can spit out the enemy or swallow it. This animation can be skipped when certain conditions are met: Once you swallow an enemy, the next thing you inhale while being close to it, there won't be an animation. This can be abused to go through a row of blocks or in order to use all three bomb drops from Kracko (in hard mode) or both stars from DeDeDe's stamp attack.

The effect of this glitch is canceled if you float or inhale normally.

This is not a timesaver, but merely a trick you can do for style points. Certain animations can be locked (in other words, reset) by changing your facing direction over and over. Your sprite will stay until you stop turning around.

Possible animations:

This is also mainly a trick for style points. When you hold "left" + "right" at the same time, Kirby will walk in place without any horizontal movement. If you let go, he will walk into the direction he was walking into before. This can be useful when entering tight vertical passages in order to keep your speed. You can moonwalk to the left when you walk left for a bit and then press "left" and "right" about every 5th frame.

Bosses and minibosses in this game are purely luck-based. When Kirby lands on the ground, bumps into a wall or inhales, the RNG changes. Because landing and bumping cause a small star to appear and inhaling also causes small oval sprites to appear.