I'm a fan of Super Star Ultra and Robobot as well. I like the later more cause I found the arena pretty challenging and the mech concept is just cool to me especially for how it integrates the powerups into them.

That's fair! Super Star Ultra was one of my first video games ever, so I'm just really really nostalgic for it. You could say it's what made me a Kirby fan!
I like how it maintains the personality of the classic games before Kirby started taking a new direction into being a god-slaying invincible force of nature, and I think its episodic nature helps it stay better paced than most Kirby games.

It's a bit of a shame, because I feel like Robobot and Triple Deluxe are a little hampered in retrospect by just how good Star Allies' quality of life changes to all the abilities was under the hood. It'd be hard to bring myself to do their True Arenas with all the abilities just like I'd done with Star Allies' Soul Melter. I'm looking forward to whenever I get around to replaying them, though!

Any reason why Super Star is a lot lower than Ultra? Not saying you're wrong by the way, I honestly switch between Ultra and original all the time for which I prefer.

So this might have to do with how I grew up with Ultra and not the original Super Star, but coming back to the latter now it just feels like a beta of the former. Super Star suffers from a lot of lag (every single time you copy an enemy, for example), and lacks a surprising amount of polish in its quality of life features (you can only drop abilities as hats; ability stars are only dropped by getting them beaten out of Kirby; you cannot share invincibility, which is now present in Ultra, RtDL and Star Allies; you can't really check if you've gotten every single treasure in a sub-area unless you go on to the next area, get the first treasure there and backtrack; etc)

And for some of this, I know I'm being quite unfair to Super Star. Some of these problems I can understand Sakurai's team genuinely not knowing their game might have benefitted from being addressed at the time, but it's hard for me to go back to Super Star now.

I like boss rushes a lot too (the modern Kirby boss rushes are some of my favorite parts of them), and Super Star Ultra has content for days in that regard. I cleared Helper to Hero with every single character, and I enjoy going back to the True Arena and... well, trying not to rely on Hammer the entire time. It also helps that Ultra started the trend of pause screen storytelling, which manages to not feel too intrusive while offering a bit of extra story for those who want it (me, I'm those who want it).

Revenge of the King is also probably my favorite part of the Super Star/Ultra package - it's something to close off the main campaign on book ends by being a straightfoward hard mode of Spring Breeze, no extra gimmicks but with additional light storytelling while making Dedede a genuinely imposing antagonist in a way that makes sense for his character. Dedede battles in modern games (the series in general, actually) have relied so much on possession and dark copies that it's really refreshing to see the King himself take Kirby on.

So... a lot of why I like Super Star and Ultra so much honestly has to do with what Ultra specifically brings to the table. Super Star is amazing for creating that foundation for Ultra to work off of, and its soundtrack is nothing short of phenomenal - but as a game, it's been outdone in basically every way.

Air Ride?

Everyone throws so much shade at nightmare in dream land lmao

i mean, i know i'm pretty critical about it in this list but i'd still give it a 3.5

i really do like every kirby game.