Kirby has had a pretty big 2022 thanks to Dream Buffet and the incredibly successful Forgotten Land. So successful that one company decided to make a deck of karuta cards starring the pink puffball and side character, Chef Kawasaki. Kirby's creators have already swooped in and demanded the project be shut down.
As highlighted by Eurogamer, there's a little more to this story than Nintendo not taking kindly to people unofficially using its IP to make money. Karuta are Japanese playing cards, and a deck featuring Kirby and his closest friends would probably go down a storm if an official deck were created. This unofficial creation, however, has Kirby and Kawasaki donning micro bikinis, not exactly in keeping with the family-friendly image the series aims to project.
KWSK Karuta is the company responsible for the deck's creation which was dubbed Chef Kawasaki's Micro Bikini Karuta. No ambiguity there, and as you can see below, you get exactly what it says on the tin. Chef Kawasaki wearing a teeny tiny bikini, and even Kirby wearing something similar in some of the cards included with the deck.
Even though HAL Laboratory has quickly put a stop to the cards being sold, it didn't manage to do so before a few fast-acting and thirsty Kirby fans got their hands on them. The first, and probably only, decks went on sale earlier this week and sold out in a matter of hours. That popularity right off the bat may well be what alerted their existence to HAL as shortly after that, the cards' creators revealed they are no longer allowed to sell them.
While you might not be able to get your hands on any risque Kirby cards, for the time being, there's plenty of other stuff for fans of the Nintendo mascot to be excited about. Not only the two Kirby games that have already launched in 2022, but also the reveal that Return To Dream Land Deluxe will be here in February 2023.