According to Masahiro Sakurai on his YouTube channel, he thought a lot about how to implement the unique gameplay element of Kirby using each of his enemies as an attack, which originated from Sakurai's need for a "Risk-Reward" system for his game. He even revealed that an early concept of this was Kirby using a long tongue, instead of his signature vacuum, to catch and consume enemies, and he further stated that this concept predated Yoshi's tongue attack too.