If the player uses the copy ability on Scarfy, Kirby can obtain the Crash ability. It's only possible to get Crash from Scarfy with this method.

A locked icon of the Great Cave Offensive can be found in the game's data, suggesting that the player would originally have to unlock the Great Cave Offensive. However, it is already unlocked when the game starts in the final release.

Along with many other small unused text and graphics, one of the main ones that didn't make it in the final game were Meta Knight's bats, which were originally going to be used as projectiles by Meta Knight, either when you battle him face to face or when you're escaping the Halberd.

Kirby Super Star, despite being intended for a SNES release from the get-go, actually began development on the original NES. This unreleased prototype was used for internal purposes only, as a way of finalizing all the ideas that would go into the final product. This can be seen with the NES sprites for the Yo-Yo and Cutter abilities, which were released to the public over 20 years later in an issue of Famitsu: the sprites shown look nearly identical to their counterparts in the finished product, with the main exception being the lack of Super Star's signature ability hats. Director Masahiro Sakurai stated that this type of development style is beneficial to him, as the starting step of finalizing all of a game's ideas via an internal prototype makes the rest of development significantly easier.

The two-player aspect of the game came as a request from Shigeru Miyamoto, who thought multiplayer would fit Kirby even better than Mario due to the Kirby games' slower pace. Masahiro Sakurai, however, struggled a bit with implementing it due to multiplayer in other games awkwardly affecting things like the camera. Sakurai and his team eventually found workarounds to this dilemma in the form of the Space Jump mechanic, and what he described as a "Lead Player and Supporting Player" system.

The "5 Games in one!" feature of the game came from Masahiro Sakurai's need to keep the player's attention and interest in this SNES game, as he believed that massive games that were on the market at the time might overwhelm players or bore them with their consistent and continuous gameplay.

Sakurai also revealed a scrapped 6th game that was going to be available in the pack: "Kagero Mansion". This game would have featured Kirby's mouth "sealed shut". The pink hero would then have to utilize different items that represented copy abilities to get by.

Spring Breeze was originally not going to have the copy ability system at all, presumably to emulate the difficulty of the original Kirby's Dream Land that it was based on, but this idea was abandoned. Masahiro Sakurai, though, wished that every player would at least try the game once without copy abilities just for a unique challenge.

In an interview conducted by Nintendo to promote the release of the Super NES Classic Edition, Kirby Super Star director Masahiro Sakurai revealed that celebrity copywriter and EarthBound series creator Shigesato Itoi came up with the game's Japanese title, Kirby of the Stars Super Deluxe. Itoi also came up with the idea for the Japanese box art, which is designed after Paulownia wood boxes traditionally used to package luxury alcohol and tableware in Japan. Itoi believed that both the title and the artwork would "convey how rich [the game] is in content."