After playing Star Allies a bunch, I was on quite the kick for more Kirby games, and I played through a good few I'd played through before. This was the only one of the bunch that I couldn't remember if I'd ever actually beaten, let alone with the real ending, so I felt writing a review for this one at least was proper. It took me 4 hours or so to beat an emulated version of the game using my Xbone controller.

The story is, as expected for a GameBoy game, very simple. Dream Land is once again under threat, and this time by the nefarious Dark Matter! Kirby needs to set out to stop him with the help of his three new animal friends, and if he can collect the 7 rainbow drops spread throughout the land, he can take on Dark Matter and stop him for good! It's a simple story that does exactly what it needs to to set up the action.

As for the gameplay, it's a continuation of the copy ability-based platforming that began in Kirby's Adventure. You've got 7 worlds worth of levels to go through with the help of your animal buddies, and if you're daring enough, you can even hunt down the rainbow drop hidden in each world. The game's a pretty tough one, though pretty standard for Kirby at the time. What's really tough is getting those rainbow drops and fighting Dark Matter at the end (who's a really tough cookie, even for a real final Kirby boss). The level design is all around solid, but the animal friends often feel more like burdens than aids, and while their variations on Kirby's copy abilities are neat, they very often feel like outright downgrades to his normal abilities. It isn't awful, but it's definitely a bumpier step on the road to finer Kirby level design like we'd come to see in games like Kirby 64.

The graphics are very nice as is the music, and you can tell a lot of love went into this one. My only real complaint is that the graphical limitations of the GameBoy kinda interfere with your ability to actually tell what destructible blocks are broken by which power. The blocks just have patterns on them to differentiate them from one another, but these patterns are rarely obvious as to what power breaks them. There was more than once where I had to redo a quite difficult platforming section with an animal companion because I found when I got to the rainbow drop at the end that I'd brought the wrong power to break this particular weird pattern of blocks XP. It's not game-breaking, as you can always just look up what breaks what online, but it does make for a more frustrating baseline experience than a game that could use color would likely allow for.

Verdict: Recommended. This is far from the best Kirby game, sure, but it's still a very solid one. If you're looking for something fun but challenging to play on your GameBoy, this is a fine game to look out for~.