What a joyful experience this was! One of my personal favorite rare things in video games is the moment-to-moment gameplay coming together with the aesthetics to feel "toyetic". It's hard to define, but it's got a lot to do with the mechanical and visual variety of tools given to the player and their utility in gameplay feeling satisfying. Kirby's main gimmick is already the epitome of this, but now there's also everything about the way the Robobot Armor works that enhances the feeling of happily smacking different sets of colorful action figures together, especially with that Patented Sakurai Hitstop™ in combat. I don't know if I preferred stages specifically designed around plowing through them with a certain item or ones that let you go wild with whatever you came across, but the level design and smooth linear difficulty curve made both styles very enjoyable. I'm glad I went out of my way for the Code Cubes because the frantic pace of the EX stages was such a fun step up from the standard levels, the second one in Access Ark being an incredibly cool victory lap.

Really, my only complaint is that there weren't even more forms for the Robobot because I'd have loved to see a Whip variant. Apparently ESP, Doctor and Poison were introduced in this game but only ESP has a robot form? ESP was my favorite one but they missed out on the potential to make Kirby run over enemies as a mobile hospital. Well, that, and also the final boss was a bit tedious, although this can be forgiven on the virtue of the things happening on screen in that fight being absolutely fucking sick.

I never played much of Kirby and it's crazy to think I might've missed out on this completely if I hadn't rushed to fill up my dusty 3DS with games in preparation for the eShop shutdown. This is the type of game I wish I had as a kid, but there's definitely no bad time to give it a spin. Kid me would've probably gotten stuck on like Mecha Knight or something anyway