This was nice! Far from my favorite Kirby game, but I feel like it's aged a bit better than most out of this pre-Superstar era. The animal friends were neat to mess around with, albeit hardly any combination of animal and copy ability can quite beat Koo with just about anything, since she's the only one that can maintain Kirby's flight ability.

The rainbow drops were a nice wrinkle; Adventure had some secret areas but given they just unlocked minigames it hardly felt worth finding them all. And it is one of those "find the hidden mcguffins to unlock the true ending" dealies, a-la Chaos Emeralds, but most of them were relatively simple to find and satisfying to figure out.

The only outright bad part of the game is that one bit in one of the last levels (I think 7-6?) that had an auto-scroller with dead ends that you couldn't see so you just get killed for not being able to see the future. Lame in an otherwise nice game. Oh and also hitting bosses with copy abilities is really unsatisfying because it barely does any damage, you might as well just play it Dream Land 1 style with them. Overall a game where I'm up in the air about giving it 3/5 or 3.5/5. It's just right there evenly in the high-C, low-B range.

Probably among the most "it's fine" games I've ever played. Pleasant and inoffensive, it just feels like it lacks a bit of the punch other Good Feel games have had. Epic Yarn may technically be impossible to lose, but it still felt gripping in the level theming in a way Showtime dabbles in, compared to. I still to this day can pick out individual levels from Epic Yarn, even without having played that game since it came out, but having just finished Showtime, some of the levels bleed together in my head.

That isn't to say there's nothing there, cause it's satisfying as Cowgirl Peach to lasso up barrels and crack them over the heads of Sour Bunch goons, or kick tables and pots into groups of enemies as Kung Fu Peach. It's just also a game that, as you've probably heard, lacks in difficulty and has plenty of QTEs that barely punish you for button mashing through them. Level theming is alright, and I like the sorta magical-girl-esque energy the flamboyant villain-of-the-week motif it has for each costume's villain. Right down to Madame Grape feeling like a good foil for Peach. And it caps off with a satisfyingly extra finale.

Epic Yarn and Woolly World especially benefited from level completion adding a decent amount of depth. And it probably does so in this game too, but a combination of long loading screens and a lot of points of no return with auto-scrollers and the like turned me off of trying to 100% each level.

It's an overall fine variety pack of games. I'm alright with games that mostly exist to sell a vibe existing; if something like Devil May Cry is a roller coaster then this is a chill dark ride.

From a gameplay standpoint it's a fine update to Metroid 2, but feels slower and clumsier than Fusion or Zero Mission did. Especially with the addition of Aeon Abilities that adds what feels like another unnecessary resource into the game and the melee counter attack, which halts Samus in place while using it and devolves a lot of the combat into waiting on enemies to do their very obviously telegraphed attack that allows you to insta-kill them and then your encounters with anything that isn't a boss becomes robotic and boring.

I'm mixed on the presentation. On one hand, I appreciate the soundtrack being reasonably faithful to the original; really atmospheric and unsettling tracks. But then it throws in random remixes from other game like Ridley's lair and Red-soil Brinstar and man. Remember when Ridley's lair was a cool track hyping up your approach to Ridley, it got brought back in Prime 1 as a nice simple callback, and here it's been reduced to "Fire level music". Jesus.

The backgrounds on their own are nice looking, but they really undercut the tension of Metroid 2 because of how brightly lit and visibly teeming with life they are. Metroid 2 is one of the mainstream Nintendo games with THE most rancid vibes ever and it feels off that a remake of it sticks in a giant fungus forest for no reason.

Speaking undercutting the tension, remember how in Metroid 2, it's just a constant decent deeper and deeper into a cave system, a linear trek downwards to a point where you can't help but think "wow I am really deep underground at this point, when the hell am I ever going to see the surface again?" Well, they stuck teleport stations in so you can just zap back to the surface whenever it's convenient to you. Yay.

And y'know, Metroid 2 is not a glorious game. You're almost basically doing a villain's dirty work by going to a planet to wipe out all of a species by some vague metric of them being "too capable of being used as bioweapons". And it felt very purposeful that killing a Metroid in the original game hardly ever felt gratifying. And that hits especially hard in a post-Fusion world where we see the consequences of Samus' actions, cause it turns out playing god and killing an entire species because they're too inconvenient isn't a very good idea because it can fuck the ecosystem up to a catastrophic degree. So it then feels RIDICULOUSLY tone deaf for Samus Returns here to have all these glory kill cutscenes against these things like it's trying to sell us on how cool Samus' job is.

And as if that wasn't enough, it completely butchers the ending. Like, Metroid 2's ending stands out because pretty much every other Metroid game ends on some big, climactic setpiece, escape sequence or not. Metroid 2 instead has you quietly take the baby Metroid back to the surface, in an almost somber and reflective manner. You just murdered this species out of existence when it's just an animal all the same as anything else. Is what you just did right? Or does it just make you as much a cold killer as the ones supposedly posing to use Metroids as weapons?

That's too lame for us gamers, gotta take the baby Metroid around the world to go 100% the game and then fight a boss because we need a big red arrow pointing at the REAL bad guy in this situation. Bllllluuuuuuuugh.

I like this game in the end, it's not like my mountain of problems with it makes it unplayable. But look at this game and all the missed potential and feel very :/