Kirby, you have crystals here that are 2 inches, 3 inches long. Yo, this is glass grade!
By the year 2000, most of Kirby's platforming counterparts had fully made the transition to 3D. Collectathons were king, and 2D platformers were becoming an increasing rarity. If there was ever a time to make the leap, it was then.
But rather than trying to adapt Kirby's gameplay and appeal to a 3D space (something Kirby's contemporaries were finding mixed success with), director Shinichi Shimomura and his team at HAL decided to keep Kirby firmly planted in 2D for his Nintendo 64 outing. Without the need to totally reinvent Kirby, HAL was able to evolve and refine what they already knew. The Crystal Shards is a pure distillation of what made the series work up to that point, and it comes pretty damn close to perfection as a result.
The Nintendo 64 allowed Shimomura and his team to create more dynamic set pieces and larger, more complicated boss battles. Everything here feels bombastic without losing sight of Kirby's cute, sugary sweet aesthetic. The story remains pretty simple and straight-forward, and is told through charming cutscenes that add just the right amount of flavor without being intrusive. It's fun to see Kirby's partners pop up in a level, though it's also a little bit of a bummer that you can't play as any of them. This is more than made up for by allowing Kirby to combine copy abilities, which allows for a lot of experimentation. I wasted a fair amount of time just running around and fusing abilities together to see what I could make, and it feels so natural that I often confuse myself into thinking it was a feature long baked into the series prior to The Crystal Shards.
Kirby 64 is a fantastic conclusion to the "Dark Matter Trilogy," and is easily my favorite game in the entire franchise.
It was also the second to last Kirby game director Shimomura worked on before... evaporating into thin air? I looked up what games he worked on and noticed he bowed out of the industry somewhere around 2002, with Nightmare in Dreamland being his last credit. Any attempt to find out why he left or what he's been up to has turned up numerous conspiracy theories, from Shimomura dying to having never existed in the first place. Perhaps this is appropriate in a way. There's an eeriness that's always lurking just beneath the surface in Kirby games, and so too is there something hauntingly mysterious about their development... Or maybe he just retired. who da hell knows
By the year 2000, most of Kirby's platforming counterparts had fully made the transition to 3D. Collectathons were king, and 2D platformers were becoming an increasing rarity. If there was ever a time to make the leap, it was then.
But rather than trying to adapt Kirby's gameplay and appeal to a 3D space (something Kirby's contemporaries were finding mixed success with), director Shinichi Shimomura and his team at HAL decided to keep Kirby firmly planted in 2D for his Nintendo 64 outing. Without the need to totally reinvent Kirby, HAL was able to evolve and refine what they already knew. The Crystal Shards is a pure distillation of what made the series work up to that point, and it comes pretty damn close to perfection as a result.
The Nintendo 64 allowed Shimomura and his team to create more dynamic set pieces and larger, more complicated boss battles. Everything here feels bombastic without losing sight of Kirby's cute, sugary sweet aesthetic. The story remains pretty simple and straight-forward, and is told through charming cutscenes that add just the right amount of flavor without being intrusive. It's fun to see Kirby's partners pop up in a level, though it's also a little bit of a bummer that you can't play as any of them. This is more than made up for by allowing Kirby to combine copy abilities, which allows for a lot of experimentation. I wasted a fair amount of time just running around and fusing abilities together to see what I could make, and it feels so natural that I often confuse myself into thinking it was a feature long baked into the series prior to The Crystal Shards.
Kirby 64 is a fantastic conclusion to the "Dark Matter Trilogy," and is easily my favorite game in the entire franchise.
It was also the second to last Kirby game director Shimomura worked on before... evaporating into thin air? I looked up what games he worked on and noticed he bowed out of the industry somewhere around 2002, with Nightmare in Dreamland being his last credit. Any attempt to find out why he left or what he's been up to has turned up numerous conspiracy theories, from Shimomura dying to having never existed in the first place. Perhaps this is appropriate in a way. There's an eeriness that's always lurking just beneath the surface in Kirby games, and so too is there something hauntingly mysterious about their development... Or maybe he just retired. who da hell knows
5 Comments
TIGHT, TIGHT TIGHT
your review has convinced me to bump this up to 4 stars, it's just too charming for anything less.
64's got some of the best music in the whole series (imho). It's mostly pep-filled tunes with banging percussion, but there's also the iconic atmospheric jams like The Factory. Songs like the boss theme and invincibility theme sound like a mad scramble. Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando treat this series' music right.
Yeah, I should have brought it up in the review but the soundtrack is incredible. Just like the game it's probably my favorite in the entire series. There was a long gap of time between playing this one as a kid and coming back to it as an adult, but The Factory and boss theme have always stuck with me in particular.
Weatherby
1 year ago