this review called it "against the storm but turn based" and uhh yeah. it's that. it's just, you know, i kind of felt i understood against the storm after playing a few rounds, and i understood this after playing even fewer rounds.

i like terraforming mars. it's neat (if, you know, morally a bit questionable - a topic the game seems happy to dodge in favor of 'ignore bad morale in favor of rushing towards terraforming asap'). the game makes it look neat.

i accomplished my goal and now i'm done. which is, like, fine. i'm just kind of left with thinking about liz's amazing essay on (among other things) One Neat Mechanic vs Anarchic Maximalism and im kind of feeling a little more anarchic maximalist than One Neat Trick these days. so it goes!

Replayed with the kids. The later levels and the treasure road portals make great use of every power. The hidden waddle dees push you to explore, sure, but also demand perfection for a few bosses. And the forgotten islands prove the developers knew exactly what they were doing - a few enemies get additional move sets that expertly increase the pressure. If anything, I wanted a dodge move to help me out some more.
I kept Easy on the entire play through and barely scraped by the back part of the game. Yet it’s always changing enemy and levels up enough that it never feels repetitive. If anything, I was left wanting just a taste more.
Overall, a great Kirby game and a great video game.

im not done with it yet - im probably not even 1/4th of the way in, despite like a few weeks of active play and several hundred hours of idle play - because this game really is slow as uhhhhhhh hell, i guess. and it's weird because for an idle game that isn't neccessarily bad, but it's bad here because progress requires such an active playstyle and YET all the QOL stuff like autoclickers and autobuyers are gated behind dozens of prestiges... per layer.... and ok, i guess, for a game like this a guide is mildly encourage, but there isn't one. I mean, sure, there's a discord but it's fairly passive aggressive and the guide isn't super well written and people will just contradict it all the time and send you in different directions, but even FOLLOWING it i'm still fucking stuck.
i don't know. i like the unit descriptions and the art, and to an extent, the feel of the units building off of each other. i just hate! the pacing. i'm sticking with it but we'll see how long that lasts.

i loved wacking a ball into bouncers and the BONG sound, i thought the collection of electricity as a currency and door unlock was super neat, the setting was fun and well-crafted, and the art!!! gorgeous.

i was also waiting for it to get juuust too hard for me, and it did. i was genuinely enjoying the frantic energy of the boss fights until they tilted a bit too far into the wrong direction.

it's gotta be hard making games. you come up with all this original and inventive stuff, it gets barely any attention, and then you get jerks like me who actually pick it up and appreciate it until it gets tough and then we put it down and complain.

i really liked the overworld and solving simple puzzles to get new levels and level variants. unfortunately i viewed the levels themselves as a kind of unfortunate barrier to doing more of the overworld stuff. which is more about me than the game!

the platforming was surprisingly generous with checkpoints and allowing skips. it looks gorgeous. the movesets were clever and useful and there were plenty of secrets. i, uh, just didn't care to invest myself in any of them. its generous but fairly demanding (but not unfair) and it just isn't my bag.