Imagine Kirby’s Dream Land 3, but it sucks ass.
Okay, maybe that’s a little too harsh. This game has that good old fashioned Kirby charm, with very cute enemy design and ally design! The addition of animal buddies was great in my opinion... or, well, a great foundation, anyway. The enemy names are also very good, and I wish I had encountered “Floaty the Drifter” at a time when I was young enough to be deciding upon user handles.
Unfortunately there’s where my praise kind of ends, as this game is bogged down in a ton of early installment jank that makes a lot of its then-new game mechanics feel more irritating than fun. The fact that you lose your abilities after one hit makes it feel like you have to babysit them if you want to use them to solve the puzzles that let you 100% the game, and they’re so nerfed in boss fights that they feel kind of useless to bring along. I think it’s a case of balance but it just doesn’t feel good!
The animal buddies are in roughly the same boat. The screen real estate is bad enough as Kirby, much less the buddies who have way bigger hitboxes. They give you an extra life bar, but aside from Coo they make platforming kind of rough and some of the ability combinations are really bad at actually hitting enemies... not to mention the enemy that outright one-shots the animal buddies??? Honestly, the game feels kind of mean in places compared to a lot of the series, with pits that only Kirby can escape on account of being too deep for Kine or Rick to escape (and also there are spikes). And man, don’t get me started on the endgame autoscrollers.
Anyway, I probably would be easier on this if I actually played it back in the day outside of renting it once or twice, but I keep comparing it mentally to Kirby’s Dream Land 3, which I did play back in the day and basically takes every concept here and makes it better, aside from perhaps being even more obtuse in some of its objectives. I think I would rather play that game again instead of trying to get the true end of this game.
Okay, maybe that’s a little too harsh. This game has that good old fashioned Kirby charm, with very cute enemy design and ally design! The addition of animal buddies was great in my opinion... or, well, a great foundation, anyway. The enemy names are also very good, and I wish I had encountered “Floaty the Drifter” at a time when I was young enough to be deciding upon user handles.
Unfortunately there’s where my praise kind of ends, as this game is bogged down in a ton of early installment jank that makes a lot of its then-new game mechanics feel more irritating than fun. The fact that you lose your abilities after one hit makes it feel like you have to babysit them if you want to use them to solve the puzzles that let you 100% the game, and they’re so nerfed in boss fights that they feel kind of useless to bring along. I think it’s a case of balance but it just doesn’t feel good!
The animal buddies are in roughly the same boat. The screen real estate is bad enough as Kirby, much less the buddies who have way bigger hitboxes. They give you an extra life bar, but aside from Coo they make platforming kind of rough and some of the ability combinations are really bad at actually hitting enemies... not to mention the enemy that outright one-shots the animal buddies??? Honestly, the game feels kind of mean in places compared to a lot of the series, with pits that only Kirby can escape on account of being too deep for Kine or Rick to escape (and also there are spikes). And man, don’t get me started on the endgame autoscrollers.
Anyway, I probably would be easier on this if I actually played it back in the day outside of renting it once or twice, but I keep comparing it mentally to Kirby’s Dream Land 3, which I did play back in the day and basically takes every concept here and makes it better, aside from perhaps being even more obtuse in some of its objectives. I think I would rather play that game again instead of trying to get the true end of this game.