I used to consider this my favorite game when I first played it on the Wii U Virtual Console. idk what kid me really saw in this to think of it as such, it's likely they weren't the same reasons that made me appreciate it so much now because damn..

Everything in this game just oozes personality, from the different UI elements in all game modes, all the cute lil enemies,the ability portraits.. in particular, the prerendered CG backgrounds are the coolest fucking thing and seeing them around the time where I started to draw seriously inspired parts of my style even today.

The combat (?) is also a pretty big step up from the previous games since the abilities have multiple moves but I don't really fuck with how they chose to condense multiple ones from Kirby's Adventure into a single ability. e.g Fire and Fireball is now just Fire and ->+Y is the Fireball move but.. Fire is lame! Couldn't the whole moveset be Fireball with 8-way movement >_>? Some of them are pretty cool though. Blocking is interesting considering this is a "baby game" but they at least had the grace not to make you completely invincible against grabs and whatever so you can't be like, 100% safe at all times while your partner character fumbles around like a fucking idiot against the boss. Oh yeah, the partner mechanic is pretty meh when playing alone and also not really an adequate multiplayer mode since the second player is almost completely on a leash. It's fun when you need to do save a partner in a rush, not as fun when you press the A button and suddenly open this whole can of worms. It... really shouldn't be the A button, why is A the dedicated "partner" button??

I'm curious to also replay the DS version, but in my only playthrough of that, it didn't impress and looks way duller in comparison. It does have "more stuff" but Super Star is already almost the perfect length so. idk, we'll have to see. If you only played the DS version, I'd certainly recommend this. If you played neither one, I'd also certainly recommend this.