I was in the mood for some more Kirby after finishing Kirby 64, and then I remembered Kirby's Adventure on my NES Classic! It's one of the very few mainline Kirby games I haven't yet beaten (and I think may actually be the last I hadn't beaten), so I thought why not give it a try. I remembered it controlling not so hot the last time I tried it, but I figured that must've just been the mood I was in at the time. I proved to myself it was in fact not the mood I was in at the time, and I didn't really enjoy my time with this game when all was said and done. I'm glad to have the entire mainline Kirby series under my belt now, I suppose, but the 3 hours of this game aren't really ones I'll look back on super fondly compared to the many many hours I spent with the GBA version of this game as a kid.
It's Kirby in his first adventure where he could gain powers and not just suck things up and spit them out. It's a pretty groundbreaking entry for the series, considering the copy ability is one of the things Kirby is best known for these days. There are a good handful of powers, at least on paper, as many of them have very similar or nearly identical effects but different cosmetics. You go through 7 worlds with 7 bosses to eventually fight Nightmare in a special final two-stage boss fight. The level design is alright, even if some levels end up feeling a little short in retrospect. You get to them via a series of hub areas for each world that has both doors to the stages but also doors to mini-games you can play for extra lives, mini-boss arenas you can do for a maxim tomato, or a gallery area where you can get a certain power for free whenever you want. Many of the levels have secret switches hidden in them that will unlock more of these special bonus areas in the hub maps, but some of these switches are SUPER hard to find and are behind nearly or entirely invisible doors. 100%-ing this game without a guide is no easy feat, and I definitely couldn't've done it in 3 hours if I hadn't remembered basically all of them, at least in part, from all my time with this as a kid. My biggest issues with the game are largely mechanical. First off, while the game is very pretty for a NES game, it also means there's a LOT of slowdown, particularly when there are a lot of enemies on screen at once. Next, Kirby has a lot more heft to him than he does in later games, and even compared to Kirby's Dream Land 1 and 2 (the games before and after this one), it feels like it takes him way longer to recover from hits, falls, etc. before he can jump or use a power again. On top of that, while you press B to use your powers and A to jump, A very critically does not fly. Pressing Up on the D-pad flies, and while this is certainly partly my fault for having the muscle memory that later Kirby games have given me, there were a ton of times where I wanted to fly but couldn't, or accidentally started flying when I didn't want to because of a stray command on the D-pad. Lastly, it's always just one hit (instead of how it's almost always several in later games) before you lose your power. The end experience wasn't often very challenging, but it was very often frustrating due to some combination of the above issues. The presentation is nice, as you'd hope a NES game from 1993 would be. Although it does add to the aforementioned slow down, the environments have lots of colors, enemies and Kirby have a lot of animations. The color pallet swaps from stage to stage do a good job of coming off more as stylistic choices instead of hardware necessities. The enemy designs would go on to be reused to countless Kirby games for a good reason: They're really solid and memorable ones, especially the bosses (even though a lot of these guys are lifted from Kirby's Dream Land themselves). The same thing goes for the music, which is as iconic as anything else in this game when it comes to Kirby. Verdict: Not Recommended. I did not enjoy enough of my time with this game that I can't recommend it without tons of caveats. The experience of Kirby has been improved and tightened up so significantly since this, his second outing, that the barrier to entry is already weirdly high for a Kirby game (having to relearn how to Kirby) even if the slowdown issues weren't a problem on top of that. It's an important stepping stone for a series I love, but this is definitely my least favorite among all the mainline Kirby games.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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