To be fair, this is a decent Kirby game, but it is also the first game to be not directed by Masahiro Sakurai himself and instead directed by Shinichi Shimomura, whom little is known of him and his intention to design this game.

This game starts out a trilogy of Kirby games (this one, Dream Land 3 and then Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards) which take place in a kind of more painterly Dream Land rather than the usual Popstar and Dream Land we mostly see in Kirby's Dream Land 1, Kirby's Adventure and basically most of the rest of the Kirby series starting from Amazing Mirror and onwards.

The notable replacement of this game is that many Abilities are ditched in favor of including the Animal Friends, a central mechanic of this trilogy that introduces three mountable creatures which are actually necessary to collect the Rainbow Drops, required in order to face the true final boss.

I voted 4 stars because while it's still a Kirby game that works, it is not much intended for beginners because of its rampant difficulty curve that rapidly increases through the game, as the game's requirement for you to forcedfully collect the Rainbow Drops is what makes this game one of the quite challenging ones of the series so far, quite apart from Masahiro Sakurai's intended difficulty design.

Since i had played this game on Nintendo Switch Online i couldn't appreciate much how Shinichi made the final boss so challenging and tedious apart from the Kirby games i've played so far (Kirby's Dream Land's King Dedede, Kirby's Adventure's Nightmare and Kirby Super Star Ultra's Marx) that i had to keep rewinding as much as i could to get it beaten. Oh well.

So I'd recommend KDL2 to intermediate players who are rather interested in a more challenging Kirby game.