This game is full of little guys and the E N T I T Y it's great!

My biggest compliment to this game off the bat is that Kirby has not controlled this nicely and certainly won't be feeling that way for a long time. But for a classic era Kirby game, the fact he controls so smoothly here should be recognized!

But as the first entry to the Dark Matter Trilogy, I believe this game has some good and bad things about them... And unfortunately I know these problems only get worse as the trilogy goes on-

For the good, the animal buddies are such a delightful addition into the series. I know we live in a world where Kirby's abilities can do all of the Buddy Abilities in a single ability, but as someone who does not enjoy abilities like "Fire" and "Burning" being separate, the way it's all contextualized with the Animal Buddies just works for me. It's very cool to see how all of Kirby's abilities (for as few as there are here) change when using one of the three buddies. And the fact they carry over to other stages like Yoshi in Super Mario World is even cooler, it makes finding them all the more rewarding and wanting to keep them all the more engaging!

However, the bad of this game are issues that I want to ignore, but the fact they get worse as the trilogy goes on makes it hard to. The first issue (and definitely the least offensive thing here) is just as a Kirby game, it's nothing o write home about. Could I blame the Game Boy's limited hardware on giving unmemorable locales? Maybe? I remember a forest world and the Dedede Arena, but everything else just kinda blends together. Outside of a few annoying instances (which I will get to in a minute), there isn't anything memorable about this game's locales. Everything just sorta blends in together after a certain point.

This last issue isn't so bad here but it should still be stated. This game locks off the ending behind finding all the main collectables, and though there is only one collectable per world, the latter half of this game likes to hide them in very cryptic ways that are such an awkward stain on an otherwise pretty decent game. Again, it's not the end of the world trying to find these collectables, but there's some in the latter half of the game that make you scratch your head and go "whose idea was this???". But again, there's only one per world hidden in the game so it's not the end of the world. It's not like future games add a collectable to every single level and still lock off the game's ending behind finding every single one or anything :)

Also Gooey debut, this is important!