Playing a bunch of action games recently and this early HAL game (Kirby, etc - early home to Iwata and Sakurai) has been on my list!
First, the positives - it's a fairly short game, the sound design and music is amazing (by Jun Ishikawa), and the pixel art is nice. There's some fun level design moments. It's very weird that this game feels Very like kirby - partially the sound design, but there's also something to the controls and how you jump around the stage using those jump pads.
But other than that, it's kind of middling as an action game. The game has many many abilities, but the movement/enemy design/level design isn't solid enough to make those work in a meaningful way. Most enemies feel the same - very difficulty to safely kill with regular attacks, so you stand far away or charge a special move. Bosses are the same - their movements are too sudden and your hitbox too unclear, they hit too hard. You can either try to hit the boss 100 times to win, or just spam magic/super skills.
That's not to say there are no good ideas, but there's not much of a solid action game core to be found here. The level design soon reveals itself to mostly be mazes with finicky mechanics (dense spike tiles, conveyer belt tiles). It's a bit of a shame because the story setup is some fun genre stuff - floating mountains, futuristic airships, demon worlds...
I think the kind of action HAL was going for ended up perhaps better suited to something like Kirby Super Star - all the abilities are something fun to experiment with and see (rather than armor on a generic protagonist), the point isn't so much solid combat as it is just going around easy levels with different kirbies.
First, the positives - it's a fairly short game, the sound design and music is amazing (by Jun Ishikawa), and the pixel art is nice. There's some fun level design moments. It's very weird that this game feels Very like kirby - partially the sound design, but there's also something to the controls and how you jump around the stage using those jump pads.
But other than that, it's kind of middling as an action game. The game has many many abilities, but the movement/enemy design/level design isn't solid enough to make those work in a meaningful way. Most enemies feel the same - very difficulty to safely kill with regular attacks, so you stand far away or charge a special move. Bosses are the same - their movements are too sudden and your hitbox too unclear, they hit too hard. You can either try to hit the boss 100 times to win, or just spam magic/super skills.
That's not to say there are no good ideas, but there's not much of a solid action game core to be found here. The level design soon reveals itself to mostly be mazes with finicky mechanics (dense spike tiles, conveyer belt tiles). It's a bit of a shame because the story setup is some fun genre stuff - floating mountains, futuristic airships, demon worlds...
I think the kind of action HAL was going for ended up perhaps better suited to something like Kirby Super Star - all the abilities are something fun to experiment with and see (rather than armor on a generic protagonist), the point isn't so much solid combat as it is just going around easy levels with different kirbies.