Pretty remarkable battle system. I think it could be balanced/more interesting but not sure how. Maybe riku's mode will be more interesting?

Dungeons a bit repetitive, normal battles are boring, but the bosses can be interesting at times. Disney story is terrible (retreads of KH1, whose disney arcs were already... bad), but I enjoy the overarching Organization plot.

If I were to redesign this game I would scrap half of the disney dungeons, keep the weird ones, make their stories weirder instead of retreads, and focus more on bosses by reducing the dungeon sizes. Grinding for map cards to get through dungeons was...bad!

The game shines during boss battles, and that's where the interesting narrative meat is, too. I think the battle system could use two improvemets:

- Remove dodge roll
- Remove JUmp
- Replace L+R sleight input with B (or A, I forget, whichever was jump)

Dodge Roll and Jump are vestigial and ported over pointlessly from KH1. In CoM they only serve to muddy the already difficult battle system and make it easy to mess up execution, which makes boss battles borderline impossible. If the bosses were redesigned around you only being able to walk around, it'd be more interesting to play as you could reasonably move, shuffle cards, build sleights.

Still an overall interesting combat system. Wish more games were weird like this!

One of my clearest, earliest memories was playing the Metaknight game around its release before my family made a cross-country move in 1996. It's interesting to see this came out in September of that year, so I can almost pin the month we moved despite forgetting otherwise.

Modern Kirby feels a bit perfunctory to me, drawn out. I like how short and sweet each game in Super Star is, the different textures they give while borrowing from the same mechanical set.

My favorite is Great Cave Offensive... just a cute adventure into some really bizarre spaces (the caves leading to the castle, which connects to outer space, and this fantasy-feeling kingdom is a poetically beautiful set of levels). That the game lets you openly explore them, letting the spaces breathe, no map to guide you, feels pretty miraculous.

That and the game is full of genius music! The goa trance-inspired Cocoa Cave is a favorite.

I blogged about this here:
https://melodicambient.neocities.org/posts/2020-11-14-Nemuru-Mayu.html

A really dreamy, unique dungeon crawler, with peculiar NPCs strewn throughout its depths. The battle system is confusing, and I remember the inventory system feeling a bit punishing. I didn't get too far but maybe one day I'd pick it up again.

The game doesn't really let you get a sense of 'where you are' in the universe, and I love that feeling of being deattached from a tangible reality.