Daggerfall Unity might be the most grateful I've been for a piece of software. Daggerfall is such a lovely and realized fantasy-life sim imbued with enjoyable dungeon crawling and incredible scale! It still stands as one of the few games that evokes the sensation of being a small, insignificant inhabitant of a vast world and lets you make your own story. This flavor of game hasn't ever been replicated, even by it's own successors. It's such a relief for it to have a feature complete and accessible port after all this time.

Even more heartwarming than the unity port is the plethora of mods that followed! Daggerfall's promise of a massive world was more than fufilled, but said world is kind of empty and a little shallow. If you visit the nexus page, you'll find dozens of projects to decorate, terraform, and liven up the Iliac Bay and they're all pretty easy to install too! I don't know, it just brightens my eyes to see so much excitement for a game that felt completely left behind by it's successors.

Play Daggerfall!

I haven't purchased a Ubisoft game in many years. I loved this game back in the day, so I bought the Limited Run Games physical rerelease, against my better judgement.

The original was the poster child for game preservation, an early prominent casualty of a digital delisting. They successfully negotiated with the various rights holders for a physical release, and what does Ubisoft go and do? They lock Knives Chau behind a free DLC that requires a Ubisoft account to download, utterly destroying the entire purpose of a physical release.

Fuck Ubisoft. They can't go out of business soon enough.

I was expecting Sakurai to build upon the platforming foundation of his first two Kirby games. He decided to make a beat-em-up instead.

I didn't even realize the genre shift until more than halfway through the game. In typical Nintendo fashion, the house's foundation has been relaid, and yet the walls have been covered over with the same wallpaper, obscuring the fundamental changes.

Platforming is de-emphasized. Common enemies take multiple hits to dispatch now, shifting the focus to combat. Kirby is much more vulnerable in his vanilla form than before, requiring the use of a suite of consolidated copy abilities, each with multiple attacks.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I think Sakurai should have gone further in revising the game's fundamental mechanics to make it a more functional beat-em-up. Carry-over artifacts from Kirby's platforming design clash with the new direction. Damage upon contact with enemies works well for a platformer, but frustratingly interrupts the game's many chain and dive attacks. Copy abilities that encourage close contact like suplex and jet are therefore at a disadvantage, especially during boss fights.

I find the presentation to be an improvement over Kirby's Adventure. The music introduced in this game is more memorable, including several classic tracks. I'm also happy Super Star decided to zoom in the perspective again, as Kirby's ability to fly completely breaks the more zoomed-out, open level design found in Adventure.

A major downside, though, is how much content is reused across Super Star's seven primary game modes. I really do have to wonder if the decision to package the game as "8 Games in One!" was made later in development in order to stretch out the game's limited content. A single playthrough of each mode will have you fighting most of the game's bosses a minimum of three times each. They even resort to palette swapping common enemies types by Milky Way Wishes to keep things fresh.

I feel that the game doesn't really do anything interesting until the latter half of the game modes. Spring Breeze is yet another truncated retread of the original Game Boy game, with absolutely everything interesting sucked out of it. Gourmet Race is a curiosity that lasts about ten minutes. And the only thing I found memorable about Dyna Blade is the eponymous final boss.

The Great Cave Offensive, The Revenge of Meta Knight, and Milky Way Wishes, though, are all various flavors of good. The Revenge of Meta Knight, however, weirdly feels like the only mode of the three with any sort of pacing or story context, leaving the other two feeling a bit like polished proofs of concept.

I have to say I was also let down by the now obligatory nightmarish final boss, Marx. He pops up at the very end of Milky Way Wishes out of nowhere, and lacks his grotesque attacks from Smash Ultimate. I found the execution to be a bit bland, a less inspired derivation of the excellent final boss of Kirby's Adventure.

Super Star is far from a bad game. Sakurai's next game, Super Smash Bros, feels like a natural iteration of its ideas, so I can see why he distanced himself from the Kirby series. The next Kirby game I plan to play is Forgotten Land; I'm not sure if or when I'll get around to any of the preceding Kirby games that Sakurai did not direct.