This was nice! Far from my favorite Kirby game, but I feel like it's aged a bit better than most out of this pre-Superstar era. The animal friends were neat to mess around with, albeit hardly any combination of animal and copy ability can quite beat Koo with just about anything, since she's the only one that can maintain Kirby's flight ability.

The rainbow drops were a nice wrinkle; Adventure had some secret areas but given they just unlocked minigames it hardly felt worth finding them all. And it is one of those "find the hidden mcguffins to unlock the true ending" dealies, a-la Chaos Emeralds, but most of them were relatively simple to find and satisfying to figure out.

The only outright bad part of the game is that one bit in one of the last levels (I think 7-6?) that had an auto-scroller with dead ends that you couldn't see so you just get killed for not being able to see the future. Lame in an otherwise nice game. Oh and also hitting bosses with copy abilities is really unsatisfying because it barely does any damage, you might as well just play it Dream Land 1 style with them. Overall a game where I'm up in the air about giving it 3/5 or 3.5/5. It's just right there evenly in the high-C, low-B range.

Probably among the most "it's fine" games I've ever played. Pleasant and inoffensive, it just feels like it lacks a bit of the punch other Good Feel games have had. Epic Yarn may technically be impossible to lose, but it still felt gripping in the level theming in a way Showtime dabbles in, compared to. I still to this day can pick out individual levels from Epic Yarn, even without having played that game since it came out, but having just finished Showtime, some of the levels bleed together in my head.

That isn't to say there's nothing there, cause it's satisfying as Cowgirl Peach to lasso up barrels and crack them over the heads of Sour Bunch goons, or kick tables and pots into groups of enemies as Kung Fu Peach. It's just also a game that, as you've probably heard, lacks in difficulty and has plenty of QTEs that barely punish you for button mashing through them. Level theming is alright, and I like the sorta magical-girl-esque energy the flamboyant villain-of-the-week motif it has for each costume's villain. Right down to Madame Grape feeling like a good foil for Peach. And it caps off with a satisfyingly extra finale.

Epic Yarn and Woolly World especially benefited from level completion adding a decent amount of depth. And it probably does so in this game too, but a combination of long loading screens and a lot of points of no return with auto-scrollers and the like turned me off of trying to 100% each level.

It's an overall fine variety pack of games. I'm alright with games that mostly exist to sell a vibe existing; if something like Devil May Cry is a roller coaster then this is a chill dark ride.