More like Kirby and the Stupid-Ass 12-year Wait. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. This shit is personal. Buckle up.
Going through the mainline kirby games this was the one title that always eluded me due to the fact I really started playing these games on the DS instead of the GBA and never could really find a copy back when I was a kid. I would only look at it through stuff like the kirby wiki, the museum and history book in kirby's dream collection, and various internet comments reminicing on how the GBA kirby games were the peak of the series in terms of game feel. When they announced it was going to be on the 3DS through the ambassador program, I was extremely excited to play the one mainline sidescrolling kirby game that I never had before at that point.
As I played for the first time those 10+ years ago, I was confused. Where were the levels? Why I am I going in circles? What's up with all these other kirbys that just bumble around? Where do I go? I think I accidentally skipped the intro cutscene when I first played because I felt like I was thrown in with NO idea what was going on. Unbeknownst to me, this game has levels structured in this large open world where you need to explore and find all the bosses to get all the mirror pieces. It's structured entirely differently from any other mainline kirby game, for better or for worse, and the in-game map isn't really the most obvious. Espically for 11-12 year old me. Combine that with the several unmarked one-way doors, and I was just kind of running around in circles on my first go, eventually dropping the game MAYBE halfway through, if that.
Fast forward a few years. In trying to get every US kirby game as a collector goal (in the times where collecting games definitely wasn't cheap, but was still in the realm of affordability to be a hobby, but that's a whole other rant for a whole other day), this game was the last game I needed to complete the set. The first copy of the game I got literally didn't work because it had what I assume to be black sticky tar on the inside back of the cartridge. Perhaps it was an omen that this game is just cursed, but I eventually got a second copy that actually worked on the actual GBA. I give it a play, knowing a bit more about what I was going to get myself into. In still getting as completely lost as before, I realized that the core problem must be the fact that the large open world is designed to be explored jointly with up to 3 friends, creating a much more social kirby experience as everyone explores a giant open world together, calling out what they find, and working to uncover all the level secrets. I knew that if I were to truly experience this game, I would need to get 3 friends.
So I bought a GBA link cable and asked around. By this point in time, it was the mid-late 2010s. Nobody had GBAs. Nobody had copies of this game. The period of time where you could concievably get a consistent group of people to play this had LONG since gone. Eventually, more time passed, I graduated from high school, my friends and I went our distant ways, and getting a group of people to play through this game went on to be a sort of bucket-list thing. I would find a way to play this in its entirety with 3 other people. If only someone made a GBA emulator that supported netplay...
And then it happened. When they announced that switch online was getting GBA support, This was the one title on my mind. When I saw it on that sizzle reel of upcoming supported games, that was my nintendo direct hype moment™. So I waited the extra few months or so for them to actually drip feed this game out, and when it finally arrived, I knew it was kirby time. Surely the various qualms I had with the game could be mitigated when divided up between 4 players, right?
WRONG!
(so firstly I have to get this out of the way because its not inherently the games fault. I was playing with one person on wifi with satellite internet and one person in Japan whereas the rest of us are in the US, so the connection was awful. Inputs pretty much took an entire ass second to register, but we soldiered on despite the many, many, MANY, problems that the poor netcode caused. The game also had a lot of periods where there would be a tangible amount of slowdown, and since the audio itself wasn't also slowing down I'm not sure if that's actually something that happens on the actual GBA hardware, but honestly for the benefit of the doubt I'm going to assume that was also a connection quality thing.) ANYWAYS
In a 4-person game, there are a few benefits and there are a few downsides. On the positive, the cell phone is actually a really cool feature. Provided you have enough battery, you can call your friends and teleport them exactly to where you are. It's helpful in situations where you need a specific ability, so you can have a friend get what you need and call them over to where you might be stuck, or if you need to solve a puzzle that requires multiple people. It also is handy if you need backup in a fight against a boss or mini-boss. The only problem about the cell phone is the fact that its super easy to teleport around between your friends doing stuff that it makes it even easier to lose track of where you are supposed to go. There were several times where I was doing something then got completely sidetracked by another player needing an ability I was close to, or help on a miniboss I had already fought. The game keeps track of which doors have been went through already between all players, and since everyone is bumblefucking around on their own, its easy to accidentally be wandering around in an area where someone else already wandered in The in-game map is still nowhere near as helpful as it needs to be for a game of this kind of calibre, though the confusing aspect of it was the least of our concerns. Oh my god, the map. Despite the fact that every player has their own bespoke screen with their own bespoke game boys doing their own bespoke thing, if ANYONE presses the map button, EVERYONE gets disrupted to see it. And even when it is showing for everyone, all players have to be looking at the same part of the map, theres no way for one player to look at one area while another person looks at another. It's like if you were in class and if one person has to take a piss everyone has to go get up and head out until they were done. Because of how disruptive it is for everyone to be checking the map so goddamn much, we'd all eventually just stop trying to use it as not to piss anyone else off, but then that just meant we were all wandering around aimlessly in circles again!!!!!!! The ability design doesn't work at all for this kind of game either!!! Losing your ability after getting hit makes sense in a linear style of game like kirby's adventure, but here where abilities have a more utilitary purpose, it gets incredibly annoying having to try and avoid touching a single obstacle just so you can keep the burning ability that can break iron blocks, or the hammer that can pound pikes. People like to describe this game as a "metroidvania" due to its non-linear structure, but then it'd be like playing metroid but every time you get hit you lose your upgrades and have to scramble around to get them back before they disappear. Don't even think about trying to get your ability back with friends dude, if everyone is getting hit everyones gonna be accidentally taking other players abilities and passing that shit around like its fucking chicken pox. Again, the phone can mitigate the ability problems (they are a lot worse in single player where you can't rely on other players), but the problems are still there. If they made it so that you could take 2 or 3 hits before dropping your ability, things would have been signifcantly better. Being careful not to get hit is also a lot harder when playing through molasses connections... The game also has all these dead-end "goal" areas scattered throughout the levels that do nothing besides net a couple of extra lives and send you all the way back to the starting area, which feels like its deliberately punishing the player for exploring because they weren't exploring in the right direction. The whole game just feels contradictory and not really well thought out. It wants you and your friends to explore a world but doesn't give the correct tools to do so, makes looking at resources for directions annoying, and punishes going the wrong way despite there not being any direction to begin with. Like they thought to make a multiplayer kirby game with a big explorable world then just kinda shrugged off the execution and instead just made a linear kirby game but with all the doors linked to one another in a confusing fashion. The level design genuinely feels like it takes cues from more obtuse non-euclidean experimental famicom and game boy games. This shit is the Atlantis no Nazo of the kirby series. (though definitely not as egregious.) Oh, and the final boss has 6 phases with only one player getting the easy-to-lose master ability to actually do any meaningful semblance of damage. Try doing that shit with a wifi warrior. If me and my pals didn't discover you could cheese life grinding by using the phone constantly at the goal areas, I think some of the players I got for the journey wouldn't have stuck around to see the ending.
Overall, yeah. Not very fun by yourself, not very much better with friends. One star is certainly harsh and the game has the amount of polish and misplaced ambition to it that I'd normally give something like this a two, but fuck man. I waited over a decade to play this, thinking it was going to be this really cool multiplayer experience lost to time finally come back. In order to have a smooth multiplayer experience, you either need friends that live close-by that still have GBAs and copies of the game around or friends with switches and actually good internet. Both of which are equally impossible for me unfortunately. I do think it also brings up the importance of having good netcode when it comes to things like this, as while it makes these old games all the more accessible for multiplayer, it can compromise the actual play experience and misrepresent how the multiplayer for these titles actually was meant to be played. If they waited a bit and made this for the DS, where it was a bit easier to get multiplayer game sessions going and they could have used the bottom screen to do an actually competent map, then they could have had something really cool. Flagship coulda made squeak squad for GBA and this for DS. They did it backwards, dammit. Not the worst game I've ever played but the actual game is bleh made all the much worse by my personal expectations and bad connection. At least it's off that bucket list...
Going through the mainline kirby games this was the one title that always eluded me due to the fact I really started playing these games on the DS instead of the GBA and never could really find a copy back when I was a kid. I would only look at it through stuff like the kirby wiki, the museum and history book in kirby's dream collection, and various internet comments reminicing on how the GBA kirby games were the peak of the series in terms of game feel. When they announced it was going to be on the 3DS through the ambassador program, I was extremely excited to play the one mainline sidescrolling kirby game that I never had before at that point.
As I played for the first time those 10+ years ago, I was confused. Where were the levels? Why I am I going in circles? What's up with all these other kirbys that just bumble around? Where do I go? I think I accidentally skipped the intro cutscene when I first played because I felt like I was thrown in with NO idea what was going on. Unbeknownst to me, this game has levels structured in this large open world where you need to explore and find all the bosses to get all the mirror pieces. It's structured entirely differently from any other mainline kirby game, for better or for worse, and the in-game map isn't really the most obvious. Espically for 11-12 year old me. Combine that with the several unmarked one-way doors, and I was just kind of running around in circles on my first go, eventually dropping the game MAYBE halfway through, if that.
Fast forward a few years. In trying to get every US kirby game as a collector goal (in the times where collecting games definitely wasn't cheap, but was still in the realm of affordability to be a hobby, but that's a whole other rant for a whole other day), this game was the last game I needed to complete the set. The first copy of the game I got literally didn't work because it had what I assume to be black sticky tar on the inside back of the cartridge. Perhaps it was an omen that this game is just cursed, but I eventually got a second copy that actually worked on the actual GBA. I give it a play, knowing a bit more about what I was going to get myself into. In still getting as completely lost as before, I realized that the core problem must be the fact that the large open world is designed to be explored jointly with up to 3 friends, creating a much more social kirby experience as everyone explores a giant open world together, calling out what they find, and working to uncover all the level secrets. I knew that if I were to truly experience this game, I would need to get 3 friends.
So I bought a GBA link cable and asked around. By this point in time, it was the mid-late 2010s. Nobody had GBAs. Nobody had copies of this game. The period of time where you could concievably get a consistent group of people to play this had LONG since gone. Eventually, more time passed, I graduated from high school, my friends and I went our distant ways, and getting a group of people to play through this game went on to be a sort of bucket-list thing. I would find a way to play this in its entirety with 3 other people. If only someone made a GBA emulator that supported netplay...
And then it happened. When they announced that switch online was getting GBA support, This was the one title on my mind. When I saw it on that sizzle reel of upcoming supported games, that was my nintendo direct hype moment™. So I waited the extra few months or so for them to actually drip feed this game out, and when it finally arrived, I knew it was kirby time. Surely the various qualms I had with the game could be mitigated when divided up between 4 players, right?
WRONG!
(so firstly I have to get this out of the way because its not inherently the games fault. I was playing with one person on wifi with satellite internet and one person in Japan whereas the rest of us are in the US, so the connection was awful. Inputs pretty much took an entire ass second to register, but we soldiered on despite the many, many, MANY, problems that the poor netcode caused. The game also had a lot of periods where there would be a tangible amount of slowdown, and since the audio itself wasn't also slowing down I'm not sure if that's actually something that happens on the actual GBA hardware, but honestly for the benefit of the doubt I'm going to assume that was also a connection quality thing.) ANYWAYS
In a 4-person game, there are a few benefits and there are a few downsides. On the positive, the cell phone is actually a really cool feature. Provided you have enough battery, you can call your friends and teleport them exactly to where you are. It's helpful in situations where you need a specific ability, so you can have a friend get what you need and call them over to where you might be stuck, or if you need to solve a puzzle that requires multiple people. It also is handy if you need backup in a fight against a boss or mini-boss. The only problem about the cell phone is the fact that its super easy to teleport around between your friends doing stuff that it makes it even easier to lose track of where you are supposed to go. There were several times where I was doing something then got completely sidetracked by another player needing an ability I was close to, or help on a miniboss I had already fought. The game keeps track of which doors have been went through already between all players, and since everyone is bumblefucking around on their own, its easy to accidentally be wandering around in an area where someone else already wandered in The in-game map is still nowhere near as helpful as it needs to be for a game of this kind of calibre, though the confusing aspect of it was the least of our concerns. Oh my god, the map. Despite the fact that every player has their own bespoke screen with their own bespoke game boys doing their own bespoke thing, if ANYONE presses the map button, EVERYONE gets disrupted to see it. And even when it is showing for everyone, all players have to be looking at the same part of the map, theres no way for one player to look at one area while another person looks at another. It's like if you were in class and if one person has to take a piss everyone has to go get up and head out until they were done. Because of how disruptive it is for everyone to be checking the map so goddamn much, we'd all eventually just stop trying to use it as not to piss anyone else off, but then that just meant we were all wandering around aimlessly in circles again!!!!!!! The ability design doesn't work at all for this kind of game either!!! Losing your ability after getting hit makes sense in a linear style of game like kirby's adventure, but here where abilities have a more utilitary purpose, it gets incredibly annoying having to try and avoid touching a single obstacle just so you can keep the burning ability that can break iron blocks, or the hammer that can pound pikes. People like to describe this game as a "metroidvania" due to its non-linear structure, but then it'd be like playing metroid but every time you get hit you lose your upgrades and have to scramble around to get them back before they disappear. Don't even think about trying to get your ability back with friends dude, if everyone is getting hit everyones gonna be accidentally taking other players abilities and passing that shit around like its fucking chicken pox. Again, the phone can mitigate the ability problems (they are a lot worse in single player where you can't rely on other players), but the problems are still there. If they made it so that you could take 2 or 3 hits before dropping your ability, things would have been signifcantly better. Being careful not to get hit is also a lot harder when playing through molasses connections... The game also has all these dead-end "goal" areas scattered throughout the levels that do nothing besides net a couple of extra lives and send you all the way back to the starting area, which feels like its deliberately punishing the player for exploring because they weren't exploring in the right direction. The whole game just feels contradictory and not really well thought out. It wants you and your friends to explore a world but doesn't give the correct tools to do so, makes looking at resources for directions annoying, and punishes going the wrong way despite there not being any direction to begin with. Like they thought to make a multiplayer kirby game with a big explorable world then just kinda shrugged off the execution and instead just made a linear kirby game but with all the doors linked to one another in a confusing fashion. The level design genuinely feels like it takes cues from more obtuse non-euclidean experimental famicom and game boy games. This shit is the Atlantis no Nazo of the kirby series. (though definitely not as egregious.) Oh, and the final boss has 6 phases with only one player getting the easy-to-lose master ability to actually do any meaningful semblance of damage. Try doing that shit with a wifi warrior. If me and my pals didn't discover you could cheese life grinding by using the phone constantly at the goal areas, I think some of the players I got for the journey wouldn't have stuck around to see the ending.
Overall, yeah. Not very fun by yourself, not very much better with friends. One star is certainly harsh and the game has the amount of polish and misplaced ambition to it that I'd normally give something like this a two, but fuck man. I waited over a decade to play this, thinking it was going to be this really cool multiplayer experience lost to time finally come back. In order to have a smooth multiplayer experience, you either need friends that live close-by that still have GBAs and copies of the game around or friends with switches and actually good internet. Both of which are equally impossible for me unfortunately. I do think it also brings up the importance of having good netcode when it comes to things like this, as while it makes these old games all the more accessible for multiplayer, it can compromise the actual play experience and misrepresent how the multiplayer for these titles actually was meant to be played. If they waited a bit and made this for the DS, where it was a bit easier to get multiplayer game sessions going and they could have used the bottom screen to do an actually competent map, then they could have had something really cool. Flagship coulda made squeak squad for GBA and this for DS. They did it backwards, dammit. Not the worst game I've ever played but the actual game is bleh made all the much worse by my personal expectations and bad connection. At least it's off that bucket list...