Growing up, one of the most important games to me was Kirby Air Ride. To this day it's one of my favorite games ever, but if I'm being honest there are about 2/3rds of that game that I really could care less about. Like most fans of that game, for me it was all about city trial. This isn't a Kirby Air Ride review so I won't go into what made City Trial so special, but one of the biggest factors to me was the ability to simply get off your air ride and walk around as Kirby. This fulfilled a strong childhood feeling I had about kart racers which was "I want to get out of the kart". It wasn't that I didn't enjoy kart racers, but when Mario Kart 64 had Peach's castle in Royal Raceway, I just felt so frustrated that there was no way to get out of the car and go in there. In Diddy Kong Racing there are cutscenes showing the characters outside of their vehicles and I so badly wanted to just move around the hub world as Tiptup or Timber (not Banjo, that guy already has his own game). So City Trial having this mechanic of being able to hop out of your vehicle at any time and walk to anywhere on the City Trial map was extremely fulfilling. In the main mode, walking around and not being on a vehicle is bad if you're trying to win, since you can't pick up power-ups or get anywhere quickly, but then we have Free Run mode. No time limit or power-ups, just you, the map, and every vehicle in the game. I spent so many hours here either making up games to play with my siblings or doing some honest-to-god RPing with Kirby running around the map, it was here that I fully fell in love with the idea of Kirby in 3D, I knew it was possible because the little taste of it I got in Kirby Air Ride was immaculate to my child self.

In a lot of the ads for Super Mario 64, and the N64 in general, there's a lot of emphasis on "freedom" and "liberation". At the time everyone was excited to leap into the third dimension, even if not everyone had a great plan for it because it was the obvious "next step", the way the media and industry framed it, there was no choice. 3D games freed us from the tyranny of 2D games, and it was time to escape (Funnily enough, it kind of sounds like how people talk about transitioning to open-world games nowadays). And yet Kirby had managed to skip this process entirely. Kirby Air Ride is just a spin-off, outside of that, every Kirby game has taken place on a 2D plane. Pretty wise on the developer's part, because we saw plenty of well-liked series try their hand at 3D and immediately regret it, and it's not like Kirby ever really had to become 3D at some point. The series had plenty of great entries in several different styles of 2D games, but Star Allies showed some stagnation, a need for something to change. So much of that game felt like Kirby running on auto-pilot, and while it had a lot of great stuff carried over from previous entries, I think the last thing anyone wanted was another one of those. Similar to my feeling of wanting to get off my kart in a kart racer, I wanted to get out of the format the Kirby series was stuck in, I knew Kirby could work in 3D, I wanted that freedom.

Now, I can't hide this any longer, so I'll just admit now that a 3D Kirby game has been one of my dream games since I was a child, and I really can't emphasize enough how blown away I am with the way it's executed here. Kirby controls as good as I hoped he would, the level design really captures a lot of the strengths of the best 2D Kirby games, and so little about what makes 2D Kirby great is compromised for this game, the transition is so smooth it feels like this game has always been here. But just making a good-feeling 3D Kirby game isn't enough to revitalize the series, so we get this completely new, exciting post-apocalypse that helps add a really good flavor to the usual grass and water levels. The Waddle Dee town is not only adorable but allows for the large amount of extra content the Kirby series is known for to exist in a brand new way. The bosses are a wonderful breath of fresh air from Star Allies, capturing the fun of Kirby bosses while adding extra layers of thought and strategy, and a fucking DODGE ROLL. Mouthful mode and the Treasure Road levels give us some great feeling obstacle course style level design, the music pops off the way any good Kirby soundtrack should, Dedede is there, this is all I could ever ask for.

Now I think a lot of the complaints I've heard from other people on this site are completely valid, and I can see why someone would leave this game thinking of it as middle-of-the-road or disappointing. The abilities have been kind of watered down for the sake of transitioning them smoothly to 3D, and for some abilities, it's not a huge deal but for others, it's kind of a shame. Cutter isn't all that fun because doing melee attacks with it feels finicky in terms of finding how close you need to get to an enemy to do it, and hammer is missing its spin attack. Not to mention there are also a lot of unfortunate cuts from the ability list, obviously, they can't bring every ability back for this one, but it just feels wrong for something like plasma or fighter to be missing. My true hope for a follow-up to this game is that they'll be able to not only introduce more new and old abilities but give them something more closely resembling the extensive movesets they had in Star Allies and the games leading up to it. I've always sort of half-joked that the ideal 3D Kirby game wouldn't be a collect-a-thon Mario 64 style, but instead a character action game. I mean, platforming has always been kind of de-emphasized in Kirby games, since you can often just float over it. It's more about trying out different abilities, solving environment puzzles, and effectively fighting enemies and bosses, and if Kirby could just go full Metal Gear Rising on an enemy when he has the sword ability, I genuinely believe that would be the truest to the previous entries in the series. If I'm being honest, fighting the final boss with the hammer only and no extra power-ups felt like baby's first Dark Souls in a way I was extremely into, so they're already halfway there.

This is really something special, and I believe a sequel in this style that improves the things I have a problem with would be just straight-up exactly what I've always wanted. And hey, maybe there'll be some DLC involving playing as other characters, something else I loved in Allies and I wish was here? No matter what, I've never been more excited about the Kirby series than right now, I'm ready for anything. Also please keep this Dedede design, he's finally cute again like in Kirby 64. Did you see that part of his second boss fight where he got on all fours and went full beast mode? Sickest shit ever, God I love this game.