Game Review: Kirby's Adventure
2019-Sep-16, Monday 19:46![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
This isn't the first Kirby game I ever played--that honor goes to Kirby's Dream Land, which I played for a few minutes on a friend's GameBoy--but it is the first Kirby game I ever beat! I played it as a university student, when unlimited high-speed internet opened up the world of games that I had totally missed out due to not paying attention to console gaming past the 16-bit era. I don't even remember why I wanted to play Kirby's Adventure, honestly, nor why I found Kirby Super Star and played that. My days as a Kirby super-fan only came very recently, so it's not like I was seeking out every piece of Kirby-related media before then.
Nonetheless it stuck with me because Kirby's Adventure is a fun game in its own right. Kirby games have a reputation of being easy, and mostly it's deserved, with the difficulty found in the alternate objectives and extra modes. Still, I found Kirby's Adventure pretty tricky at points, especially a couple of the boss battles, and I was glad that the game threw lives at me like crazy. There were times when I needed them.
The ancient enemy returns.
As I mentioned in my Kirby's Dream Land review, it's weird to think that Copy Abilities, probably the thing that most defines Kirby in the eyes of anyone who knows about him, didn't exist there. Kirby's Adventure was the game that introduced them--though sadly, it would take Kirby Super Star to give Kirby a cute hat for each Copy Ability
--and it's still the Kirby game I've played that has the most of them. While Kirby's Dream Land's gameplay was extremely simplistic, limited to eating enemies and spitting them out again and flying over obstacles, Copy Abilities provide a wide variety of possible ways to solve challenges.
A brief explanation: Kirby's main method of interacting with enemies is eating them, and when eaten and swallowed, many enemies provide their signature ability to Kirby. Eating the sword-wielding Blade Knight gives Kirby the Sword Copy Ability, allowing him to slash enemies, whereas the spiky Togezo gives Kirby the Needle Copy Ability, allowing him to stab spikes out and protect himself. Rather than just eating everything and flying, Copy Abilities let you change the basic way you interact with the level, stabbing or cutting or shooting lasers or bouncing like a superball. What's more, many Copy Abilities interact with the environment and some of them are required to pass certain obstacles. To light the various fuses found attached to cannons, Kirby needs a flame-producing Copy Ability (or laser, if the fuse is underwater). If a door is hidden behind blocks Kirby can just eat the blocks, unless those blocks are above him. Kirby can't inhale fast enough while flying to get through those blocks, so he needs something like Hammer or Hi-Jump. For the optional objectives, sometimes you have to hang on to these for multiple sections of a level to get to the place where they're useful.
Unlike Kirby Super Star, where Kirby could take a certain amount of damage before losing a Copy Ability, any hit does it in Kirby's Adventure. The Copy Ability flies out as a star that bounces around for a few seconds, so if you're fast enough, you can inhale it again. This is especially useful for stages that need a certain Copy Ability to unlock a bonus objective but don't have that enemy in the stage (most often Hammer), but it runs into trouble if Kirby eats another enemy at the same time. Copy Abilities have a priority system, and eating two means the higher-priority one wins. Sometimes if they have the same priority it triggers a lottery that produces an entirely new Copy Ability that could be anything.
Once, on a stage where I needed the Hammer but had lost it early on, I ate two enemies, triggered a lottery and...got the Hammer.
I thought about buying lottery tickets, but I figured I used up all my luck.
Secret unlocked!
Kirby's Dream Land had a strictly linear progression, with each stage divided into two parts, with a mid-boss and a boss fight. Kirby's Adventure is much more expansive than that, with more of a world map for each stage that Kirby can freely fly around on and unlock. Beating each stage unlocks the next stage in the progression, but sometimes it also unlocks extra areas. There are a variety of minigames that provide extra lives as prizes, "museums" that contain Copy Abilities for Kirby to eat, and Arenas with mini-boss battles for the more powerful Copy Abilities like Hammer or Backdrop that the game doesn't just want Kirby to have whenever he wants.
This is a little annoying because of the extra objectives. Many stages, and increasingly more as the game goes on, have a hidden switch somewhere that unlocks an additional part of the stage. This is always optional, usually a mini-game or a museum, but I wanted to 100% the game so I spent a while hunting them down. Generally the big switches were just behind a hidden door, concealed by geometry or clever level deisgn--my favorite was probably the waterfalls pouring out of holes in the background where the "hole" was actually a door to a switch room--but sometimes the switches required particular Copy Abilities to access. This was generally the Hammer, because the Hammer can break down blocks that Kirby can't eat and that no other Copy Ability can affect, and some levels that required the Hammer didn't have a Bonkers mid-boss in them that I could defeat to get, so I'd have to do the level once, recognize that I needed the Hammer, go to the Bonkers arena and fight him to get the Hammer, then go back through the level, keeping the Hammer the whole time, and smashing the barrier. There were only a couple of these, but they annoyed me out of proportion to their frequency because there was no to predict them ahead of time. It led to me just keeping the Hammer as often as I could, just in case, which meant I sometimes missed out on the possibilities of the other Copy Abilities.
However, I do have to commend the designers for making the optional objectives mostly straightforward and easily completable, unlike in Kirby's Dream Land 3, where I quickly resorted to a FAQ so I didn't have to deal with stepping on a flower ruining an attempt. And the levels here were shorter.
Also, the actual stages are incredibly cute.
I mean, Ice Cream Island? Butter Building? Yogurt Yard? Each stage is introduced with a cute little animation where something happens to poor Kirby, like the Orange Ocean animation where Kirby is looking around with a telescope and then falls into the ocean and gets chased by a shark. And fortunately, they replay every time you quit and open the game again, so I was able to watch them more than once. More Kirby is never a bad thing.
Oh no! Swim, Kirby!
Kirby's Adventure came out in 1993, two years after the SNES had come out, but the NES was old enough by that point that developers were able to squeeze a lot more out of it than they had been previously. While there's still noticeable slowdown when there's more than a few enemies on screen, the detailed backgrounds and lush color palette really stand out. Stages like Stage 4 of yogurt Yard, which end with Kirby falling down a long waterfall past a bunch of enemies, are the kind of thing that would have seemed almost impossible back in the days of Super Mario Brothers. Even the soundtrack is expansive--with over forty tracks, it's almost twice as big as the soundtrack of Final Fantasy I.
While I am sad about the lack of cute hats, there's still some changes that Kirby undergoes for Copy Abilities. Most often is a simple pallete swap, with Kirby going from pink to a kind of lightish orange, but Freeze and Ice turn Kirby blue, Sword and Parasol have Kirby holding the respective item, and UFO turns Kirby into...a UFO. UFO was my favorite Copy Ability here just because it was so different, but also because it had the most drastic change. It's a UFO but with what looks like Kirby's head peaking out of the top! It's Kirby wearing a cute outfit, in a way.
Backdrop is also really good because for an 8-bit game, the animation of Kirby suplexing Waddle Dees is really good. Kirby will not let Waddle Dee waddle be.
And something I didn't realize until just recently because I happened to see it on Wikirby, each level has a color scheme that matches the letter in the title--in Butter Building, blues predominate, whereas in Grape Garden, green is the color of choice. Furthermore, the first letter of each letter makes VIBGYOR, or "Roy G. Biv" backwards. It's cute and fun, which is the aspect of Kirby games that really appeals to me.
Now we must do battle.
This is still not a difficult game, but unlike Kirby's Dream Land 3 it's not frustrating either. Barring the Hammer fixation for some of the puzzles, I never really got annoyed with it, and while I died enough that lives were meaningful, I never came close to running out of lives. It was just a fun romp through the stages, beating up poor Waddle Dees, fighting Kracko and Whispy Woods, and eventually Nightmare, making this the first game where Kirby starts out by beating up a tree in the forest and ends by fighting an abomination from the darkness between the stars.
It's also the game that starts the path toward Kirby making friends with everyone. In Kirby's Dream Land, DeDeDe was the enemy. Here, he seems to be the enemy, but he actually had a reason for what he did and he even tries to stop Kirby from returning the star rod to the fountain of dreams and releasing Nightmare, but Kirby is too stubborn to listen. Fortunately, when Nightmare does appear, Kirby is up to the challenge.
I can't be objective about Kirby's Adventure. It's one of my favorite games on the NES and my first introduction to the Kirby series, so it'll always have a special place in my heart. But it's legitimately a good game on its own right. Even without finding any of the optional rooms, you can still finish the game and get the full story, and it's much more mechanically complex and interesting to play than Kirby's Dream Land is. It's cute and fun to play and satisfying and full of Kirby goodness, and what more could you ask for?
Nonetheless it stuck with me because Kirby's Adventure is a fun game in its own right. Kirby games have a reputation of being easy, and mostly it's deserved, with the difficulty found in the alternate objectives and extra modes. Still, I found Kirby's Adventure pretty tricky at points, especially a couple of the boss battles, and I was glad that the game threw lives at me like crazy. There were times when I needed them.
The ancient enemy returns.
As I mentioned in my Kirby's Dream Land review, it's weird to think that Copy Abilities, probably the thing that most defines Kirby in the eyes of anyone who knows about him, didn't exist there. Kirby's Adventure was the game that introduced them--though sadly, it would take Kirby Super Star to give Kirby a cute hat for each Copy Ability
--and it's still the Kirby game I've played that has the most of them. While Kirby's Dream Land's gameplay was extremely simplistic, limited to eating enemies and spitting them out again and flying over obstacles, Copy Abilities provide a wide variety of possible ways to solve challenges. A brief explanation: Kirby's main method of interacting with enemies is eating them, and when eaten and swallowed, many enemies provide their signature ability to Kirby. Eating the sword-wielding Blade Knight gives Kirby the Sword Copy Ability, allowing him to slash enemies, whereas the spiky Togezo gives Kirby the Needle Copy Ability, allowing him to stab spikes out and protect himself. Rather than just eating everything and flying, Copy Abilities let you change the basic way you interact with the level, stabbing or cutting or shooting lasers or bouncing like a superball. What's more, many Copy Abilities interact with the environment and some of them are required to pass certain obstacles. To light the various fuses found attached to cannons, Kirby needs a flame-producing Copy Ability (or laser, if the fuse is underwater). If a door is hidden behind blocks Kirby can just eat the blocks, unless those blocks are above him. Kirby can't inhale fast enough while flying to get through those blocks, so he needs something like Hammer or Hi-Jump. For the optional objectives, sometimes you have to hang on to these for multiple sections of a level to get to the place where they're useful.
Unlike Kirby Super Star, where Kirby could take a certain amount of damage before losing a Copy Ability, any hit does it in Kirby's Adventure. The Copy Ability flies out as a star that bounces around for a few seconds, so if you're fast enough, you can inhale it again. This is especially useful for stages that need a certain Copy Ability to unlock a bonus objective but don't have that enemy in the stage (most often Hammer), but it runs into trouble if Kirby eats another enemy at the same time. Copy Abilities have a priority system, and eating two means the higher-priority one wins. Sometimes if they have the same priority it triggers a lottery that produces an entirely new Copy Ability that could be anything.
Once, on a stage where I needed the Hammer but had lost it early on, I ate two enemies, triggered a lottery and...got the Hammer.
I thought about buying lottery tickets, but I figured I used up all my luck.Secret unlocked!
Kirby's Dream Land had a strictly linear progression, with each stage divided into two parts, with a mid-boss and a boss fight. Kirby's Adventure is much more expansive than that, with more of a world map for each stage that Kirby can freely fly around on and unlock. Beating each stage unlocks the next stage in the progression, but sometimes it also unlocks extra areas. There are a variety of minigames that provide extra lives as prizes, "museums" that contain Copy Abilities for Kirby to eat, and Arenas with mini-boss battles for the more powerful Copy Abilities like Hammer or Backdrop that the game doesn't just want Kirby to have whenever he wants.
This is a little annoying because of the extra objectives. Many stages, and increasingly more as the game goes on, have a hidden switch somewhere that unlocks an additional part of the stage. This is always optional, usually a mini-game or a museum, but I wanted to 100% the game so I spent a while hunting them down. Generally the big switches were just behind a hidden door, concealed by geometry or clever level deisgn--my favorite was probably the waterfalls pouring out of holes in the background where the "hole" was actually a door to a switch room--but sometimes the switches required particular Copy Abilities to access. This was generally the Hammer, because the Hammer can break down blocks that Kirby can't eat and that no other Copy Ability can affect, and some levels that required the Hammer didn't have a Bonkers mid-boss in them that I could defeat to get, so I'd have to do the level once, recognize that I needed the Hammer, go to the Bonkers arena and fight him to get the Hammer, then go back through the level, keeping the Hammer the whole time, and smashing the barrier. There were only a couple of these, but they annoyed me out of proportion to their frequency because there was no to predict them ahead of time. It led to me just keeping the Hammer as often as I could, just in case, which meant I sometimes missed out on the possibilities of the other Copy Abilities.
However, I do have to commend the designers for making the optional objectives mostly straightforward and easily completable, unlike in Kirby's Dream Land 3, where I quickly resorted to a FAQ so I didn't have to deal with stepping on a flower ruining an attempt. And the levels here were shorter.
Also, the actual stages are incredibly cute.
I mean, Ice Cream Island? Butter Building? Yogurt Yard? Each stage is introduced with a cute little animation where something happens to poor Kirby, like the Orange Ocean animation where Kirby is looking around with a telescope and then falls into the ocean and gets chased by a shark. And fortunately, they replay every time you quit and open the game again, so I was able to watch them more than once. More Kirby is never a bad thing.Oh no! Swim, Kirby!
Kirby's Adventure came out in 1993, two years after the SNES had come out, but the NES was old enough by that point that developers were able to squeeze a lot more out of it than they had been previously. While there's still noticeable slowdown when there's more than a few enemies on screen, the detailed backgrounds and lush color palette really stand out. Stages like Stage 4 of yogurt Yard, which end with Kirby falling down a long waterfall past a bunch of enemies, are the kind of thing that would have seemed almost impossible back in the days of Super Mario Brothers. Even the soundtrack is expansive--with over forty tracks, it's almost twice as big as the soundtrack of Final Fantasy I.
While I am sad about the lack of cute hats, there's still some changes that Kirby undergoes for Copy Abilities. Most often is a simple pallete swap, with Kirby going from pink to a kind of lightish orange, but Freeze and Ice turn Kirby blue, Sword and Parasol have Kirby holding the respective item, and UFO turns Kirby into...a UFO. UFO was my favorite Copy Ability here just because it was so different, but also because it had the most drastic change. It's a UFO but with what looks like Kirby's head peaking out of the top! It's Kirby wearing a cute outfit, in a way.
Backdrop is also really good because for an 8-bit game, the animation of Kirby suplexing Waddle Dees is really good.
Kirby will not let Waddle Dee waddle be.And something I didn't realize until just recently because I happened to see it on Wikirby, each level has a color scheme that matches the letter in the title--in Butter Building, blues predominate, whereas in Grape Garden, green is the color of choice. Furthermore, the first letter of each letter makes VIBGYOR, or "Roy G. Biv" backwards. It's cute and fun, which is the aspect of Kirby games that really appeals to me.
Now we must do battle.
This is still not a difficult game, but unlike Kirby's Dream Land 3 it's not frustrating either. Barring the Hammer fixation for some of the puzzles, I never really got annoyed with it, and while I died enough that lives were meaningful, I never came close to running out of lives. It was just a fun romp through the stages, beating up poor Waddle Dees, fighting Kracko and Whispy Woods, and eventually Nightmare, making this the first game where Kirby starts out by beating up a tree in the forest and ends by fighting an abomination from the darkness between the stars.
It's also the game that starts the path toward Kirby making friends with everyone. In Kirby's Dream Land, DeDeDe was the enemy. Here, he seems to be the enemy, but he actually had a reason for what he did and he even tries to stop Kirby from returning the star rod to the fountain of dreams and releasing Nightmare, but Kirby is too stubborn to listen. Fortunately, when Nightmare does appear, Kirby is up to the challenge.
I can't be objective about Kirby's Adventure. It's one of my favorite games on the NES and my first introduction to the Kirby series, so it'll always have a special place in my heart. But it's legitimately a good game on its own right. Even without finding any of the optional rooms, you can still finish the game and get the full story, and it's much more mechanically complex and interesting to play than Kirby's Dream Land is. It's cute and fun to play and satisfying and full of Kirby goodness, and what more could you ask for?
