User:Auroraareas28

Kirby Series Mini-Reviews
Since a lot of our other regular users have these, I thought I'd chip in with some of my own opinions.

Kirby's Dream Land: I'm going to refrain from giving this game a rating. As everyone knows, it's aged poorly and is overly short and simple, even by the standards of its time. However, because it started the entire series and laid the groundwork for every other Kirby platformer that followed, I feel like it should be above criticism.

Kirby's Adventure: The first example that comes to my mind when I think of quality "light entertainment" in video games. It must be given credit for taking the original game's formula leaps and bounds further, making KDL1 look like an early proof-of-concept prototype in comparison. However, in my opinion, KA was obsoleted by its remake Nightmare in Dream Land, which offers uniformly superior graphics, performance and sub-games. A technical marvel to be running on the NES, but even still, it suffers from unstable graphics and annoying slowdown. 3/5 stars.

Kirby's Dream Course: A very original concept from the pre-Super Star period, when the series had less of a strongly defined identity, and was more free to venture into any direction or genre that HAL wanted to try. On the SNES, the physics and controls could easily have been a mess, but are quite well programmed, and mostly intuitive. Unfortunately, it's a little too hard and frustrating for the core content of a Kirby title, and there will be plenty of times that a tiny miscalculation will send you flying out of bounds. The multiplayer mode can be a huge amount of fun, and definitely added a full extra star to my score. But be warned, it can also provoke major amounts of salt, potentially more than Mario Party or Smash. 4/5 stars.

Kirby Super Star: There's not much I can say about KSS that hasn't already been said at length. A tour-de-force that exemplifies everything that was great about 16-bit platformers and the capabilities of the Super Nintendo. Had a stronger influence on the Kirby series than any other game since. While there may not be a huge amount of content on offer, it certainly jam-packs what there is with all the variety and creativity that HAL and Sakurai could offer. Unlike with Kirby's Adventure, I feel that the Super Nintendo version has not been completely superseded by its remake. I happen to prefer its more charming graphics and tighter gameplay, despite the slimmer selection of sub-games and bosses. Being a console game, it also has the benefit of being on the big screen, and allowing two co-op buddies to share the experience on a television. The only real bummer is that the collectibles in Cave Offensive are little more than score items with arbitrary values, so there's not much incentive for non-completionists to go for them. 5/5 stars.

Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards: HAL concludes the Dream Land saga with a bang. A brisk, inviting platformer that feels like opening a huge toy box, with countless fun actions and playthings at your fingertips all the time. Aside from the disappointing lack of co-op, I see it as an ultimate refinement of the concepts, mechanics and aesthetics introduced in KDL2 and KDL3, while still offering something fresh and unique within the series. K64 had the darkest tone of any Kirby game to date, and managed to expand more on the series' lore, universe and characters just as much as KSS (if not more), without needing to use a single word of dialogue. The hugely entertaining versus minigames are a worthy substitute for a co-op mode. I may be a bit biased towards this one, because it was the first Kirby game I ever played, and is a major source of personal nostalgia. 5/5 stars.