With the countdown to the release of the Wii U drawing ever closer, Nintendo offers one last release for the Wii, honoring the 20th Anniversary of their pudgy pink star with an endless appetite, Kirby.
This special edition release wraps a soundtrack and art book within some adorable packaging, along with six of Kirby’s earliest adventures, so let’s break that down below.
For the second year in a row Nintendo’s pink pudgy star brings his insatiable appetite for adventure to the Wii, as well as his seemingly never-ending vendetta against a familiar tree. It would be forgivable to view this release with a pinch of cynicism, as a kneejerk attempt to pad out a Wii release schedule that hasn’t thinned out so much as dried up with the shift in focus to the 3DS and Wii U.
And though it only took a day to lightly pass through Return to Dream Land, I’m not feeling quite that cynical. Kirby’s latest outing sports significantly less yarn this year, instead offering a traditional Kirby platformer that gives Hal Laboratory another chance to strut their penchant for visual flair and rather magical stage design. However, Kirby’s return does suffer for want of a point to all the wonderful abilities Hal can grant him, and in the absence of any real challenge the finer points become so ridiculously subtle that one could miss the treats entirely for never being encouraged to discover them.
The old rules apply, and Kirby once again becomes who he eats, which makes the menu of potential powers the emphasis, and though stages never slouch about finding space for moments of inspiration that leave me smiling at how clever Hal continues to be, the playing is much more an act of design appreciation over tactile engagement.
HAL Laboratory was the first developer to truly show just how cool games could be on the Nintendo DS. Those of us who survived the dark, dreary days that were the DS’s first few months of existence know how slim the pickings were. But, like the sun breaking after a long night, along came Kirby Canvas Curse, and gone was any buyer’s remorse we had been feeling.
Canvas Curse skillfully demonstrated that the DS’s touch screen could be used for more than gimmicky mini-games, while also taking the Kirby series in an interesting new direction. I still play it on a regular basis all these years later – it is fabulous, and if you haven’t played it, do yourself a favor and track it down immediately.
Now we find ourselves in the twilight of the Nintendo DS’s reign, and HAL returns once again with an absolute knockout release. Kirby Mass Attack, like its cousin Canvas Curse, does away with a traditional control scheme and opts instead for stylus-driven control. Thankfully, the wizards at HAL superbly integrated this type of control scheme into engaging and intelligent level design and aesthetics, and the end result is one of the most interesting, innovative, and fun games to hit the Nintendo DS in quite some time.
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