Content from Last 48hrs

A Whole Lotta Kirby So, one of the things that made the Switch 2 so appealing to me was the size of the library available on it, not just the ports and remasters on the Switch itself but also the retro games available on NSO. One of the series I'd been meaning to dig into properly was Kirby. So I spent the month of July playing nothing but Kirby games. Kirby's Dream Land 1 and 2 (GB) They're simple and cute little Game Boy platformers. I kinda figured I'd try them for a few minutes and move on but I ended up playing them all the way through in one sitting. The second one in particular was pretty fun but it got kinda bullshit hard by the end and I don't think I would've bothered finishing it without save states. 7/10 Kirby's Adventure (NES) This one was actually impressive for an NES title. The art style is simple enough that they were able to push the graphics way past what the average NES game looked like. It doesn't quite feel a generation ahead of its time but almost. If you bumped up the graphics a bit, it would basically feel like a SNES game because it brought the gameplay to the level you'd expect out of a Kirby game. Basically, Sakurai was already cooking way back then. That being said, the emulator crashed in the middle of the final boss fight and my only save state was like 2 full worlds back so I watched the ending on youtube because I wasn't replaying all of that. 7.5/10 Kirby Super Star (SNES) This is the only game that I had played a little of back in the day. I think this one is considered the gold standard when it comes to 2D Kirby games and it's easy to see why. It's split up into multiple mini-campaigns and every single one is firing on all cylinders. Not much else to say other than it's a fantastic game. 9/10 Kirby's Dream Land 3 (SNES) I guess this is where they started the "Kirby but with a __ art style" gimmick. It has this watercolor painting art style that looks really beautiful. It might actually be the best looking SNES game I've seen. Unfortunately, it felt kinda sluggish to play. The gameplay was significantly slower than the previous games and the animal mounts didn't feel anywhere near as useful as in Dream Land 2. I kinda had to force myself to finish it a little and I didn't get the true ending because it requires you to find a hidden collectible in every single level and I only found a handful of them organically. I wasn't going to replay most of the game just for this so I just watched the true ending on youtube. It's basically just an extra phase to the final boss. 5/10 Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards I was bracing myself for the worst with this one since games from that era haven't aged the best but I was pleasantly surprised. It immediately felt really good to play, especially after Dream Land 3. It also looked really good for an N64 game. I don't know if Nintendo's emulator is running games at a higher internal resolution of if the scanlines filter was just doing heavy lifting on the admittedly very simple art style but the image looked incredibly sharp to me. There isn't that much to say about it beyond that. It's basically a glorified 2D platformer. I wouldn't even call it 2.5D, it's way too simple for that. You can combine two copy abilities to create a stronger ability, which was a pretty fun twist but you only end up relying on a few overpowered ones. I got most of the collectibles by playing the game normally and I was having a good time with it, so I went back and got the ones I was missing for the true ending. 8/10 At this point I still had a GBA game and a couple of classic style games on Switch that I could play but I only had a week left before the physical release of Xenoblade Chronicles, which I was planning to play immediately, so I decided to skip ahead to: Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star-Crossed World This was the one I was most looking forward to playing, so I figured I'd use the limited time I had left to play it. It's basically to the old games what 3D World was to 2D Mario. It feels like a 2D platformer that was given a third-dimension without turning it into a full-blown 3D game. It's pretty great! I wouldn't say it was as good as Mario 3D World (or as challenging) but if you're in the mood for a cute and fun platformer, you could do much worse. It's definitely one of my favorite Switch games so far. I got all the collectibles for the base game and the DLC and completed most of the post-game stuff. The only things I have left to do are some of the harder mini-games that seem like they would be more frustrating than fun. I might come back to them to get 100% eventually but for now I think I'm good. 10/10 edit: Oh and I realized I never posted my friend code. Feel free to add me: SW-3747-9638-1387