I've gone on a pretty epic NES bender the last week or so, and knocked off four games in the process, so here's the first review from those four. I've been playing them all on my NES Classic for various reasons, but I actually didn't own a cartridge copy of Kirby's Adventure, so it seemed a logical place to start.
Kirby's Adventure is a very late NES title, released a full two years after the release of the Super Nintendo! Usually these games are fairly rare and collectible, but as an official Nintendo release featuring a well loved property riding high from his success on the Game Boy, Kirby's Adventure is actually pretty reasonably priced, although I've only come across one in the wild, and coincidentally after I'd just bought the NES Classic in part to add Kirby's Adventure to my collection. Oops.
Kirby's Adventure takes Kirby's basic skills (flying, sucking bad guys up and shooting them back out) from Kirby's Dreamland and modernizes him to become the Kirby we know and love today. His signature and frankly horrifying ability to swallow enemies and take their skills for his own debuts in this game, and the pink puffy vampire has never looked back. Kirby has a frankly staggering number of different powers in the game, and each of them is lovingly and cutely animated so that he'll steal your heart with every sword slash and body slam he does. He also has a sliding kick, although, frankly, I rarely used it.
Kirby's Adventure takes place across eight worlds with somewhere around 45 levels (just a guestimation). The basic platforming elements of Kirby's Dreamland are all here, but the expanded power of the NES allows for Kirby's world to be larger, brighter, and more delightful than ever before. Kirby's in color, now, as is his world. The sprites are still delightfully drawn, but definitely take advantage of the NES' power. As a late game entrant to the NES library, this game looks far closer, graphically speaking, to the late generation triumphs of the later Mega Man games and Little Samson, with the developers at HAL Laboratory having figured out the tricks of developing for the system on their earlier titles. The game is truly striking and has a bunch of really cool effects thrown in that would have really dropped jaws back in 1993, at least compared to other NES games.
The game features a bit of slowdown, which is common among games of this era and level of detail. It's nowhere close to the mess that is the middle Mega Man games, but it's definitely noticeable and irritating at times.
The controls are generally pretty good, but they'll kill you occasionally due to the quirky choice (again), to make up make you fly. This means that if you brush across up on the d-pad while jumping, Kirby will immediately float up into the air and start flying, which can definitely be irritating.
The levels are big and detailed and fun to navigate. Each one is chock full of different secrets that can only be unlocked if you've brought the right stolen power into the room with you. This gives the game quite a bit of replay value, as you may find that you're trying to work the system in order to bring the right powers and get that completion percentage higher and higher (note: this is the first game I can remember that has a completion percentage to it-but there is probably another one before it). The bosses are detailed and fun to fight, and none are so frustrating that you'll want to give up.
The game has some cute little cut scenes between the level that show off the story of the game without any words, which is positively delightful. The story is definitely pretty shallow, but there's a pretty good twist at the end that will make you smile and feel even more in love with Kirby and his world than ever before.
The music to this game is insanely catchy, in keeping with every other entrant in the series. The sound is also very good.
This game can best be compared to Mega Man 2. It took an excellent idea from the first game in its series and polished it up, introducing new ideas that would eventually become hallmarks of a truly hallowed institution of gaming. Kirby's Adventure is a thorough delight to play, and I think just about everyone will enjoy it. I'll give it a 9.5/10.
Up next on What I'm Playing is another NES title that I actually beat months ago and forgot to review. I can't pretend that this is a great teaser, but that's fine.
-TRO
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