As you might have noticed, BoneSnapDeez went on an enthusiastic Kirby bender a month or so ago. All his stumping for Nintendo's cutest killer got me inspired to grab another title in the franchise, and since I was sold on the concept of power combinations, I picked up Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards.
First thing's first. This game is adorable -- and by that I mean it's somehow more adorable than I was already expecting it to be. Kirby and his friends have so much personality in this game. There are cutscenes sprinkled about, and although each one is only about thirty seconds long, they convey oodles about the characters' dispositions in ways that made me laugh out loud. The icing on the cake is that a loveable Waddle Dee and the infamous King Dedede join your cause to form a very unlikely band of heroes. The story is simple, but the storytelling is compelling if you let it connect with your inner eight-year-old.
On powers, Kirby can absorb enemies' abilities as he did in
Adventure, but in
Shards he can combine two different types to hilarious effect. Half of the joy of this game is matching combinations and seeing what happens. Absorb something spikey and you grow spines for a short time; absorb
two spikey things and you erupt into an absurdist swiss army knife that features a fork, a syringe, a cactus, and a honey bee's butt. It's hard to explain how funny and delightful this is.
Regarding the music, Jun Ishikawa's Kirby stuff is always lovely and fun, but what I especially enjoyed were the compositional callbacks to tracks from other games. Without a doubt the backing rhythms to Green Greens and Float Islands (
Dreamland) made appearances, as well as full renditions of Butter Building (
Adventure) and Gourmet Race (
Super Star) -- and there are probably others I'm missing.
I had some problems with the game, but I think they all boiled down to one thing: I kind of sucked at it.
It's rendered in quasi-3D, and a lot of boss fights employ this in exciting ways which I personally found difficult to process. One in particular involved objects with a single long spike that rotated on a vertical axis; I had to literally chant "forward, backward, forward, backward" out loud in order to time my dashes and avoid getting whacked. The camera also travels around in subtly dramatic ways, and I often had a heck of a time lining up my shots. This wouldn't be so frustrating if certain power combinations weren't required at specific times; a misaligned toss might mean having to restart the level to pick up the lost ability again.
My one real beef is that the game wasn't entirely consistent with its conventions. As mentioned above, certain power combinations are needed to uncover certain shards. At first the game makes it unmistakably clear what you need, but later some of the power solutions make little contextual sense and are not suggested in any way. Again, I wouldn't have a problem with having to try everything out, but on many occasions the required powers were not even present anywhere in the level. I was not keen on spending a lot of time backtracking through levels to grab ability combinations that might not work. I used a guide for some of them because I just wanted to hang onto the fun.
