Genre:Puzzle
System: Super Famicom, Game Boy
Developer: HAL Laboratory
Everyone loves Kirby right? Kirby has appeared in quite a few different genres, platforming, racing, golf, pinball, baseball. etc. Some of you are familiar with Kirbys Avalanche, a PuyoPuyo clone and Kirby Block Ball, an Arkanoid clone....or is it Breakout? eh, they're all the same anyway. Are you familiar with Kirby Star Stacker for the Gameboy? It was released in 1997, with a remake appearing on the Super Famicom in 1998 but unfortunately never made it outside Japan, for obvious reasons, the N64 was still around and Nintendo was done with the SNES in America. This review will be covering the 1998 version.
Story:
From what I can tell based on the pictures, a cute little star crashes and breaks up or some shit and you have to out puzzle various enemies from the game, Waddle-dees, Knuckle Joe,Dedede, Meta Knight, etc. and help I guess get stars or something I don't know. Kirby is aided by Rick the hamster, Coo the owl and Hine the fish from Kirbys Dreamland 2 and 3. Wee!
Gameplay:
The gameplay! OMG! Fuck! Bliss! Pure puzzle BLISS. The way the game plays it feels like a Kirby game, simple, easy to grasp but there are sooooo many ways to play it! There are 5 different kinds of pieces, hamster, owl, fish, garbage blocks and star blocks. Star blocks act as wild cards of sorts, say you have a fish block and a few star blocks going either vertically or horizontally, nothing happens, but put another fish block at the end of those star blocks and it disappears. The game is mad addictive, with heavy heavy emphasis on combo strings which are really easy to do. It feels really rewarding to see your blocks vanish in a big fat combo, after you get a chain and the chain ends Kirby or whoever you are playing as will shower the playing field with stars, this helps fill the gaps and potentially continue the chain. It is so addictive and satisfying.
Due to the menus being in Japanese I only played through story mode, endless mode and versus mode. They are exactly what you would expect from a puzzle game.
Graphics:
If you have played Kirbys Dreamland 3 then you will know what to expect from this game, everything is done in this colored pencil/crayon style and it looks beautiful. The story is told through still storybook like images from Dreamland 3. Everything is very colorful and the graphics are sharp, but nothing that really pushes the hardware. B+.
Sound:
Like every Kirby soundtrack, Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando deliver the goods. Some music is remixes from older Kirby games and some are brand new, my complaint here is that when I was playing against some friends in versus the music really never changes. You just hear the same stuff over and over, it's like I enjoy cake but I wouldn't eat it every day. A few hours of play and that music gets old. B.
Overall:
This game is amazing! The gameplay is just so addicting and fun, but relaxing. Something that bothered me about this game is the lack of Kirby type things. Panic bomber takes what might be a dull puzzle formula and throws in the bombs which makes it awesome, this game really doesn't do anything to put its own personal spin on the genre. There is no sucking up enemies, no copy abilities or anything. That being said I think this is easily in my top....maybe 3 as far as puzzle games go. It's just so much fun, if you love puzzle games at all you owe it to yourself to play this. Get a friend to join in too, because puzzle games are always way better with other people.
Overall I give Kirby No KiraKira Kizzu a 9.5/10. PLAY IT NOW.
