Kirby and the Amazing Mirror was the first Kirby game I played. To this day certain aspects of its level design and graphics pop into my head unbidden to tell me “things should look more like this”. I loved the idea of finding powers in enemies and the framework, with themed worlds all linked together into one open thing. It’s a keyring platformer, like Metroid. (see the What do we call metroidvanias thread.) The idea is basically Metroid but instead of PERMANENT upgrades, your upgrades are TEMPORARY. Your skill in avoiding hits changes how likely it is that they’ll be taken away. And it has a hub world. A big, circular hub world, like in Yume Nikki, but starting off empty, and pressing huge satisfying switches bigger than Kirby’s body to activate the doors to each themed stage arranged in clock fashion.
I don’t think there’s a lot of sequence breaking you can do but it adds so, so much to the game to have a constantly branching path; so much so the actual doorways between rooms are a tracked collectable. (no reward for getting all of them i think but i’m pretty sure i eventually got stuck on 99%. so i wouldn’t know!) Every single place you go could have some hidden world access point; until you learn the rules of every power in the game, there could still be hidden doors. But you won’t be confused about where to go because there’s always something clearly pushing you ahead. (Even some interesting stuff like doors that take you only one way, so you have to risk your existing progress and maybe abandon whatever task you had in mind to enter them.) That’s classic good game design.
Then I found out it was sorta the black sheep of the series and every single other Kirby game is overwhelmingly linear. Even the ones after it!
Can I just make a scene, here, about this meager thing for a moment? That’s so FUCKING STUPID it BLOWS MY MIND. I don’t even understand how they came up with Kirby in the first place without coming up with Amazing Mirror. Metroid was out for a cold 7 years; no excuse. The other Kirbys were just done wrong. Like they don’t even get what’s cool about their game. “Yeah, I GUESS there could be more places for our flexible, flying, ability-changing blob to go than the empty line, straight ahead of you. Buuuut… like… branching might require players to replay parts of a level. I don’t want to make a level that’s interesting enough to go through more than once.”
No, this is how they wanted to make levels. Cute, guys!
That said, I haven’t tried THAT hard to delve into other Kirby games. I’m not sure if I could emotionally handle the fallout of being disappointed again. I played the GBA remake of Kirby’s Adventure and a certain powerup (the spike one) was so astonishingly cool it retroactively worsened my experience of the other games that it’s nowhere to be seen! It seems like the big trick of the series is to come up with good ideas once and then drop them.
Take Kirby 64. The only other Kirby game I really enjoyed and finished was Kirby 64, because (among other things, like looking nice) it has the power combos. Again, awesome brainstorm. Everyone who talks about this game talks about how cool they are. (Just like they talk about how cool it is that you can only fly for a limited time before Kirby starts huffing and puffing like an old man and falls to his death! Oh, what, that wasn’t a super popular improvement that they definitely stuck with?)
Combining powers is fucking awesome. You find one new power, it means a multiplicative explosion of discovery. The part I like the most is that tons of powers aren’t useful as keycards or even good for keeping you alive - the designers just really devoted themselves to making a reasonable combo for every single elemental power. You don’t know what you’re gonna get but you know it will have some sort of amusing logic behind it.
There’s so much you could do with this criminally under-utilized mechanic. Sure would be nice to see that developed, instead of atrophying away into nothing. Yeah, a logical progression instead of making their gimmick that they come up with a whole new aesthetic for every Kirby game, like they’re doing now. Are they gonna return to this well of unanimous success? Ever?
N O P E
Yeah, failed. Failed like a poorly inspected bridge!
Amazing Mirror was one of my favorite games as a kid; it’s one of the few games I can remember getting and putting into my GBA SP and playing on my old chair at my old house, talking to my mom about how much I liked it. You know what? FUCK Kirby! FUCK THE WHOLE KIRBY SERIES. The only reason anyone has remembered this wretch for 15 years is because he’s in Smash. Nintendo, give up whatever pathetic bullshit you’re on now, team him up with Samus, put them both in a Metroid Kirby game. JUST MAKE A METROID KIRBY. Kirby of the STARS, right? Space bounty hunter? Kirby of the ZEBES? Just spitballing here.
Maybe Kirby is the bit of Chozo-Metroid DNA that got sucked out of Samus after Fusion, and she hangs out with him afterward because he reminds her of the baby metroid she saved. Kirby would flutter around after her and you’d control them both and switch between them like in Donkey Kong Country or Lost Vikings or Superstar Saga. And at the end of the game they’d say goodbye and he flies off to go crash into Pop Star. Because he’s so inspired by Samus he wants to go be a space bounty hunter too.
You would have Dedede and Kraid all bickering over food and not getting along, and you’d be all “Hey! This doesn’t seem quite right! Where’s the real bad guys?” and then DARK MATTER would come outta nowhere and so would MOTHER BRAIN but in her creepy humanoid form from Super, and they’d mashup into DARK BRAIN and they’d be all WAAARRRGH and the Space Pirates would be like YEERRRRRRR and the painter girl would fly Samus’s ship down to the surface and hop out, and you find a boss room with the Adam the computer man from Fusion and he’s just totally ancient and fucked up, and Samus has to kill him all “What a shame” and Kirby can suck up his corpse and go GUBBA GUBBA !! and open up security hatches and there could be a bit where you find weird mushrooms in a cave and there’s a frog jumping around, and it would be a funny in-house reference like, get it, that’s Toad.
Ridley would inexplicably not show up at all. In his place is Yoshi. But Samus would still have developed a phobia of him and passes out whenever she sees him, so during that battle a fearful Kirby has to constantly eat his big sister figure and spit her out of the way of attacks.
EASY win for Nintendo, $800,000,000. Sony, Microsoft defeated. YOU’RE WELCOME.
