LogFAQs > #950532732

20. Kirby Super Star (SNES, 1996)

Kirby is such a wildly malleable character. He's got linear games with methodical progression (Adventure/Dream Land series), radical departures from traditional platforming (Canvas Curse/Epic Yarn), and a vast array of spin-offs. (Pinball Land, Block Ball, Air Ride, Dream Course, etc.) There's a lot of potential with a character who is basically just a blank slate and can transform into exactly what you need him to be! But the one game in the series that I feel like maximized on this potential (and took him beyond a novelty) is Super Star, by a significant margin my personal series favorite.
As with much of the rest of the series, Kirby swallows up enemies and copies their abilities, with the usual Fire, Ice, Beam, Sword, and others among the array of powers. Each power, however, has a robust moveset of several button input combinations that produce different effects, making almost all of them valuable for a significant amount of situations. As such, KSS is a game that plays at a much quicker pace than its predecessors and gives you the toolset to deal with it - you're a much beefier and more effective Kirby in just about every situation. You can also easily play this one cooperatively; you can use a power to spawn a partner character that can be controlled either by a human or an AI, and both features work pretty great.
The structure of the game is a pretty big departure, too - instead of one lengthy adventure, there are 6 independent "games", each its own self-contained adventure with different rules. Spring Breeze is a short retelling of Kirby's Dream Land 1; Dyna Blade is another mostly linear adventure, but with some hidden secrets; and Gourmet Race is a 1-2 player challenge where you're racing off against an opponent to reach the finish line first in a series of courses, but with the caveat that you score points for all the food you eat along the way.
The best parts are in the last three games, though. Revenge of Meta Knight follows a linear storyline of Kirby infiltrating Meta Knight's Halberd airship, interspersed with dialogue between Meta Knight and his minions along the way. It's charming but challenging, backed with some of the best music tracks in the series, and some really memorable boss fights.
Great Cave Offensive has Kirby traveling across a giant interconnected maze of rooms, collecting as much treasure as possible along the way. It's perhaps my favorite mode of the game, and arguably the predecessor to Kirby & the Amazing Mirror. Finding the right powers to use to reach a hidden treasure or get past an obstacle is really good here; as I said earlier, you're going to generally have something pretty useful, and not be stuck with a completely worthless ability for a long time just because you need it to get through a door.
Milky Way Wishes is great, too - twisting the formula a bit, you're not getting copy abilities through enemies, but instead via statues hidden behind doors (there's usually a couple of these in each level). Once you get a statue, you can break out that ability any time, so you slowly accumulate power over the course of this mode, and it just feels really satisfying to reach a new permanent ability. Plus, this has the best ending and boss fights in the whole game.
There's just a ton to like here - each game is reasonably short, so it doesn't wear out its welcome before its mechanics get too tedious, and breaks up the action well. I think this sort of structure just suits Kirby well in general; there's always a point in basically any of his other longer adventures where the game kind of loses steam and seems to run out of new ideas, but here it stays fresh consistently. The new powers feel much more suited to a faster-paced action game than the more constrained options from prior titles, and I think the series in general is better for it - it lets Kirby's mechanics and movement really shine for the first time. While I can see why someone would prefer Canvas Curse or Nightmare in Dream Land, Super Star captures what I always wanted from a Kirby game.

---

it's an underwater adventure ride