Kirby & The Amazing Mirror - Another Trip to Dreamland

[Dracos]

Boy it has been a while since last I sat down with the reviewing pen.  I recently picked up a nintendo DS and, during the preliminaries to order it,I swiped Kirby: Canvas Curse.

That is not what this review is about.

Instead it is about a game that I found while waiting for the shipment to come in, that slipped past me before: Kirby and the Amazing Mirror for the GBA, developed by Flagship and published by Nintendo/Hal Laboratories.  I somehow missed it the first time, true shame as it is a genuinely good game.

The story of the game is that there is this mirror and shadow demons snuck out of it, sealing metaknight away and going to cause chaos in dreamland after breaking up the mirror into nine pieces.

Simple enough.  The game's conceit is that it is multiplayer and you're working together with a team of kirbies.  Also simple enough.

In reality, what we have here is a generically awesome kirby game.  The gameplay is standard polished kirby, a little weaker than Superstar but augmented with the fact that the entire game is this gigantic treasure hunt across the nine worlds which are all interlinked and have nifty mapping systems to help you out.  You get a phone to call the kirbies for support and despite it being multiplayer, there's only one puzzle in the entire game that really requires you to use the kirbies (And the AI is good enough to help you do that puzzle, it solved it for me in fact).  You've got the usual variety of bosses, some old faces (Kracko, Metaknight) combined with a number of originals.

The music, sadly, doesn't bring much originality or flair to it, but for something apparently developed out of house, it really captured the kirby spark.  Definitely worthy of note is that they included a "Smash" ability set and master hand, both from Smash brothers as a kind of tribute.  Neat there.

Something really to pick up if you're into kirby games and haven't played it yet.

Dracos