This week, since I'm low on suggestions and I want to encourage people to give suggestions via comments, I'm going to just pick a franchise myself. In this case, it's Kirby, everyone's favorite pink marshmallow vacuum! For those who aren't familiar with Kirby, he or she is an adorable pink marshmallow-looking thing that sucks up enemies like a vacuum and copies their abilities. Swallow a ninja, you get a sword to carry around. Swallow a guy with a hammer, you get your own hammer to swing around. It's well known in the gaming community and by Nintendo fans as being a series of very easy games, usually best for kids who want to get into video games. It's also, quite like Kirby, changing and evolving, presenting new and innovative games as well as games that more so celebrate Kirby's early days. Some games, like Kirby Mass Attack for the DS or Kirby Air Ride for the GameCube, take Kirby into new and weird directions, whereas games like Kirby Triple Deluxe for the 3DS or Kirby's Return To Dream Land for the Wii are less innovative and more similar to past entries. That's why, to celebrate and show just how split in half the Kirby series feels, I will review two Kirby games. Lord help us all.
Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land:
This a Kirby game that, admittedly, is more my speed. It's like the other Kirby games, but I'm okay with that. It at least is a fun overall experience. Here are my in-depth thoughts.
First thing, controls are solid. Controls are rarely a problem with Nintendo games, so it's no surprise when I tell you that this game controls perfectly. Different commands are laid out with the best possible buttons, and Kirby moves around at just the right speed. Gameplay is also great. Kirby's copy abilities are awesome and in this game, you have the freedom to experiment with the different abilities, something the game also encourages often. Something I really wish there was more of would be copy abilities like "Sleep" that act more as a detriment than an advantage. To clarify, the "Sleep" ability makes Kirby just fall asleep mid-game, leaving you completely out in the open and vulnerable for 10 seconds. It's one of my favorites, because unlike other abilities that you can use to just zoom through levels with ease, this one actually makes the game more difficult.
Speaking of difficulty, this game's story mode is really easy, which I guess is supposed to be a standard for most games in the Kirby series, but it's still irritating. Because the levels are relatively long and really easy, the story mode feels really, really tedious. There is a mode you unlock after beating the story mode that has you fight all of the bosses in the game with only one life. This mode is ridiculously hard, which feels weird after playing such a pushover of a game. Aside from that, there's a few side mini-games that feel like they're taken straight out of Mario Party and they're just okay.
Now, is this a game you should come back to after one playthrough? In my opinion, yes, but only because of the Boss Battle mode. It forces you to think critically about the way you play and it is also so incredibly difficult, but not because of unresponsive controls or bad design. If you die, it's your own fault, and since you have only one life I suggest you think carefully about how you approach each boss. Overall, this is a great Kirby game.
Kirby and the Amazing Mirror:
Now, if you like Kirby games that introduce new ideas or do unexpected things, this is the game for you. Do like the Metroid game? This game is right up your alley.
Since controls are basically the same as before, I'll skip to gameplay. In this game, you have to travel around, find new areas and pathways, and locate all of the hidden shards of the Amazing Mirror. And instead of one Kirby--there's four! You play as the regular Kirby, but every other Kirby is traveling in a different area while you play, and at any point you can call all of them to your area so that they can help you. It's definitely a great idea, and the game itself is fun, but there's one big problem that hinders the whole experience: The world in this game is way too big! You either get lost because you find a whole bunch of unexplored areas all at once, or you get bored because you've already looked everywhere and you can't find anything new. To this day I still have yet to beat the game because whenever I pick it up, I get frustrated by the lack of things to do. Again, it's a great idea, I just wish it was executed differently.
Difficulty wise, for reasons stated literally just a few lines ago, this game is very hard. It, too, also has useless mini-games that are really just distractions. They're really easy, and I'm not sure if there's some kind of special mode you unlock after completing THIS game's story mode, and if there is, I'm not going to be playing it anytime soon.
Overall, the game is pretty good. In some areas, it feels a lot more polished than the other game and abilities like "Sword" and 'Fighter" are given a bit more depth and control to make them more fun to use. However, this type of game just wasn't for me. I admit that its concepts, ideas, and some of its executions are very good, but the fact that it gets increasingly harder to find new, branching paths the further you progress is just tiresome. Sorry, but I'm gonna stick with Nightmare in Dream Land.
Hey guys, this review took me forever to finish but if you enjoyed it, let me know in the comments, and please suggest a Nintendo franchise for me to cover next week if you can. It would really mean a lot to know that people are reading these things, and it would really be helpful to have an idea of what those people want me to talk about. See ya next week!
Hello friends! My name is Ian and I really like video games! I also really like reviews, so I've decided to do a blog where I review video games and also talk about life from time to time. In this first post I'm going to review Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 3DS. Leave a comment below suggesting a video game franchise (preferably Nintendo-related) and I will pick a random game from that franchise to review in the next post. Without further ado, here's my first review for the blog:
Super Smash Bros is a weird franchise for me. The only entry in the series I really played was Brawl, and I knew almost nothing about the previous games. Almost half a year before the 3DS game was released, me and my brother Colin played Brawl at almost any chance we could get. We unlocked new characters, experimented, and found new strategies. It was a great game, because the gameplay and characters were always the same, but experiences were different. Some of my funniest and my most intense moments playing video games came from there. It had a staggering amount of content, and still today I have yet to get all of the music tracks, trophies, and other things. I say all of this stuff about the game because that's what I've been thinking about while waiting for the newest entry on the 3DS. "Will it be as good?" was a question I asked myself a lot. Everything looked promising, it would have new fighters like Mega Man and Pac-Man, the 40-minute Nintendo Direct video about it and its Wii U counterpart indicated that Nintendo seemed to know what it was doing. Recently, I got the game and spent a few days getting a feel for it. Grab some popcorn, ladies and gents, this is going to be really long.
First, the gameplay. I was really skeptical about how the 3DS button layout would fit with a game like Super Smash Bros. I, among many other Smash Bros fans prefer using a GameCube controller, but the 3DS isn't that bad. Can the Circle Pad be unresponsive at times? Yes, it can. Is it much of a problem? No, it really isn't. Even though you have to use the Circle Pad for moving your character and you can't change that, you do have some options for how you want to lay out your commands with the buttons. Once you get used to the controls it is pretty much a breeze from there. From the beginning, A is regular standard attacks, B is specials, X and Y will make you jump, L will make you grab the opponent, R will make you shield yourself, and the D-Pad is used for taunts, although the D-Pad can't be changed to anything else. I really like the control layout. It may not be as good as a GameCube controller, but it does the job of letting you control the game pretty well.
Now for the different game modes. Classic Mode is back and has a really cool thing where you can set the difficulty before it starts. The higher the difficulty, the more coins you get, which you can use to get trophies and other things. But if you lose during the Classic Mode, you get to continue where you left off, but the difficulty lowers, meaning you get less coins. Trust me, if you think you can beat Classic on the hardest difficulty without losing, you better kiss your social life goodbye because you'll be trying to beat it for hours with no success. New to the series and exclusive to the 3DS version is a mode called Smash Run, where you run around, fight enemies from all sorts of different video games, get power-ups that increase your stats like Speed, Jump, Defense, and then after five minutes of increasing your stats, you and some other players will either race, fight enemies or really anything to win. This is probably my favorite of the modes, because you start out really slow, you can't jump very high, but as you go through it you become faster and can jump higher. You have to have all of your bases covered when playing this mode. All-Star Mode is back, but it is really easy, and keep in mind I played on the Normal difficulty. You fight all of the other fighters in order of when their games were released, starting with the oldest and working your way up to the newest. It's cool, but the problem is that the A.I is really dumb and (for whatever reason) is set to take more damage from your attacks, making the mode really easy, yet also really tedious. You also take damage a lot quicker and when you die, it means Game Over and there are no "Continue?" things anywhere to save you. Every time I lost on All-Star Mode (which was most of the times I played), it was because I slipped or overshot an attack and fell off the stage.
For smaller modes, Home Run Contest and Multi-Man Smash are back and basically play the same, with a few minor changes like Rival Smash, where you and an A.I race to defeat as many Mii Fighters as possible. It's okay, but I doubt I'll be coming back to it anytime soon. There's also a little game that's like a combination of Home Run Contest and Angry Birds with a bomb that starts ticking as soon as you touch it. Once it has three seconds left, send the bomb flying to destroy as much of the structure as possible! This mode is also okay but not really good enough to warrant a second play-through.
Now for the fighters. My personal favorite of the new fighters is Little Mac, because of how much damage he does while on the ground. He forces you to think about how you fight, which is really cool. Because his recovery moves are garbage, you need to be on the ground and close to the center of the platforms as much as possible. My least favorite of the new fighters would probably be Charizard and Greninja, as they play almost exactly like Bowser and Fox respectively. Mega Man and Pac-Man are just sort of in the roster, and while I'm glad they're there, I really wish they had something else that could justify playing as them. You also start off with almost all of the fighters from the very beginning, which kind of really sucks, especially considering how many fighters there are total on the roster. In Brawl, there were a lot of characters on the roster, but most of them had to be unlocked from doing very specific things and you had enough time in between unlocking fighters to try each of them out, which is also why I miss The Subspace Emissary so much, because even though it did drag a lot and the final section of it is awful, you could unlock most of the roster by playing through it and you always had a little bit of time to try out each fighter you unlocked. Here, there are more fighters than before and because there isn't any kind of story mode that encourages you to try each of them out, it feels really tedious and daunting.
Almost all of the stages in the game are okay. Moving on.
How does the regular Smash fare? It is still just as good, if not better, than before. Nintendo ditched the Coin matches, which is great, but it feels a lot less great when you realize they probably removed it for hardware reasons and not because they thought it was an actually good idea to remove it from the game. Every fighter moves at a crisp 60 frames per second, which looks great. And hey, the 3D actually looks really awesome with Smash Bros! It's still headache-inducing, but at least it looks good! Local Multiplayer Smash Bros is really good, there is virtually no lag, and everything is easy to figure out. There's also Online, which, while very laggy at times, is still very enjoyable. They also have StreetSmash, which I haven't tried out and probably never will because it looks really stupid.
Overall, Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 3DS is fantastic. No doubt about it, if you plan on buying a 3DS or a 2DS, get this game, it's worth every cent and fulfills expectations wonderfully.
