Kirby is awesome. He’s always been awesome. After his beginnings on the Game Boy, and his first real masterpiece with Kirby’s Adventure on the NES, he’s been kicking ass and taking names. His last real home console outing was on the N64, not counting Kirby’s Air Ride since it was a spin-off, so this has been a long time in waiting for Kirby fans (well, gamers in general really, everyone SHOULD love Kirby since his games are solid). Kirby is frankly one of the only characters in all of gaming to not have one bad game out, even his spin-offs were amusing enough.

After the Gamecube title was cancelled, and then rumored to come on Wii, and then cancelled again, we were losing hope that Kirby would be seen on consoles for a while still, other than his Smash Bros appearances. At least handhelds were keeping Kirby alive with a few really good titles.

When this was announced at E3, I was ecstatic. It looked a bit weird and the title was unlike anything I would ever expect from Kirby, but the gameplay videos got to me. But, after I learned you couldn’t die in the game, my interest waned. Despite that, I was still willing to give it a chance.

So read on and see if it was worth giving a chance to!

Developer: Good-Feel
Publisher: Nintendo
Date of Release: October 17th
Platforms: Nintendo Wii

Genre: Side-scrolling Platformer
Rated E for Everyone

What is good about this game
Presentation
The graphics here are just fantastic, some of the best in the generation. There’s no pixels, anywhere. Just fabric and yarn. I had to try hard to see anything that looked like pixels, since the lack of anti-aliasing just contributes to make the yarn look even more like yarn. They really nailed the look they were going for. THe animations look very realistic in regards to how yarn and fabric would move, and the character design really does well to look and feel like the usual Kirby style, but with yarn. The overall look is very cutesy but… this is Kirby after all.

The music is also very good, for the most part. The tunes mostly use some childish instruments, like recorders and xylophones, as well as piano and a variety of other things. They have a very child-like sound to them, but most of them are fairly fun to listen to. The best tunes of the game are near the end, when Kirby returns to Dream Land (all transformed to Fabric and Yarn), since they’re remakes of classic tunes, and very well done remakes.

The gameplay still feels like Kirby
While the look of the game is very unlike any other Kirby game, it doesn’t play a whole lot differently. You can suck up enemies and absorb their powers because of Kirby turning into yarn, but you still have the same basic attack as in previous Kirby games. Rather than sucking up enemies, you use a whip, which can either kill enemies, or make them into a ball which you throw at enemies, sort of like you did in other Kirby games by swallowing enemies and spitting them back.

Since Kirby can’t inhale, it also means he can’t fly like he usually does, so he has other things he can do to compensate. In the air he can turn to a parachute to float down slower (and be affected by air currents). You can also use a ground pound, turn into… some weird thing with a propeller to move underwater, turn into a car to go faster, and latch on to certain things to swing to higher/farther places as well as changing the landscape which is pretty awesome. In addition to that, Kirby has various transformations in certain levels: UFO, robot tank, train (which SUCK ASS), fire truck, Humvee, spaceships (for fun but easy Shmup levels), a dolphin, a thing that digs through the ground… And I might be missing one or 2. The transformations add quite a bit of gameplay variety and overall fun… other than the train, it’s just horrible.

While the game looks different and has a few different gameplay elements, it’s still very much a Kirby game. You still use enemies to kill enemies, and you have various different forms for Kirby. It’s slower-paced than the average Kirby game, but it’s still fun to play.

Another thing I want to mention about the gameplay is that the level design is awesome. You have various gimmicks in most levels, and the platforming is occasionally very interesting.

The gameplay takes advantage of the graphics
I’ve pretty much never said something like that. The developers took the graphics and crafted the gameplay around them. Going behind fabric, turning Kirby into a single filament of yarn to pass through small areas, using buttons to alter the playfield and countless other things, work so well  because of the graphics. They took the concept of “everything is yarn and fabric” to another level by making the gameplay fully based on that, rather than just the graphics.

Content
There’s actually a good amount of content in here if you want to do everything. 3 collectibles to find in every level, gold medals to get in every level which depends on the amount of beads you pick up in each level, an extra patch in boss fights to open 2 extra levels per “Land” (totalling 6 levels per Land+a boss battle), and 3 apartments you can decorate to bring in new tennants, which give you “side-quests” through every level of the game (finding hidden characters, getting an amount of beads, bringing a character to a certain part of the level, all with time limits). The game is fairly short, but the extra stuff can add a lot of gameplay time (Beadtrix’s challenges in particular). Completionists can definitely find something to love here.

What I didn’t like about the game
It’s SO EASY
I mean, there’s easy, and then there’s this. Kirby has never been incredibly hard, but it’s never been such a cakewalk. You can’t die. Getting hit removes some of the beads you’ve collected, and scatters some of them around. Same if you fall in holes, though holes rarely let you keep any of the beads you’ve lost. You’re ranked at the end of every level depending on the amount of beads you have, so, if you want to 100% the game, you need to get gold on every level, so there’s at least SOME motivation to not get hit/fall in hole….

That brings to the second problem in regards to the difficulty. The enemies DO NOT WANT YOU DEAD (not like you can die anyways… but you know what I mean). They do not hurt you if you touch them, only if they attack you, or if they have spikes. You can just use enemies as platforms, there’s that harmless. Their attacks are usually really easy to avoid, or they have so little range or attack rarely, so you’re almost never in danger, there’s rarely any risk of losing your beads. And, even if you do get hit/fall into a hole, unless you’re right next to the end of the level, you’ll rarely lose enough to not get at least silver rank, the only time I got lower was in multiplayer.

The boss battles are rather disappointing. They don’t have complicated attack patterns, and their attacks are so telegraphed that it’s nearly impossible to get hit. Heck, you can beat the final boss by button-mashing, he’s that easy. It kinda sucks too since all of the bosses, other than that magic pumpkin guy, had good potential to be really interesting bosses… even the underwater boss.

Unless you want to do everything in the game, there’s really no challenge whatsoever. And, even then, the game is so forgiving that you’ll never really run into any problems. The super-low difficulty is sort of an insult to the great level design.

Minor gameplay problems
Other than the game being incredibly easy, the gameplay suffers from a few minor problems. The most obvious one is that it’s really slow. Not that Kirby had incredibly fast gameplay before, but they were a lot faster than this. The underwater levels aren’t too great either, with the only times where they play well being when you’re in dolphin form, otherwise it’s a bit too stiff. I already said this twice in the review, but the train levels are just purely horrible, especially in 2-player. Also, there’s never any “hmm, how will I do THAT?” moments, since everything is made painfully obvious, like they never want you to solve problems/puzzles.

Then there’s the fact that there’s some useless stuff in there. The apartment is completely pointless. You collect tons of furniture and wallpaper, but none of these really do anything other than in the 3 other rooms that you have to decorate with specific things. The only use for beads beyond an extra floor to the apartment building early in the game (which eventually leads to extra challenges) is buying furniture and wallpaper… which are pointless! A bit more incentive for getting beads would be nice.

Multiplayer
Not that I don’t like it, but it’s not really well-done. I like that it’s drop-in/drop-out mid-level, and that the game asks you before every level if you want to play with someone else. The problem is that the game stops working well when another player enters the fray. The camera goes out of wack, never knowing who to center on, and instead just does whatever it feels like, making it harder to progress if the second player isn’t following you perfectly. You’ll fall in holes more often and get hit more often by enemies you can’t see since the camera sucks, making it harder to get a gold rank in every level. And it’s rather pointless since the levels were designed with one player in mind.

Overall
All those super-positive reviews this game has been getting? Well, it’s because of the graphics. It can’t be because of the gameplay, because the game is so damn easy and the gameplay has some problems. Another example of reviewers being positive with a game because it’s pretty. I’m not saying the game is bad, far from that, but it’s way too flawed to be reviewed as positively as it has been.

I find that Kirby’s Epic Yarn is a fairly fun game if you go at it with the right mindset. The game is stupidly easy, and it’s extremely childish, so, if you go at the game ignoring that and just relaxing/having fun, you should be okay. If you don’t like extremely kiddy stuff, stay away. I’d call KEY a more relaxing game than an engaging gameplay experience. It still has a lot of content, lots of fun moments and even a bit of challenge if you look towards the extra content, but it’s not an experience that the more “hardcore” gamers will be completely fulfilled by. I mean, it’s clearly made with beginner games in mind, and, in that sense, that’s fine. But they really should have included difficulty levels.

It stands to this day as the weakest “main” Kirby game ever, even including some spin-offs, but it’s still a fine game if you stay open-minded about it, and DAMN is it pretty. It’s a LEAST worth a rental to check out the graphics and such, but it’s hard to suggest a buy on this to people who aren’t hardcore Kirby fans. And ,even then, it’s so different from Kirby’s usual awesomeness that even hardcore Kirby fans might be taken aback from this.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Very pretty
- The basic gameplay is well done
- Really good level design with nice gimmicks
- Lots of content, and good replayability
- Some really good music

Cons
- I’ve rarely played such an easy game
- Difficulty levels would have been nice…
- The gameplay needed some work, and more speed
- Should have had 2-player levels to make the multiplayer worth playing

The Save Factor
50$ for this new is sort of high, 25-30$ would be much better considering the difficulty, even with the fairly high amount of content.

jobocan Console, Games, Review, wii