Having waited for three months in anticipation for Nintendo’s rather good haul of game releases this year, I was quite excited to see a new Kirby game coming to the Wii. When I first picked it up and played it, I was thrilled by all of the fantastic (and quite adorable) effects within it. The music is grand, featuring quite a few piano-only pieces. Though the plot is a little dry (an evil poncho-wearing wizard kidnapping citizens of Dream Land and essentially turning them into yarn), the rest, be it the game-play, or just some of the effects within most of the levels, might just blow your mind.
Due to the fact that Kirby becomes made of yarn within this game, he naturally loses his ability to inhale and consume enemies, copying their abilities. This is explained within the game in a cut-scene near the beginning, in which Kirby tries to inhale a foe, but the foe goes right through him. Regardless of this drawback, I feel that this game is still superb. From Kirby losing these abilities however, the game-play has somewhat shifted from what would easily be identified as Kirby’s unique style of a game, to become more of a Yoshi’s Island-style game. Kirby’s arm extending to grab an enemy can be easily compared to the extension of Yoshi’s tongue. Granted, this isn’t actually a bad thing, as the Yoshi’s Island games are pretty good, from what many people say.
So, just how does Kirby defeat most enemies in this case, if he gets no copy abilities, nor gets to be able to inhale foes? Simply put, instead of doing this, Kirby extends an arm of his and grabs foes, stringing them up into a ball, and use them as projectiles. Alternatively, he may grab an enemy and just rip them apart.
Kirby’s Epic Yarn has a two-player cooperative mode, in which the second player plays as the secondary main character, Prince Fluff. The second player has all of the abilities of the first, except for the areas in which both characters transform and combine, either into a tank, a train, or a snowboarding penguin (it exists in there), in which the person who touched the transform item first gets the primary control, and the person who did not gets the subordinate role (i.e., in snowboarding mode, only the person with primary control may jump and spin, but the subordinate may shake his/her Wii remote to make the primary person jump again).
One common aspect of Kirby games are the bosses. Personally, if I were to compare this game’s boss fights to fights in all other Kirby games, I would say that these are the best. In just about every boss fight, there are multiple ways to damage said boss (often times grabbing onto them and slamming them hard into the other side of the screen after stunning them using a projectile), unlike in most other Kirby games. Within the boss fights most other Kirby games, you would merely either inhale projectiles and spit them back at the boss to damage them, or just use a copy ability you’d brought in beforehand to smite your enemy.
The only major con in this would be in the few instances in the game where Kirby transforms into a train, in which the player(s) pointed their Wii remotes at the screen in order to draw track for the train to go on. Though toying with the flukes in the system were entertaining (the train spazzing out if your arm wasn’t steady drawing the track), I overall disliked this phase of the game.
Overall, Kirby’s Epic Yarn is a rather wonderful game. There was only one area in which I had any issues. I highly recommend this title to anyone who’s a fan of Super Mario, or Yoshi platforming games, as well as returning fans of the Kirby series.
Loading ...