Kirby & the Amazing Mirror

Developer: HAL Laboratory, Capcom, Flagship, Dimps, Arika
Publisher: Nintendo
Release: 2004
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Genre: Metroidvania

Picture yourself playing Metroid. You dig down through a big deal of planet, surviving tricky menaces along the claustrophobic way, until you hit a missile hatch sealing the path. That’s when you realize you need to get back to grab some since you could only carry one equipment at a time, and you’ve chosen the Morphing Ball. In a less dramatic and more colorful way, that happens a lot in Kirby & the Amazing Mirror.

Of course, the backtracking is diminished by the very enemies you find getting to places since Kirby’s copycat ability can be put to use at (almost) any time, but needed abilities are often too far for bothering—or you can easily get lost in the pure chaos of the world’s map and don’t even know how to get back.

Anyways, that’s part of the problem of a Kirby built from ground up to be a multiplayer experience. There is a clever “cellphone” system (with battery life and all) for making it up to a lonely player—it allows you to call reinforcements in the form of other kirbies—but the friendly AI is too dumb to rely on. That can render particularly frustrating moments when it comes to simple environment puzzles like standing on a button to open a door or helping moving a heavier stone, for instance.

Bosses pose a decent challenge to a lone wolf as well, and the final boss stretch is borderline absurd. Kirby’s unruly physics don’t add up well either—he can even climb ramps faster than he threads regular terrain—and the short (at start) health bar bring the Zelda syndrome up (that meaning “dying happens more in the beginning than towards the end”).

But Kirby is charming as hell, and the presentation delivers that in spades. One of the best pixel work to ever grace GBA can be found here (despite the heavy slowdowns when the screen gets busy), and that’s no small feature given the competition.

SNES³

In the end this Kirby should be approached more like an adventure sandbox than a proper action platformer. It just doesn’t go that well when it takes itself too seriously.