4/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Kirby & The Amazing Mirror.

Platform: Switch (via Switch Online) Time Played: 5.5 hours Status: Beaten ⟳ I have so much nostalgia for Kirby & The Amazing Mirror. I watched enough clips of it on YouTube as a kid that my dad managed to find a bootleg GBA copy for me to pop in my DS. Ever since then, I've loved the soundtrack, the world, the unique characters, the unique game structure, etc. I've already reviewed this game back in 2022 when I was doing a Kirby marathon, and I still loved it then. When they announced that this game was coming to Nintendo Switch Online several months ago, I tried organizing a play session with three of my friends so that I could finally experience this game's multiplayer in all of its glory, and that's what I finally got around to doing earlier this month. And while I found a lot more things to critique this time around, I still think that this game can be a really fun experience. One thing I learned over my playthrough was that although all four players can go off and do their own thing on the map, it's much better to work cooperatively to overcome one singular task. That sense of teamwork just really elevated the multiplayer aspect of the playthrough. Sure it's nice to be able to spread out and take down individual levels and challenges in order to get to the ultimate goal quicker, but that just wasn't the way to go with the group I played with. One thing that wasn't the greatest was the local and online connection strength/speed with NSO. The amount of lag my friends and I faced when we were all playing in the same room was obscene and really dragged things down at times, but there wasn't much we could do about that. It's been a long time since I played a Kirby game that still had the original formula that Super Star helped evolve and became a mainstay after Super Star Ultra. Losing your Copy Ability after one hit, the general physics of this game, the stiffer floating, and the limited move sets with the Copy Abilities (still a little more fleshed out than earlier games in the series with abilities like Smash, Sword, and Hammer aka the best abilities) combined together took a fair bit of getting used to and made the overall game feel more archaic, but that's the nature of these older entries in the series, so I give it a slight pass. One thing about this game in particular that I know everyone dislikes, specifically an aspect of this game's Metroidvania setup is the star goals. Those fucking things are so damn annoying. It's as if the game gives you a false sense of progression when you go into parts of an area that you have yet to go through only for you to end up at a star goal and have to restart searching through that area all over again. It just serves to discourage the player for their efforts and makes you even more lost in the vast world which is really easy considering how difficult it is to find the maps for each area. Besides all of that, as I said earlier, I love the sprite work and graphics seen throughout the game, I love the soundtrack, the unique enemies and bosses along with the cool premise are really cool and was a well-deserved shakeup for the Kirby series. I wish that we got to see more of these like Mega Titan, Gobbler, King Golem, Dark Mind, and some of the regular enemies in future entries. Also insane how they never brought back Master Hand and Crazy Hand as bosses and barely utilized the Smash ability after this game because it is genuinely so awesome. Anywho, while this specific co-op playthrough of Kirby & The Amazing Mirror wasn't the best thing in the world, I still appreciate this game for what it is and what it did to shake up the Kirby series, and it remains one of the most memorable and nostalgic games in the franchise for me to this day.