Kirby Super Star Ultra : Nintendo DS Review

Posted December 20, 2008 by Cow Cow in DS Reviews, Featured, Featured Home, Reviews.

After years of anger management classes, Kirby is back, and just as angry as ever.

After two mediocre games by Capcom, Kirby’s finally back… with a remake. Personally, I’d much rather play a new Kirby game, but beggars can’t be choosers. Maybe they’re really busy reworking that Gamecube Kirby game for the Wii. In the meantime, we’ll have to settle for this game. It’s not too bad though, since Kirby Super Star was a great game back in the day, but does it stand the test of time? Is the new content enough to entice veterans to return for seconds? Should new players buy this game? Read on to find out.

Kirby is a platformer at heart, but doesn’t play like most 2D platformers. First of all, Kirby can fly, so baring any silly mistakes, you won’t fall to your doom. He also has the usual moves like running, swimming, jumping, and attacking.

Kirby fights by inhaling foes, then spitting their corpse back at other enemies. You can also gain slew of new fighting abilities by devouring certain enemies. For example, with the Suplex ability, you can break someone’s spine with a back breaker; or smash their face in; or repeatedly stomp the tar out of them. They all easy to do, and fun to use. Out of the 19 different abilities, each of them provides at least 4 or 5 different moves for lots of variety. You can simply enjoy the game by experimenting on what moves are most effective for you. I haven’t even counted some of the rarer single use moves.

If that wasn’t enough, Kirby can eat his foes, and brainwash them into a helper. This helper has the same moves as whatever you just ate, and has his own life bar. You can share food, to revitalize each other! This helper can be controlled by the computer, or by a friend with local wireless play. Even without a friend, the computer helper will fearlessly attack anything in sight. You might say they’re brainless, but they rarely — if ever — hindered my progress. The helpers are technically invincible, because once they run out of health, they have a few second to touch a completely different enemies, and transform into it; or Kirby can turn it back into an item, eat it, then call back the helper with full health again. It’s a fun game to play by yourself, but even better with a friend.

If there’s one thing that hampered the gameplay in the original, it’s the slowdown when the action gets too intense. This graphical issue doesn’t exist in the remake. Even the pre-rendered backgrounds have received a facelift. Some are drastic enough that I couldn’t immediately identify the area shown in screenshots. There might be the occasional background that looks inferior to the original, but they are very rare. All the cinemas have been redone with CGI, and there’s plenty of them. Some might cry foul, but I like them. The little stage intros in Spring Breeze are intact in their original form.

This isn’t a very hard game, but it is packed with lots of great content. I’ve know the original game like the back of my hand, and it took me 6 hours to complete everything with 100%. That was me rushing through the game to unlock the new content. Although it’s labeled as having multiple games in one package, you can also look at it as different stages of one whole game. On the other hand, many of these games have unique properties to separate them from each other.

Let’s take a quick look at everything this game has to offer. You have to beat some of them in order to unlock others. Each game has it’s own name.

Spring Breeze, DynaBlade, and Revenge of Meta Knight play like regular platformers. Unleash Kirby’s might and beat down everything that stands in your way. The level designs are very straight forward, but Revenge of the Meta Knights feels more fast paced. Revenge of the Meta Knight also has a counter that ticks down, so if you don’t beat the game fast enough you… I don’t know, actually. I’ve never ran out of time before. I assume you lose if you run out of time.

Great Cave Offensive has excellent replay value. I mentioned these games being separate worlds within a game, yet Great Cave Offensive has its own worlds and stages! Kirby must fight his way through 4 worlds while collecting treasures within each of the 3 non-linear stages. Many of the treasures requires you to use the different abilities to solve some puzzles, while others are just cleverly hidden. This is what Amazing Mirror was strived to be, but failed — miserably. It’s much shorter than Amazing Mirror, yet packed with more secrets, action, and puzzles. I like to erase my file and replay this to collect everything after a while to relive the adventure. For new players, finding everything could easily take 3 hours.

Milky Way Wishes’ level structure is the same as the others, but the core gameplay is a bit different. Kirby can no longer gain the abilities of the enemies he eats. He must locate these abilities to collect them all. Once you have them, you can call upon any power/helper anytime. There’s also a very cool side scrolling shooter stage towards the end.

Gourmet Race isn’t a full game, yet it’s much deeper than a mini-game. Your goal is to race against King Dedede in 3 relatively lengthy levels as you try to scarf up as much food as possible along the way. There are no enemies or bosses to fight, but still lots of fun. Since I didn’t have anyone to play this remake with, I don’t think this game supports multiplayer, but I could be wrong.

Meta Knightmare Ultra and Revenge of the King are 2 new full games added to this package. Actually, they’re not completely new either. Meta Knightmare allows you to play as Meta Knight to fight through all the previous games — except Milky Way Wishes. Meta Knight has his own moves, and some touch screen activated abilities. They put a new spin to the game, but it feels more like a time attack mode of sorts. Revenge of the King is Spring Breeze with harder difficulty, slightly redesigned stages, and some new bosses.

These 8 games make up the bulk of the package, along with a few mini-games. Everything from the original SNES game made it in, you just have to unlock them. I don’t want to spoil too much for the veteran players, but you will get to see at least 6-8 brand new bosses and other surprises.

The soundtrack is range from cute, to intense. Sure, you might think a pink happy squishy character like Kirby would only feature happy melodies, but you’ll also hear songs that feel right at home in a sci-fi space shooter, or furious action game. This is one of the most underrated soundtracks out there.

This game is without a doubt a great purchase for first time players. It’s not very difficult, but there’s plenty to keep you occupied. For veteran players, I actually think it’s better to hold out for a price drop or sale. The new content isn’t really worth it in my opinion unless you must have this game on the go.

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