Look, I can explain!
If you've seen some of my other Kirby blogposts, you'll probably know by now that I was not the biggest fan of Planet Robobot. I always thought of it as a good game, but I had too many niggling gripes with it to call it one of my favorite Kirby games, and the sheer reverence people had for it left me feeling even more bitter towards it. But as I'm all too familiar with, sometimes it takes a bit of time for a game to fully click with you, and Robobot finally clicked.
So what made me decide to give Robobot another chance? Well, it was a discovery that I made about the game's combat. For whatever reason, perhaps due to an oversight, HAL completely removed i-frames from enemies and bosses. This meant a large percentage of Kirby's abilities in this game are broken in ways incomparable to any other entry in the series. Hammer, Cutter, ESP, Ice, Doctor, Whip, Leaf, Parasol and Ninja on the ground, Archer, they can tear through bosses like no one's business. I never knew this until very recently, but the moment I found out, I immediately rushed back to try the True Arena with this knowledge in mind, and I had so much fun that I just had to play through the game again. Just the right amount of brokenness can really made combat a lot more fun (it's part of why I like X6 so much), and realizing just how far I could take Robobot's combat made for a far more fun experience for me.
And since I was trying to delve more into Robobot's combat, I also decided to try and get a bit more out of the Robobot suit this time around. My biggest criticism for Planet Robobot was always with the Robobot suit itself, that it felt like a slower downgrade from just playing as normal Kirby. It seemed like all its moves would stop Kirby's momentum and that the pace would slow to a crawl whenever I had to use it. But here's where I went wrong, I thought of the Robobot Suit as a separate mechanic rather than an extension of Kirby's own abilities. Whenever I play a new Kirby game, I make sure to test out every ability's full moveset to see which ones work best with my playstyle, so why didn't I give the Robobot suit the same courtesy? So I actually tried to look into each Robobot ability and discovered a bunch of moves I had no idea about, all of which made using it way more fun for me. Fire has a Down-B burst move that takes less longer to do, Cutter lets you hold out a sawblade and move around, using Beam in midair doesn't stop you, I found myself enjoying using the Robobot suit way more when I stopped treating it as a "scripted sequence". While there's still a fair share of puzzle rooms that need you to use certain abilities, there's just as many moments that leave you free to plow through enemies however you want.
And once I started to actually enjoy the core gameplay of Robobot, I was able to truly appreciate a lot of the stuff it did right, the level design in particular. Robobot has so many memorable and inventive levels and setpieces, like the cars in Revolution Road, the ice cream factory in Overload Ocean, the casino stages, the Jet Armor stages, the Wheel Armor stages, the laboratory levels, the creepy virtual world near the end of Access Ark, and literally all of Rhythm Route. I feel like I really took the sheer creativity on show in Robobot for granted, maybe because of how many of its stages have stuck in my mind after all these years. But the aspect of Robobot that I really grew to appreciate was just how puzzle-centric it is. There's stages where you have to hop in and out of the Robobot armor to get it through an armor, puzzles involving juggling batteries around, puzzles where you have to shove trucks around in the right order, and best of all, some really fun segments about using a remote control to pilot a doppleganger of yourself. Of course, this is a Kirby game so most of these puzzles won't leave you scratching your head or anything, but it's the variety and (once again) inventiveness of these puzzles that make them fun.
I also gained a lot more respect for the soundtrack too. I used to find it underwhelming due to the sheer degree to which it utilized its main leitmotif, but compared to Forgotten Land's core leitmotif which is also used quite often, I will say I like the Haltmann theme much more. And while I still generally prefer Canvas Curse's glitchier EDM style, Planet Robobot's soundtrack goes for a style akin to Sonic Frontiers' Constructure which I also quite like. But ultimately, it's the remixes and final boss themes that really steal the show here. Every single laboratory theme is absolutely incredibly, from the haunting Sand Canyon 3 remix, to the melancholy Sky Tower remix, to the banging Dark Castle remix, to yet another amazing Float Islands remix (Float Islands gets the best remixes, I swear). And that's not to mention the excellent Dark Matter and Kabula remixes, and the sheer variety of songs used in the bonus levels. Hell, they even ported Canvas Curse music quite frequently, and it fits like a glove. As for the final boss themes, they're all phenomenal. From the frantic Vs Star Dream, to the beautiful Intermezzo, to the all-out glitchfest Soul OS System, it's yet another strong ending to a strong Kirby soundtrack.
Do I still have some issues with Robobot? Yeah. The Code Cubes are still pretty easy to find (though the Rare Stickers partially make up for that), the boss roster isn't quite my favorite out there, and there are still a few too many autoscrolling stages, but at this point, it's no more than the amount of gripes I have with virtually every other Modern Kirby game. Return To Dream Land has a slow start and an overlong Extra Mode, Triple Deluxe has its cutscene-heavy Hypernova segments and an uneven final world, and Star Allies has basic level design and obstructive Friend Abilities. Planet Robobot is at its best when you really engage with everything it has to offer, making the most out of both Kirby and the Robobot sides of the game, using the stickers, testing out all the abilities and breaking the combat as much as you can, combing the stages for the Rare Stickers and not just the Code Cubes, and of course, playing the hell out of that amazing post-game. It took a long time for Robobot to really land with me, but now I can definitively say that I like it quite a lot. I'd easily rank it right up there with all the other Modern Kirby games, even if I still wouldn't call it one of my favorites.
5/5 Stars
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