Kirby's Dream Land 2: A Deep Dive

Kirby is a series known for not having a bad game, and I generally still think that's true. When the generally regarded worst Kirby games include a perfectly fine game with microtransactions, a reskin of Puyo Puyo, and a pinball game for the Game Boy, all of which are spinoffs, your series is in pretty good hands. But even with how consistently strong the mainline games are, there's gotta be a worst, and for me, Kirby's Dream Land 2 is the worst mainline Kirby game. And it really hurts to call it that, because it's not a bad game. It's honestly one of the Game Boy's most impressive platformers, and makes some pretty big improvements over its predecessor. On top of that, it kickstarts my beloved Dark Matter trilogy and paves the way to two of my favorite games in the series. So what's the problem? Well, let's talk about it.

Kirby's Adventure: A Deep Dive

Kirby's Dream Land is a fun little game for the Game Boy, but I think most can agree that Kirby's Adventure is when the series fully forms. This is a much larger adventure with a more fleshed-out moveset, the introduction of copy abilities, and vastly more levels. It's also easily Nintendo's most technically-impressive (and probably also best) NES game, with stunning art direction, fantastic music, and an abundance of content. Maybe even too much content since Kirby's Adventure is also infamous for its lag issues. But for now, I want to focus on going over the design of Kirby's Adventure and how it makes big strides over its predecessor in this area.

Kirby's Dream Land: A Deep Dive

I've enjoyed doing those Mega Man deep dives so much that I wanted to branch out into delving into some of my other favorite series, and one in particular is Kirby, my favorite video game series of all time. Kirby is a series that just doesn't get fully analyzed much on a game design level, so I wanted to change that and really pick apart what makes these games work so well for me. So, let's start with the first game in the series, Kirby's Dream Land.