Sorry in advance for the enormous pictures in this post, high resolution is inconvenient and I can't be bothered to fix it right now.
Kirby had a lot of defining qualities that other games didn't have, or couldn't have. It was unbelievably different from other games in the sense that nothing else could have pulled off what Kirby pulled off. So, let me list some original things that were ripped from the heart of Kirby when he entered the Yarn filled world of his Epic Yarn.
Abilities
This is the first thing that punches you in the face. Kirby is completely unable to inhale fuck all. Technically, if this was true, everyone living in the yarn world (I forget if it has a name) would suffocate to death. Obviously, Yarn doesn't have to breathe, so I SUPPOSE I can let that pass. The story implies that when Kirby tries to inhale, the air passes right through him. Physically, there would be no change in air direction regardless of what he did. Without lungs (or whatever the fuck Kirby used in the first place) there is no change in air pressure, and therefore no air rushing towards the low pressure area. Air shouldn't be passing through him at any enhanced rate at all.
Now, forgetting all that, let's stick to what he is left with. He can shoot a string of yarn and grab onto whatever to do whatever with. Depending on what he does with it, the yarn will do different things, usually pulling. Here's where shit gets weird
When you grab an enemy with your yarn, you do one of two things. If you hold the button, they turn into a ball of yarn. Simple enough. Then you hold them above your head and you can throw them at whatever. Kind of like other Kirby games right? Since you don't have copy abilities, you can just throw balls of yarn. Oh, the second thing is that if you just tab the button, you grab onto the enemy and rip them to shreds with your yarn lasso. That's what happens. Holy shit. Kirby games have never been so ruthless. Other Kirby games never let you see you digesting your enemies into stars. Yarn or no yarn, if you did something like that in real life, you're leaving a bloody mess on the floor.
Now, while we're on the topic of abilities, let's get a little more specific...
Mobility
Kirby hates you for this, Nintendo. Kirby's inhalation of air did more than just let him eat fucking everything, it let him fly. Now, he can't. He can, however, turn into a parachute. The working physics of a parachute is that it's large surface area pushes against the air on it's way down, thus slowing the fall significantly. What the fuck is going on here?
Some other things that you can do are turn into a car, a yo-yo, a top, and a tiny tank. If you get to a point in a level where you are required to turn into something more complicated that you can't transform into on a regular basis. Some of these things are a UFO, a dolphin, a snowboarding penguin or a giant tank.
I don't have a problem with many of these, but they are all very limited use. None of these things can be used wherever the hell you want with the exception of the car because it's just dashing but for lazy Kirby when he doesn't want to take the bus, and the occasional turning into a weight and apparently getting heavy as hell despite being made of the same yarn. Therefore, unless you're in a place where you are required to use it to get something/somewhere, you can't use it. It seems pretty useless most of the time. But here's something that's even more useless...
Scoring
Lots of games with stages and worlds have decided to score you on your performance, D usually being the lowest (Sometimes E) and S usually being the highest. It's a pretty familiar system by now, and it usually incorporates a variety of things. Sonic games usually base it on how fast you ran through the level, Mario games usually base it on score alone, but what can Kirby do? Kirby doesn't have anything that can support a functioning scoring system because of all the things you can do and all the different ways you can do it. Kirby games are so limitless that there is no plausible way to score the levels you play.
Oh wait.
Kirby's Epic Yarn introduces Beads. You need to collect lots of beads to get a good score in the level. It's completely useless to bother, but it's something you might as well do along the way, otherwise the game gets boring as hell. There are several uses for the beads, none of which are very original. You use beads outside of the levels as currency to buy more useless shit like furniture for your house that has nothing to do with anything and does nothing but look pretty while you sit around in your Yarny house not playing any levels. To bead collecting challenging, every time Kirby gets hit, you lose a shitton of beads. You can recollect them if their within reach before they disappear, and if they don't fall down into a pit. Oh, but don't fall into a pit yourself because then an angel appears and as it carries you out of the pit, you shit out all of your fucking beads and they usually all fall back into the pit, forever unreachable. Oh, and don't think that taking a hit with no beads kills you...
Challenge
Having a challenge in a video game is necessary for fun. It's not necessarily original in anyway at all, but Kirby's Epic Yarn completely erased any challenge it could have had. You can't die in this game. When you lose all your beads and take a hit, you're fine. It doesn't matter what happens, you're perfectly safe at all times. You don't have a health meter, and getting hit makes you flinch and lose your beads. Don't have any beads? Ok, let's just take out that last part until you get some beads to lose. This makes boss fights extremely easy, and boss fights that you can't figure out (if for some reason you can't figure it out) long and obnoxious. Scrambling around to collect your beads is a definite distraction, but what else is there for you to do? Nothing is out to get you for anything more than making you poor.
The final boss was disappointing. It wasn't long enough, and there was no challenge. The biggest problem you could have had was landing hits, and when you get to the last phase, it's just stupid easy. It's not necessary to make you completely invincible in a video game even if it is directed at children. Invincibility for the sake of not wanting kids to lose and have fits should be left for games like Disney Princesses and shit like that, which aren't all that legitimate. Speaking of being illegitimate...
Legitimacy
Kirby games have some noticeable patterns to them. There's always a Wispy Woods clone, even Epic Yarn stuck with that idea. There was, however, one very disappointing boss battle that I was looking forward to.
Meta Knight battles always allow Kirby to use a Sword. That's because Meta Knight is Chivalrous, and because sword fights are awesome. Of course, Kirby's Epic Yarn did not include a sword fight because there is no sword ability, and Nintendo felt it unnecessary to make a special exception for this particular part of the game. Instead, it was filled with Meta Knight throwing fireballs at Kirby from his sword, and getting them thrown back at him, never realizing that if he stopped throwing fireballs, he would be Goddamn invincible. He says later that he was sorry and that the Yarn had made him evil or something because he needed an excuse for not knitting a Yarn sword for Kirby when he made his own. What a douche.
That's really all there is to it. Now, I'm not saying that Kirby's Epic Yarn was a bad game. It was a good game. Not the best game I've ever played, and it was pretty short and didn't have a lot to it, but it was alright. You have to take into consideration what the market is for games when you think about how good/bad it is, so for a kid's game, it was decent. Compared to other Kirby games, however, it was awful. If they just went ahead and tried again on that game that was supposed to be for the Gamecube that got delayed repeatedly and then cancelled, I imagine that people would be much happier with the result. I know I would have been.
KingRanter
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