A playthrough of Nintendo's 1993 platforming game for the NES, Kirby's Adventure.
This video shows two runs through the game. The first is a 100% playthrough to unlock the extra game mode that I begin at 2:04:03. At 3:32:53 you can see the sound test that unlocks once you've finished the extra game.
Kirby's Adventure was the second game of the long-running Kirby series, released almost exactly a year after the puffball made his debut in the classic Kirby's Dream Land for the Game Boy ( • Kirby's Dream Land (Ga... ).
Despite having such a short time between the releases, Hal really went all out to ensure that the NES game wasn't a mere rehash of the earlier game. The original game, though it was met with huge amounts of praise, was often criticized for its low difficulty level and extremely short length.
It's clear that, in creating Kirby's Adventure, HAL listened to these criticisms and did their utmost to address them. Instead of a mere five stages, there are over thirty this time around, and Kirby has seen a whole slew of improvements made to his battle capabilities. The biggest of these is that now he takes on the abilities of the enemies that he inhales. This allows for much stronger level design, with a lot of puzzles being designed to require specific powers to overcome. This reworking of the stage design also prevents Kirby from merely floating above everything that might hurt him like he could through most of Kirby's Dream Land. Enemies are more aggressive this time, too, but between his powers and his new dash/sliding abilities, Kirby is well equipped to handle whatever King DeDeDe might throw his way.
It was clear from the moment that it was released that Kirby's Adventure was not your standard 8-bit platformer. It was the only official North American cart that shipped on a 768K ROM (6 megabits!) - larger than most early Sega Genesis titles - and the game made full use of the expanded memory to make the game feel more "16-bit" than just about anything else on the platform at the time.
There are special event animations to show characters interacting with one another, each power picked up has its own unique set of sprite animations and illustrated tutorial screens to go with it, there are some impressive uses of parallax scrolling and faux-3D rotation effects, and the overworld and the switches used to open secret areas together add to the feeling that the stages are part of an interconnected world instead of being self-contained action seqences.
It all feels much closer to Super Mario World than it does to Super Mario Bros., for sure.
The overall presentation is fantastic. Even though I've never been a fan of the game's art style, there is no denying just how well put together it all is. It never tries to look like a 16-bit game (like Batman: Return of the Joker or The Immortal), but instead it looks like a super-polished 8-bit game. The colors are bright and vivid with the pastels making it look like a story book, and the final boss fights are impossibly cool with all of the things going on in the background. Somehow, despite the limitations, it never really looks garish like many NES games did. It does, however, suffer from some extreme slowdown. As hard as it presses the NES, I'm surprised I never smelled burning plastic while playing.
The sound design isn't as impressive on a technical level as the graphics are, but the music easily stands up to the phenomenal soundtrack from the original Game Boy title.
I think my personal favorite part had to be the throwback area late in the game: one of the stages is quite literally a compressed remix of Kirby's Dream Land in its entirety, replete with the original music and monochrome graphics. I really loved the shout out, just as much as I did when I found myself on the reimagined C-Island at the end of Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II. It's such a simple and cool way to show a bit of appreciation to the fans that have played the earlier games.
I also found it incredibly funny that at the end of the game you find out that Kirby is a complete and utter douchebag. You seriously have to feel bad for King DeDeDe when everything comes to light.
Overall, Kirby's Adventure is a fantastic NES title that shouldn't be missed. If you are a fan of it, you might be interested to know that the game has seen a couple of rereleases - beyond the standard Virtual Console release, it got a full stereoscopic 3D update for the 3DS (with the slowdown removed!), in addition to the 32-bit remaster treatment it received in 2002's Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land for the Game Boy Advance.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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