Kirby's Adventure is the sequel to Kirby's Dream Land and is the second game in the Kirby series. Released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, it features a ton of improvements compared to the original game on the Game Boy. The first thing you'd notice of course is Kirby is now in color! This provides a lot more visual variety and thanks to the more powerful hardware, the levels have more complexity with plenty of hidden rooms to find.
The game is a 2D sidescroller platformer where Kirby can run, jump and float his way to the destination . The twist with Kirby is that he can suck in enemies and then spit them back out as projectiles. He gains the additional ability of a slide kick and being able to dash in this iteration, significantly increasing the pacing. This game is also the one where Kirby gains his signature ability of being able to swallow his enemies to gain their abilities. There are a lot of abilities including fire-breathing, turning into stone, freezing enemies, firing a laser, and wielding a sword. This drastically increases the variety of gameplay compared to the original.
After playing this game, you will be surprised at how refined the gameplay already is. The controls are tight and fluid, and later games haven't really drastically change the gameplay. The biggest criticism of the original was the short length, being able to be completed within an hour. Kirby's Adventure rectifies that with 41 levels across seven worlds. Each level is decent in length, with great level design. Scattered in each world are also minigames which helps you gain extra points. You can repeat stages as each world is represented by a separate level select stage, with doors being unlocked progressively as you finish each level.
The game will take less than three hours to complete but search through every nook and cranny of each level to unlock all the bonus stages and you're looking at 1-2 hours more. Boss battles are more involved and gained an increase in difficulty. Their patterns are a little bit more unpredictable and if you try to rush things, then you may just find yourself losing a life. Kirby has a health bar so it's not as if you will get one-hit KO'd but seeing that gaining back health in the middle of a level can be rare if you don't find the secret rooms, then you have to be careful. Dying just means you restart at the start of the current segment, not from the beginning of the level. Losing all your lives though only results in a penalty to your high score.
The final boss was pretty epic for its time, and it is surprising that the visuals are so stunning and the music so fast paced for a NES game. The final cutscene was funny too. The game contains a lot more secret rooms now, mostly with health restoring items but on the off chance, unlocking minigame rooms. While the game is still on the easier side, it gets progressively harder during the later levels but never gets unfair. You'll more likely to die by rushing through the levels than by any real threat. The plot is still simple but when it is a platformer, it doesn't need to be any more complicated. King Dedede returns to steal the Star Rod and splits it into pieces. Kirby sets out to retrieve those pieces and save Dream Land once again.
If you have a Nintendo 3DS, then this game was remade into a 3D Classic. This means you get to play it in 3D, while this is purely a gimmick, it still looks pretty snazzy. Overall, Kirby's Adventure is everything you would hope for in a sequel. It has significantly improved graphics (and one of the most impressive on the NES), excellent music and a gigantic leap forward in gameplay. The addition of Kirby's copy ability makes the game extremely fun to experiment around with and the gameplay still holds up well to this very day.
----------------------------------------
For other game reviews, have a look at this page.