Kirby: Canvas Curse

2024-02-11
This was probably one of the first DS games I ever got and for whatever reason I only finished about half of it and put it down. Well, as is my way, I've gone back and finished it and here are my thoughts almost 20 years after I purchased it.

Kirby is a wonderful series because of its variety. Sure you have your classic platformers but there's racing games, fighters, top down shooting games, games that are basically a collection of mini-games-- and this one, a Line Rider esque platformer where instead of controlling Kirby directly you guide him around the levels by drawing a line across the screen. Kirby magnetically follows the direction of the line you drew as long as he touches it so you can do little loop-de-loops and make ramps and so on. It can also block some enemy attacks. Levels end up being a sort of obstacle course of pits, enemies, and things that can squish the pinkman. As is the classic Kirby way he can also absorb enemies powers. Sadly these seem to mostly be more for solving very specific optional puzzles (no thanks) on levels than really doing anything cool. Almost none of them synergize well with the core mechanic like modifying the way the lines you draw behave or how Kirby interacts with them.

The game starts off a fun little game as you casually draw lines around to get Kirby through the levels and this is actually my favorite part of the game and maybe why I stopped halfway as a kid. Near the end it ramps up the difficulty precipitously requiring you to pull off admittedly cool stunts in quick succession or you'll die. The problem is the game also has the classic, archaic lives system. That means, while there are plenty of reasonable checkpoints to respawn at if you die during a difficult section, if you die enough times you have to restart the entire level over. That meant I just spend 30 minutes grinding lives on the first level while on a phone call to remove this tedious aspect of the game. Tedium for tedium.

But at the end of the day it's a very fun game. Not a masterpiece but a fun game. And to be honest I'm only sad they didn't make a sequel where they iterated on the ideas here and made them more fun. Maybe they knew they hit the limits of the concept and that's why we got what we got.