It's rare for me to feel repulsed by a game. I think as long as I pick up a title willingly, I can usually find something about it that I enjoy—even if it's something as simple as the game's concept. Case in point: a sidescroller Pikmin-like with touch controls? Sure, sign me up! I had a lot of fun with games like Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and both DS Zelda outings, so it seemed probable that I would enjoy Kirby: Mass Attack. Plus the fan reception towards the game was generally warm (some calling it a forgotten masterpiece) and HAL had yet to steer me wrong...
... until about an hour in, where I realized I was descending into a terrible pit or poor design choices. Kirby: Mass Attack has two only gears: boring and frustrating, leaving the game an unsalvageable mess. It is, as sad as it is to say, one of my least favorite games I've ever had the displeasure of completing.
I understand full-well how audacious the previous sentence sounds. I've played a lot of junk in my day, with only a fraction of it being stuff I've reviewed for this website. But what places Mass Attack near the top of the steaming heap is that I found nearly none of the game fun to play. It suffers from two equally damning, deadly problems: bad controls and bad stage design. I cannot understate what an awfully noxious concoction this produces; it would be one thing if the game wasn't pleasant to play, another if the stages dampened your fun, but both together renders Mass Attack a mood-cratering chore.
The first point—the controls—seem solid on first blush. You can tap the screen to make Kirby walk, double tap to make him run, and a quick scratch will fling him at your enemies. All of this works like you think it should, but the more Kirbys you add to the equation, the messier the game becomes. The pink puffballs tend to spread out rather than bunch up, and since the camera needs to keep all ten in frame if possible, you don't have a lot of screen real estate to work with. Worse yet is neither does the gang of Kirbys: prompting them to move produces definitive "winners" and "laggers", with some Kirbys reaching your stylus first and others taking a second or two to catch up. Therefore the camera doesn't have much room to look ahead at what you could possibly be running headfirst into, and if there's one Kirby missing it won't even move until he's reunited with the rest of the pack.
Plus there's a nastier consequence to holding your stylus down to usher the Kirbys along—Kirbys that reach your stylus will be sucked into a Canvas Curse-esque blob that can be ferried to wherever you draw. The problem with this is that it absolutely kills the game's momentum, as the Canvas Curse blob is not only slow but worse at wrangling the camera than your screen taps are. Most of the time you will activate this effect without wanting to use it, giving the game a very stuttery ebb and flow as you tap away to dispel the blob, and then hold on the right side of the scren to keep the train moving. So whenever you're not having a tug-of-war with the camera, you'll be watching the Kirbys at the caboose struggling (and failing) to make a jump to keep up, while those at the head attach themselves to your stylus like a newborn desperate to suckle. Though annoying only a couple hours in, you better brace yourself, because this vexing struggle is going to go on for at least ten.
Kirby games are usually not lengthy affairs. Most of the titles can be wrapped up in under three hours, with only the bigger, more prestige titles reaching the (still comfortable) seven hour mark. Mass Attack is about 1.5 hours of content spread into a vacant 12 hour container, thanks to its laborious and glacial level design. Stages in this game just do not know when the hell to end, stretching on for over fifteen minutes at a time—and that's if you don't have to replay the stage! So much of this game is designed to slow you down: mid-stage cutscenes, painfully long autoscrollers, durable minibosses, stretches of flat land, and endless patience-testing mechanics like darkness, sandstorms, rolling logs, simon says switches, block destroying, block pushing—it never ends! Hell, once you have all ten Kirbys out on the field, consuming more fruit will pause the game momentarily to add to your worthless score, which also unnecessarily interrupts your run command. Mass Attack willingly sabotages itself, resulting in the stupidest thing possible: death by innumerable speedbumps.
God help you should you aim to 100% the game, because you will receive no mercy from the designers. Completionist goals are split into three categories: grabbing all the medals on a stage, beating a level without a single death, and completing hidden bonus objectives. On my run I only had the stomach to attempt the first category, and even that was a pain in the ass to complete. Mass Attack commits the cardinal sin of storing its medals down exclusively branching paths, forcing you to replay a level to grab them all. It's not one or two stages either: 1-1, 1-9, 2-1, 2-2, 2-4, 3-5, 3-8, 3-10, 4-1, 4-2, 4-4, 4-6, & 4-11 all require multiple visits. And this isn't even counting all the stages in which you only have one chance to grab a quickly appearing medal, or if you miss one by accident, or if you just take the wrong goddamn door!
The content within the levels themselves range from dull to decent, although you're likely to notice a weird trend: Mass Attack is at its best when you're not playing, well, Mass Attack. The first four levels of World 3, 6-2's tank stage, and the surprisingly robust minigames you unlock are the closest I've had to "fun" in the game, with the key feature linking them being they have nothing to do with the 10 Kirby touch screen gimmick (I think 3-11 is probably the best regular level, but even then its leaning tower gimmick could easily be used in another one of the puffball's platformer outings). Meanwhile the game's more traditional stages were constantly hair-pulling: 1-5 has you walking around 90% of the time, 1-8 is rotten with time-wasters, 2-5's miniboss is a joyless slog, 3-7's valves take twice as long as they should to rotate, and 4-10's ship ride is like 5 whole minutes of mindless flicking. The worst offense of all is found at the end of 4-11: after a gruelingly long stage you're offered an invulnerability power-up that's often used to get medals in impossible-to-reach places. But if you take the power-up and run through the last leg of the stage, you'll destroy a key you need to unlock a chest that contains the last medal you're hunting for. I've never seen a Nintendo game bait you with a power-up that will then lock you out of getting a collectible. It's just rude and spiteful; one more blemish to add onto this ugly, bloated wretch of a game.
In a vain attempt to pity you, Mass Attack includes mid-level warps that can take you straight to the goal, provided you've completed the stage before. But these are often placed in the most puzzling areas. Ideally you'd use them if you missed an early medal but didn't want to replay the entire stage, but I often found the warps placed before you could the first medal appears. That, and the most easily missed medals (those you have only one chance to get) often show up at the end of a stage, rendering the warps useless. I suppose you could use them if you needed to restock your Kirbys, but you'll rarely be finishing a stage with any Kirbys missing, as even a full wipe will bring you back to your initial Kirby count. It's a complete design oversight—look at the mid-level warp in 3-1/3-2/3-3/3-4 and tell me this game is well designed with a straight face.
Even Mass Attack's aesthetics underwhelmed by the end of my journey. Occasionally the backgrounds can look pretty nice (like at the start of Worlds 3 and 4), but the game is far from the looker that Super Star Ultra and Squeak Squad are. Levels are fairly barren by design since all 10 Kirbys need space to stick together, and I was never really impressed or tickled by the enemy design. Likewise, the soundtrack underperforms for a Kirby title; sure the first stage is mildly catchy and jaunty, but the rest of the OST is filled with depressingly lackluster tracks that initially sound good but don't really go anywhere interesting—they're all bark and no bite. The best thing I can say about Sakai's compositions is that they're wonderfully varied and not starved for quantity, but they lack the texture and splendor of Ishikawa's pieces. Just compare a boss track from this game to the common one in Return to Dreamland; ignoring the difference in soundfonts, Dreamland's is much more compelling—and it's not even my favorite boss track from the game!
Returning to what I claimed at the top of my review—that Mass Attack is one of my least favorite games I've ever finished—I think what really cements this opinion for me is a simple truth: you barely even play Mass Attack. There are plenty of notoriously worse games that are deserving of far harsher criticism, but almost every one I can think of has at least some element of play to it. There are buttons to press, mechanics to learn, and strategies to devise on your terrible journey that can lead to some form of mastery (unless it's full-motion garbage like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties). Mass Attack requires only lazy inputs from the player, where your mind wanders with your stylus in one hand and your chin atop your palm in the other. Even other games with low gameplay input like Vampire Survivors and Dragon Quest have at least some modicum of interesting minute-to-minute decisions you have to make, which can impact your survival in the long term. In Mass Attack, the most interesting problem you face is what angle to throw your Kirbys at—and it's really only one enemy (the cactus fellow) that takes advantage of this.
It summons an interesting dichotomy: I recently went trophy-hunting in Ketsui and you know what? That's an amazing video game. In a few seconds you'll be mowing down enemies, optimizing score, and needing to balance the route in your head with the bullets on the field. It's admittedly unfair to compare a Kirby offshoot to one of the best shoot-em-ups ever made, but the point I'm trying to make is that Ketsui is an input extreme, giving you full control at all times with interesting decisions to be made nearly every second. Going to Mass Attack soon afterwards felt like hitting the other end of the spectrum, where all you do is hold your stylus on the right side of the screen... and slowly watch Kirbys clonk an enemy to death. There's very little risk management, even fewer heart-pounding scenarios, and no pathing quandaries that need solving. Every other Kirby game at least gives you some substance you can sink your teeth into and play riskily if you so choose. Mass Attack consists of only 10% of that excitement at best—the other 90% is the most boring, repetitive game on Earth. Why else do you think almost nobody speedruns it?
I have no sympathy for Kirby Mass Attack; it's a tedious, dull, asinine game. What I think I struggle with the most when looking back on it is trying to understand why some fans love it so. I get being drawn in by the concept—I was too. I understand having a soft spot for it because you may have played it in your childhood. But calling it underrated? Phenomenal? The best game in the franchise? It's a circle I can't square, outrageous doublespeak I'm too shrewd to accept. I get that tastes are subjective and all that, but a masterpiece? This game? No.
You'd have to lobotomize me before I touch it again.
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Images obtained from: ign.com, blogger.com, ebay.com, amazon.com
Images obtained from: ign.com, blogger.com, ebay.com, amazon.com
