Review: Kirby Mass Attack

Kirby Mass Attack doesn’t respect the player’s time. This isn’t solely because it can be an uninteresting game but also because it piles on superfluous fluff. Games don’t have to be short but they do need to use their length effectively; otherwise, what is the point of being long? In a time where games are measured as “good buys” based on the number of hours they could contain, this inflated length could be a selling point. I don’t care about selling points and I would like to believe we are past this kind of thought (we aren’t).

Kirby Mass Attack (Nintendo DS)
Developer: HAL Laboratory
Publisher: Nintendo
Release Date: September 19, 2011

Case in point for how Kirby Mass Attack doesn’t care comes in the later section of the game. For the last world to unlock (they actually label this with the nonstandard nomenclature of “Level” and each level is instead called a “Stage”), the game requires the player to collect all the “rainbow medals” found in each of the stages that the player had to complete to even get to this point. If one happens to find them anyway, the last world is just open and you can beat the game—this is unlikely. For me, this meant going back and looking at each stage to see if I had gotten the rainbow medal or not and then meticulously replaying the stages hoping that I don’t miss the rainbow medal this time. For me, that was 14 stages and about two hours of time.

That last world was totally worth it, right? Actually, I’ll spoil it though you really shouldn’t care: the last world is nothing more than a boss gauntlet where one must fight the four main bosses fought before, only this time a little harder. So, to put this plainly: the game required me to play content that I’ve already played for two hours only to unlock the final world which is nothing more than a slightly tweaked rehash of the content that I already played.

This isn’t an effective way to design a game unless you are a business man who doesn’t care about the people who play your games, then it is an extremely effective way to design a game. A video game takes time to make: design takes time, programming takes time, art asset creation takes time. Reusing the same basic design of bosses and levels saves time, reusing these game art assets saves time. Another person probably told this business man at some point that time equals money. Another person might have told you that cash rules everything.

This is true. Nintendo and HAL are businesses and they want to sell games. People who review video games seem to think it is great when games take many hours to play regardless of anything else (though Kirby Mass Attack didn’t take that long, relatively: approximately 12 hours, 55 minutes and 44 seconds—I liked about a third of that total). This is probably true as well: games that review well (or have amazing marketing) tend to sell well. And if the game sells well then the game earns money. And if that game takes less time to make, that means it cost less money to make. And if it cost less money to make it then it is more likely to make more money. And if cash rules everything then this is a good thing.

I don’t care about anything in the previous paragraph and you shouldn’t either. I don’t own Nintendo stock. I don’t care how much money they make. “But it needs to make money,” isn’t a legitimate argument against this. “I evaluate my games based on how much time I get for my dollar,” shouldn’t even be a thought entertained. I care about playing games and I would hope that is what you care about too. I don’t have to be playing games right now. I mean, I do, because I like the idea of them (and writing about them), but I don’t cause I have a ton of music to listen to and movies to watch.

Don’t take this as “movies and music are better because they take less time.” I don’t care if something is long, as long as I feel it gives me some kind of meaningful value. This can be many things; it’s enjoyment, it’s entertainment, it’s thought-provoking, it’s a feeling. If I can play a game for 40 hours and truly enjoy all 40 of those hours—that would just be miraculous. This could happen, this has happened, but most games don’t even last past 2-3 hours without making gameplay loops painfully apparent. Even if there is an obvious loop, sometimes I don’t care, because either the game is that good, or the systems have some interesting hook, or the game evolves. That doesn’t mean a game needs “character progression”—things like that can be artificial. I mean a true change in interesting gameplay dynamics, or the building of a deeper understanding of the game.

That is another way Kirby Mass Attack fails: it doesn’t evolve. Okay, it does, you begin with one Kirby and that grows into a mass (that can attack) of 10, but having 10 is meaningless. Adding more Kirbys only means that when you tap on something like a madman to attack it, it will die faster. It also means that when you get to a section of a level where you see “10” or some other numeral plastered on a platform or breakable item, you can then break it if you have a mass that large and then you will probably get a regular coin (which probably wasn’t needed). An increase in numbers rarely means anything more than a superficial change in appearance.

It is amusing that these problems exist in the main game when there are unlockable mini-games that are designed antithetical to rest of the game. They are much shorter, thus don’t have the problem of staying so static—by the time they are completed, I am satisfied with what I understand about them—and they are all refreshingly one off. I am maybe overvaluing them because of my distaste for the carelessness of the main game; a majority of these mini-games are bad but the pinball and shooter mini-games are rad. The top-down shooter mini-game, called Strato Patrol EOS, has plenty of interesting play mechanics. The stylus-based movement controls through directly touching and dragging on the screen are super precise and make me wonder if there were any shooters on the DS that did the same thing that I missed. The fact that the Kirbys are in a chain that is elastic makes a surprising difference in how to dodge bullets and shoot. Instead of being entirely about twitch action, movement is more about predicting where you can move the lead Kirby so that the others will follow and still dodge the patterns. In the shooting, because each Kirby of the chain shoots continuously and independently, movement can be used to adapt to the situation; a large circular swathing motion can be used to cover a wide area of incoming enemies while a slow-moving concentrated blast can be used to deal more damage.

Even in contrast to the shooter mini-game alone, the main game of Kirby Mass Attack is feels flat. There isn’t any kind of deep thought or even interesting thought that goes into playing Kirby. See an enemy? Tap and attack it. See a breakable block? Flick to attack it. See an enemy telegraphing their attack? Tap to avoid it. Every single moment in Kirby Mass Attack and the thought required to deal with it is one of those. That can be interesting for about a third of the game, but too frequently there is filler interspersed in that third. If the game doesn’t care enough to give a tightly constructed package, why should anyone care to play it?

Score: 37%