Before I tell you about the hour I recently spent at Nintendo with Kirby's Epic Yarn, I think I should share my feelings on Kirby (the character) so you know where I'm coming from. I hate the little guy. I've never actually played any Kirby games, so my only experience with the cuddly blob-thing has been getting cheesed by him in the Smash Bros. games. He makes me mental floating around, sucking dudes up... argh!
Yes, I realize that I sound crazy, but I wanted you to know that I went into the play session with negative feelings towards Mr. Kirby, and walked out quite impressed. Here's what I liked most from my 60 minutes with Kirby's Epic Yarn.
Attractive visual style: You won't often catch me saying that a Wii game looks fantastic, but I have to say that this Wii game looks fantastic. The visual style is reminiscent of LittleBigPlanet, which means that it's cute, colorful, and a perfect compliment to the gameplay, characters, and story. You can tell that the developers really put a lot of thought into how they wanted the in-game world to look, and the overall experience is better for it.
Co-op that's neither too hard, nor too easy: Co-op that requires too much cooperation stinks. So does co-op that is so dumbed-down that it adds nothing to the game. I felt that Epic Yarn found the elusive happy medium.
Sure, it moves stragglers up if they get too far behind, and you don't have to work with your partner like you're trapeze artists, but that's OK. You'll need to coordinate with your friend to get certain bonus items and the bosses are much easier with a little teamwork, so there is some reward to working together.
Catchy music: Short, catchy tunes (that repeat endlessly during a level) are sort-of a lost art these days. The music here reminded me of some of the great songs from Nintendo's 16-bit heyday. It's the sort of stuff that you hear a few times, and then have it stuck in your head the rest of the day. If you're like me, you might end up making up words for the musical numbers. The Nintendo folks seemed to get a kick out of my "We're at Nin-tendo, we're playing Kir-by" lyrics that I sang during one of the later levels. It's also entirely possible that they were only laughing because they thought I was insane. I prefer to think otherwise.
Transforming Kirby: At a certain point in each level, Kirby will turn into something other than whatever-the-heck-he-normally-is. Once he was a fire truck and had to shoot water onto fires, another time he was a missile-firing-tank. The transformation sections were never too long -- they were fun, and a great way to break-up the action.
While I was overall very impressed with Kirby's Epic Yarn, there are a few things I wasn't crazy about. I didn't think that the collectables (other than the furniture you could put in your house) were very interesting. I also didn't find the story to be particularly engaging, though I will admit that it seemed to be better than your average Mario storyline. It wasn't bad or anything, I just found it a bit goofy, and I would almost always rather play a game than watch a cutscene.
I'm no Kirby expert, but based on my limited time with the game, I think that Kirby fans are going to be quite pleased with his latest adventure. I'm also pretty sure that non-Kirby people will have a good time with it if they give it a chance. You won't have to wait long to find out; the game ships exactly one month from today.
