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Kirby’s Dream Land (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I always forget that in this, the very first Kirby game, Kirby’s well known basic power of inhaling in baddies and copying their abilities doesn’t exist. Well, he can suck them in, but he can’t gain powers from doing so.

It’s also very easy. As in, I didn’t die. You can avoid a load of things by just flying over them or sucking them up, and there’s health pickups everywhere, so it’s only really the bosses that provide any sort of challenge. Except they don’t.

Not that any of that matters though, because despite the age, lack of difficulty, and limited nature of Kirby himself, it’s still a lot of fun to play through.

WarioWare, Inc.: Minigame Mania (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Nintendo added a load of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games to their online subscription service this week, and although I’m hyped to get to play through The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap I’m leaving that until I’m done with Fire Emblem Warriors. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d play this.

It’s… very easy, isn’t it? Have I really remembered how to play every single minigame, accurately and with skill, from 20 years ago? To the point where I think I failed only about five times in total and only one of them was on a boss? And then went through Endless Mode (on Easy, to be fair) and got to 400 before I gave up? Yes, it’s easy.

But it’s fun. And there’s more to do now, like unlock the few remaining games and VS mode games.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes (Switch)

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Completed again. After finishing it with Edelgard’s Empire and being baffled by the logic of her decisions, I decided to New Game+ it and play through as Hufflepuff (or Faerghus Kingdom or whatever Dimitri’s blue lot are called). New Game+ carries over all your character levels, weapons, base facility unlocks and so on, so any characters that overlap between Red and Blue, plus Shez, were all incredibly overpowered to start with.

Well, not quite to start with, as for the first couple of missions you’re set to Level 1 again, but after that, indestructible. Which obviously meant the entire game was very easy. Not least because I already had super-powerful weapons and nothing to spend money on bar more level upgrades.

The plot for Dimitri made a lot more sense. Edelgard was under the control of Those Who Slither In The Dark and so most of it wasn’t her fault. I also managed to recruit Byleth and Jeralt this time through, meaning I got a few more chapters, a bizarre other-worldly mission, and a totally different ending.

So, at 75 hours in, time for New Game++ and Claude’s yellow lads.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Although I don’t really have any affinity for Fire Emblem, that hasn’t put me off getting hooked by series spinoffs in the past – Tokyo Mirage Sessions and the first Fire Emblem Warriors are two of my favourite games, but the old strategy titles I could take or leave. Not because they’re bad, just because they’re not Advance Wars and permadeath (which I know can be turned off these days) is scary.

Three Hopes is a musou Warriors-style reimagining of the story from mainline Fire Emblem game Three Houses, which of course I didn’t play. The plot is presumably similar – you’re a mercenary and you join one of three originally-at-peace houses, all of whom have a future leader at the same school, run by the Church of Seiros. Then, they’re no longer at peace for reasons which don’t really make sense.

For my first run through the game, I chose to join Edelgard of the Adrestian Empire, and it turned out she was keen to “create peace across the whole of Fodlan”, mostly by declaring war on both the church and her former school chums because someone who worked at the church but wasn’t part of the church turned out to be possessed by evil? Or something? Seems a bit extreme.

Ultimately, this means loads of smacking millions of baddies with swords and axes and magic in the same way all the other Warriors games work. And this bit of the game is really good. Levelling up, improving skills and weapons, building up your base to unlock new skills, items and abilities – lots of higher-number-chasing, but it’s a great gameplay loop. However, between all that there’s so much chat. Oh god is there a lot.

Each of your “team” has a relationship indicator with not just you, but everyone else in your team. You can converse with them, do activities with small groups, training and fight together, and take them out on dates. In itself, that’s not a problem and it builds backstories and stuff, but there’s so much of it I’ve found myself spending sometimes upwards of an hour chatting and managing relationships between fights. It’s probably mostly skippable, but there’s a FOMO element to it that I daren’t.

I’ve played much of the game in two-player with my daughter. It’s even better this way!

The smacking though, is so wonderfully fast and mindless and satisfying, that these betweentimes events just kill the momentum a bit. And they’re a little bit creepy. Overall though, the game is great. And now I have two more runs with the other colours…

Songbird Symphony (Switch): COMPLETED!

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You know, I’ve often wondered what Guitar Hero would be like if it was a cute platformer full of birds. Well, actually I never have. But clearly, someone did because here it is.

Songbird Symphony stars Birb, a little bird of unknown origin, who sets out to find his family and where he came from. This involves some Metroidvania-lite platforming but instead of unlocking new skills to reach new areas, you unlock new musical notes which you tweet at locked doors and stuff to progress. In fact, apart from jumping around and sometimes pushing blocks, the main gameplay is tweeting.

And here’s the Guitar Hero bit. You have to sing along with various characters to “beat” them, using your unlocked notes. To start with, you just have one, but by the end you have six, mapped to left, up and right on the d-pad, and Y, X and A on the face buttons. Each “foe” gives you tunes to repeat, but in different ways. Sometimes it’ll be notes falling from the ceiling very much like Guitar Hero. Sometimes it’ll be coming in from the sides or in a pattern, like Gitaroo Man. In fact, it borrows from Ouendan, Taiko no Tatsujin, Dance Dance Revolution, and pretty much every other rhythm action game you can think of for these sections.

The platforming bits are really simple, with a bit of exploring and a handful of puzzles (block pushing, switch pressing, that sort of thing), nothing taxing at all. The singing though? Completely impossible. There’s no way I could complete most of them with an A or B rank, but luckily it seems you can’t fail no matter how bad you do.

The story has a big twist which I did see coming, and your identity is pretty obvious from early on, but if you don’t get it then I suppose that’s a big “ohhh!” moment for you.

It’s not the best game in the world, and the “variable pixel sizes” (where different things seem to have different sized pixels – a real turn-off for me) annoys, but it’s cute and unusual and does have great – if impossible to perform – music.