Pop Star’s pink puff-ball will be returning to the Wii, nearly one year after going 2-D–traversing hazardous stitching and weaves–in Epic Yarn, in his newest title: Kirby Wii (tentative title). Kirby Wii maintains the traditional Kirby gaming experience while adding on new-ish features to the mix. Kirby’s newest escapade in Pop Star heralds yet another one of Nintendo’s mascots to appear on the Wii or the Wii-U in the coming months.
Before there is any discussion of the game itself, let’s take a peek at the E3 Trailer.
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Now before you sit there and start lecturing to me on how this looks to be just like any other Kirby game, let me just say…you’d be mostly correct. The new abilities and multiplayer mode in Kirby Wii are mostly the standard fare for any Kirby title, but let’s run through them anyway. But before we get to that let’s take a quick stroll through the story. Ready? OK here we go: an alien ship–it’s literally a ship–flies through a portal and crashes on Kirby’s home planet and breaks into pieces (see where this is going?). Kirby must venture around Pop Star to retrieve the ship’s parts to help the aliens return home. As Kirby travels throughout the planet he stumbles upon portals to a shadowy world (the portals looks suspiciously similar to the portal the aliens came through) which feature a variety of obstacles and enemies for Kirby to overcome. What significance the aliens, the weird shadow world and suspicious similarities play in the game remains to be seen.
One of the features touted around by Nintendo at E3 was the ability for four players to get in on the story action (being able to play as Meta Knight, Waddle Dee or King Dedede), which goes along with Nintendo’s recent gaming for the whole family drive. Kirby can use his allies for some hilarious shenanigans such as inhaling and spitting them at enemies to cause damage or using them as means of piggy-back transport. Players jumping into the action will not have access to Kirby’s Copy Ability, but will still be able to use their trademark weapons (Meta Knight’s sword, Dedede’s hammer and Waddle-Dee’s…uh…whatever it is he has). What is unknown about multiplayer is how it will be used in relation to game progression: will it be necessary to get through stages or to certain secrets, or will it be a way to ease the difficulty for players?
Another “new” feature in the game is a new line-up of abilities that our hero will have access to. Identical to past Kirby games, the puffball has to inhale and swallow his enemies to copy their abilities (if they have any to give) or pick up some of his abilities from floating pedestals. As usual, Kirby will keep some of his staple abilities (like Sword and Beam), but may also obtain and use Whip and Leaf. With the Whip ability Kirby will pull a John Wayne and don a 10-gallon hat and a lasso in order to snare his enemies. Using Leaf, Kirby takes a play out of Wood Man’s book and projects a protective barrier of leaves that circle around him; he’ll also be able to use these leaves as weapons in his attacks.
But Kirby doesn’t mess around with the simple–measly–abilities these days, they are beneath him. Kirby now has access to “Super Abilities” (abilities that go above and beyond the basic power of their more simple forms). While they are pretty bad-ass abilities, Kirby has to find the special enemies that grant them to him first. But when he does, some pretty awesome things can happen. For example the Super Sword ability is long enough to take up roughly one-third of the screen when swung and cause pretty massive collateral damage, it can even be used to clear certain stage obstacles. Super Abilities look to run on a gauge of sorts that depletes as he uses the ability and–if the Super Sword Ability is any indication–they seem to play a role in navigating stages.
The control scheme seems to be WiiMote based. It is unknown how the WiiMote will be fully used, but from what we saw in the video, there seems to be some motion-based controlling in the game (that involves shaking the WiiMote up and down).
Between the price and release date we only know the latter. We can expect to see Kirby Wii in the fall of this year. How will Kirby fare in his next adventure on the Wii? Time–and the critics–will tell for sure.
Listed below is a gallery of screenshots from Kirby Wii.
