Review: Kirby’s Epic Yarn

• Nintendo

In recent years Nintendo has acquired a reputation as a company that caters entirely to children. They’d become the Disney of gaming — a company that is widely beloved, but only for the nostalgia they instill in those who grew up with their games. For the here and now gamers wanted more “adult” titles. Blood, guts, nudity; these are what gamers craved and Nintendo simply refused to capitulate to the growing tide of “mature gamers” and their desire for “mature games.”

If I were to teach a university course on the game industry’s response to the desires of its customers — Marketing Via Master Chief 101 maybe — Kirby’s Epic Yarn would be the cornerstone of a three-week-long section dubbed “Ignoring Industry Trends And Getting Away With It.”

• Nintendo

Kirby’s Epic Yarn
Developed by Good-Feel, HAL Laboratory
Published by Nintendo
Available now for Wii

Kirby’s Epic Yarn — the latest game starring Nintendo’s fuffy pink ball of … marshmallow? clouds? the living embodiment of human affection? — is almost a direct incarnation of Nintendo’s plans for gaming industry domination. Taken in that light and compared to its competitors, a curious trend becomes visible.

KEY hit store shelves on October 17, 2010. Around the same time we also saw the release of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Medal of Honor and Fallout: New Vegas. All were the latest in long-running, widely beloved series, all appeared on multiple platforms, and all were rated “M for Mature.” Great. You likely already know this. What’s the point?

If one were to examine these four games as a microcosm of the entire gaming industry, it would appear that the key to sales success is blood, exploding heads and vampires with sniper rifles. To a large extent, this is true. But then you have KEY, a game that, I think, would baffle my theoretical game industry examiner. How is it that consumers eat up blood and guts on the one hand, yet in a very few specific cases, they seem to be equally drawn by bright colors, cute characters and adorable everything?

• Nintendo

Of course, there is always the nostalgia appeal, but that alone couldn’t account for the appeal of KEY. Yes, there are people of my generation who greet each new Kirby game with a head full of happy memories spawned in Kirby’s Dreamland or Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, but the vast majority of people playing KEY — those who Nintendo is counting on to buy its products — are not those gamers who call themselves “gamers” and can recite the entire lineage of the Mushroom Kingdom’s royal family. No, Nintendo had to appeal to those people to whom Kirby may, at most, be “that totally kickass blob fromSmash Bros.“

It’s these gamers whose willingness to accept Kirby is somewhat baffling. Again, no blood, guts or heaving bosoms, so what draws these people in? In short, quality gameplay.

KEY is as pure a platforming adventure as you can get, and it absolutely lives up to every single genre trope we’ve come to hope for since the first time Mario buttoned his overalls. Not only that, but it accomplishes each with such sublime excellence that gamers, both young and old, will find themselves immediately enraptured with the adorable adventure. It should be telling of KEY’s “simple is better” ideals that the game doesn’t even take advantage of the entire Wii control scheme — it asks that you turn the Wiimote sideways and dump the Nunchuck — to offer a full featured game.

By simplifying the entirety of the control scheme to essentially two buttons and a directional pad, the developers have ensured that even the theoretical geriatric audience that the Wii is responsible for conjuring during this console generation baffled by Kirby’s on-screen antics.

That all said, everything else is basically frosting. Sure, the graphics are pretty (the creation of an entire world via the sorts of implements you’d find at your nearest Michael’s Arts & Crafts is quite clever and functionally useful in game design, as I’ll cover in a moment), and the number of unlockables is, quite frankly, shocking, but all you really need to know is that Kirby’s Epic Yarn is the purest platforming experience in almost a decade. One could even argue it tops the two entries in the Super Mario Galaxy sub-series by virtue of its strict adherence to tradition.

Pure adherence to tradition would be incredibly dull however, so KEY also has a few neat tricks up its sleeve that simultaneously play into the game’s old-school heritage and its 2010 pedigree. Grabbing a stray button, tugging it and watching the entire level fold over toward you, in effect creating new paths to the end, is just one example. This is a game in which you metamorphose into a tank, transform into a UFO, crawl behind the scenes in a sequence where your only indicator of Kirby’s position is the lump he creates in the fabric of the world, and offer assistance in renovating and operating a cozy inn — all within the first two levels.

Simply put, Kirby’s Epic Yarn deserves a place in the library of every Wii owner. Now, is anyone surprised that a game starring one of Nintendo’s core characters is excellent?