The Awful Kirby Game

 

I quite like a bit of Kirby from time to time.  I wouldn't call myself a die-hard fan of the franchise or anything but I do tend to have a good time with the little guy when I do fire up a game of his every now and again.  The games are baby-easy, clearly by design and are therefore good for when I just want to kick back and stomp all over something for a few hours.  So when I decided to play Amazing Mirror in my quest to explore the GBA library this year on my to-do list I thought it was going to be a nice easy time and instead I got a deeply frustrating slog that felt like pulling teeth.

The premise of Amazing mirror is simple.  There's a big mirror and bits of it have been scattered to the corners of the world and you have to go reasssemble them so you can hop inside and go suck off the big bad guy until he dies.  For some reason this splitting of the mirror has also resulting in a splitting of the Kirby and so you are joined by 3 AI buddies that will hop around and do basically nothing for the duration of the playthrough.  I think the idea is that you are supposed to link cable up and then you all branch off and explore separately until someone finds something of note and then you use an in game phone item to summon each other to that location.  This is 2026 though, so no one owns the game and even if they did, no one owns a fucking link cable and therefore we're left with some deeply frustrating semi open world exploration that only serves to take the classic, fun Kirby formula and make it deeply frustating as it wastes your time every other room.

Let's make one thing very clear here, Amazing Mirror isn't annoying because of its core gameplay.  It's still the same baby-easy Kirby game full of braindead, haphazardly placed enemies that pose basically no threat and even if you somehow do die to something the game showers with you so many one ups that it's actually impossible for any player over the age of 3 to game over.  What makes this game so annoying is the navigation of its world and levels.  Unlike basically every other Kirby game, Amazing Mirror has a more open world that you can explore.  The hub is this big sprawling zone that connects a number of areas and within those areas there are multiple routes you can take.  The problem with this is that only one of those routes will lead to the boss which will net you a mirror shard.  The other routes will often lead you to a "goal" but purplexingly the "goal" at the end of these routes is not the goal of the game.  The goal just gives you a shitty mini game where you ride a star up a screen and then watch Kirby do his stupid little dance.  Sometimes these screens will give you 7000 one ups, sometimes they just give you health.  Why anyone would give a shit about reaching these goals is beyond me because they seem to serve no purpose whatsoever.  Maybe if this were a real video game with some teeth and one ups were a precious resource that needed to be stocked up on I'd understand but its fucking Kirby.

The unused multiplayer mechanic when doing a solo game actually trivializes any potential challenge entirely because the Kirby clones can be utilized to break every boss over your knee and leave them in a bloody pool on the ground.  Using the shoulder buttons you can use a phone to call the CPU companions to your side in order to help you fight any given enemy but not only that, when they arrive the CPU will just hand you a bunch of free healing as well.  So even if there is a boss in this game that you would somehow struggle with, as soon as things start to look a little grim you just hit the call button and then 3 more of you, probably fully powered up with copy abilities, jump in, heal you to full and then start laying on some extreme DPS.  I like Kirby for being easy but this is just taking the piss.

Maybe if you and some friends have this game and a link cable then I can see the appeal.  A lot of the navigation frustration could potentially be worked around by having 4 of you exploring different paths all at once and playing with friends is often just a nice time even if you're playing trash like this.  For the solo-players and emulation users out there though, just skip Amazing mirror because by yourself its just depressing.  Put this shit in the trash and just play Nightmare in Dreamland instead. 

The Games Industry Makes Me Sad

 

Let me just put it out there from the jump that this is not going to be a post bitching about the state of games themselves.  There is a lot to be said about the state of releases in an industry that's swamped year in-year out with remakes and sequels, an industry whos "best" game of the previous year just yoinked the plot of a PS1 game, the mechanics of a SNES game and the UI of a PS5 game smushed them together and made them French.  There's a discussion to be had there but that's not what I'm on about here.

I want to look back a little bit, to when I was a naive young boy.  A time before widespread use of the internet (my age is showing, I know, shut up) when most of the things I'd hear about games came from rare snippets on TV or magazines bought from the local supermarket.  One topic that always fascinated me when it came up was when development teams would get talked about, specifically Japanese ones.  Offices filled with people passionately bashing away at computers to make the latest and greatest games.  I remember hearing specifically, sometime around the Dreamcast era, that Japanese developers would quite often stay late at the office working on their projects, sometimes sleeping under their desks and then just waking up to resume work right away.  "Wow! That's so cool, these guys are so passionate about making games, I wanna do that, I wanna be like them" my young, idiot-ass thought at the time.  The sad reality of it though is that working like that sucks ass, even if its something your passionate about.  You may recall around the time of The Last of Us 2 coming out about the discourse around crunch culture, people working insanely long hours and burning out or suffering various mental and phsyical ailments as a result.  My dreams of developing games professionally got crushed by the staff at my high school because of my lack of general ability in maths was too much of a wall to overcome, according to them, but it was saddening to grow up and discover that the reality is not that these people are sleeping under desks and missing their commutes due to passion, but due to necessity and weird unwilling company loyalty, in a lot of cases.  Not a situation I would ever let myself fall into 

So my attention shifted, I may lack the skills to dev but I certainly have the skills to play games and write about them.  Having opinions on the media and reporting on industry happenings was something that a younger me rather liked the idea of.  But then, once again, this aspiration was mostly crushed by the reality of what being in games-media spaces is like.  An industry full of people who have no idea what they are talking about, writing bullshit in order to push magazine sales or, in the modern day, get ad revenue clicks.  A field where you aren't expected to have a deep understand or any real experience with a game before you review it, but where you play it for as short a time as humanly possible so that you can get a review up in time for release in order to drive traffic.  Not having any real opinions of your own but brown nosing indie developers and large publishers so that whatever outfit your writing for can recieve various perks such as early releases or even funding.  It sounds like a fucking miserable experience and judging from the joyless, skilless assholes that make up the majority of games media and games writing, I think if I had entered that side of the industry I would have left the mortal plane considerably earlier than intended.

So then I got older, I studied Japanese and became fluent and so the first thing I thought to maybe dabble in was game translation.  Well that turned out to be dogshit as well.  I started by doing a little freelancing, a few jobs for what mobile visual novels that I found on a website called Upwork.  The pay was low but it was a start, a foot on the ladder.  I figured if I kept plinking away at it then maybe I'd build a bit of a repuation, a bit of a portfolio and I could work my way up into higher profile things.  But then I got one job where the guy I was emailing back and forth with ended up just ghosting me after the job was complete and I didn't get paid.  I'm not working for free, so I took to looking for a salaried position somewhere and while I found some things I could qualify for, the salaries for these jobs are bullshit.  At the time, I wanted to get into translation as a way of escaping the English teaching trap a lot of gajin in Japan find themselves in, but the salaries for any positions I found usually only matched or were lower than the school I was working at.  Translating stuff is way harder than singing the alphabet to 3 year olds so I didn't really feel like adding the extra stress for basically no extra money, fuck that shit.  When my options were getting ripped off or extra stress for no reward I just bit the teaching bullet until I eventually got into translation and interpreting for an automotive company.  Not what I want to be doing per se but getting to use my Japanese and earning a real salary is nicer than having the field of education drain my soul

 All is not lost though.  Thankfully we live in an age where doing things by yourself is not only possible, but with a bit of luck and a bit of skill can even be profitable.  Working for a big game studio making things at the behest of investors and crunching so hard I never see my family sounds like shit, but engines and tutorials are avaliable and I can dev in my free time.  Thanks to services like Steam and Itch there's even avenues to put it out there.  The enthusiast press may be full of metrics driven idiots who couldn't tell a 3DO apart from a Sega Saturn but the mass adoption of social media and YouTube means it's extremely easy to just write your own shit and publish it to your own spaces and, once again, with a little luck even turn that into a living.  Translation is a bit harder to think positively on but at least I get to do it for real money even if its not about games.  A shame because the state of the average JP to EN translation for video games is actually embarassing, I'd like to do something about it, but without the coin behind it I'm happy to just play in the original text

So if the industry is making you as sad as it makes me on occasion, don't give up, just ignore it and get out there anyway.  Let me know about your indie projects so I can continue to avoid all this bullshit too.