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.
