Everyone’s favorite little pink ball of puff is back in action after a three year hiatus (two if you count his 20th anniversary collection I suppose). With Kirby: Triple Deluxe, Nintendo continues its tried and tested platforming formula, as it’s been on a roll with 2.5D platformers in the Mario and Donkey Kong franchises as well, but with this exclusive 3DS release Kirby is also going back to his roots over 20 years ago as a handheld game, and that’s something great to see after so much experimentation and ports littering his past portable games.

Kirby’s latest adventure begins when a giant beanstalk… err.. “Dreamstalk” grows under Dream Land, lifting several places including his house into the air and creating floating islands as a result. It also turns out that the culprit is some caterpillar looking guy named Taranza who has captured King Dedede as well. Your job as Kirby is to rescue the king and sort out this mess of course. You accomplish that by going through the levels on each floating island and not only beating them but collecting Sunstones (much like Mario’s star coins) to unlock the final boss battle. Once you win the battle, the dreamstalk grows higher so that you can reach the next island.

Just like every standard Kirby adventure before it, the name of the game (besides jumping past obstacles) is sucking up your enemies and either spitting them back out as projectiles or swallowing them, and if they have a special ability, absorbing it for yourself and using that to attack enemies or access previously unreachable locations. While the game plays in a 2.5D perspective, you can be attacked by things in the background, and also jump into that background by riding stars. This leads to some fun tricks in later levels and bosses and I would recommend using the 3D mode of your 3DS if you can handle it, as it makes them easier to detect. There’s some new abilities to absorb in this version (along with over 20 abilities from the previous games), including Beetle, which allows Kirby to use a beetle’s horn to pierce enemies, smash them into the ground or pick them up and carry them around; Bell, which lets Kirby wield twin bells like clubs, use them as a shield, and attack with sound waves; and my personal favorite, Archer, which like it sounds allows you to shoot arrows in any direction, including straight up to cause a rain of arrows below, as well as perform some stealthy tricks. The most epic new ability however is Hypernova, which is activated during certain segments of levels by eating a Miracle Fruit. This powers up his inhalation ability, allowing him to suck up much larger objects including trees and trains. The focus of these segments ends up being moving objects around to solve certain puzzles, rather than just completely annihilating the baddies however. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the game, along with the boss battles, which are creative and do things like mess with your vision and require you to spot fakes and such. If just beating the game isn’t enough for you, there’s tons of collectible keychains to find, and you can replay the whole game as Dedede, which is a nice bonus.

If that weren’t enough, as the name implies, Triple Deluxe comes with two more games built-in, albeit mini games. First is Kirby Fighters, which is basically Smash Bros. only with the different types of Kirby’s which have different abilities, so you can pit Sword Kirby against Archer Kirby and Fire Kirby and Ninja Kirby. It gets pretty crazy and of course it also has local multiplayer for up to four using download, which is fantastic! The second mini game is Dedede’s Drum Dash, which is a rhythm game where you have to time your jumps with the beat of the song, also coinciding with Dedede landing on each drum. Using this you control how high he jumps while you must also move him left to right across the stage. It’s a real challenging and clever game mechanic. I just wish it had more songs to play!

Kirby: Triple Deluxe is perfectly optimized for the 3DS’ screen size and power, running absolutely smooth in 3D mode and looking gorgeous to boot, though I suppose the simple aesthetics make that easy to pull off, still it deserves credit. The sounds are adorable, and the soundtrack has a whimsy that will cheer you up without driving you nuts. It all just oozes classic Kirby and fans should lap it up.

The recurring conclusion I come to with every Nintendo game lately crops up again once more here. If you love Kirby or you love platformers in general like I do, then once again they have executed their formula to near perfection. If you’re the sort that tires of all these rehashes of classics, there’s not a whole lot here that’s going to change your mind unfortunately.

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