I’m going to say it here and now. I was excited for this game when it was announced. Unfortunately, I missed Kirby’s Return to Dreamland which was meant to be a multiplayer game on the Wii, and foolishly I believed Team Kirby Clash Deluxe was going to be based on it. Sure I expected the game to require purchases, but I was thinking like they had done with Fatal Frame V where the first part was free and if you wanted to continue you would buy the rest as DLC (potentially as multiple episodes). And while the first expectation being smashed is not necessarily a bad thing (a different game can still be a good one), this game destroys the second one in horrific form, defining the very issue people have with Mobile F2P games.
In fact it does so enough my patients have been pushed beyond finishing it. I write this tonight as I put the game down for the final time having barely gotten through 3 hours of gametime (according to my 3DS) before the foul taste of pay-wall after pay-wall after pay-wall this game contains just ruined my will to keep going. For the first time since setting my standards, I have been driven by a game to break them, not by a game-ending bug, but by a microtransaction system I personally find too egregious to continue.
Story: The story to this Kirby game is about as standard as it gets: The Dream Kingdom is under attack by roving monsters, and it’s up to Kirby to defeat them all. However, he does not do so alone, as Kirby will find assistance with 3 clones of himself, each skilled in various forms of combat. Will they defeat these monsters? Will they find why this is happening? And can they stop it?
If you have the patients to get through the whole game, you will find the answer to all three questions to be “yes” but it has about as many twists as a classic Megaman game with a hidden final villain to be revealed. There really isn’t a lot here, but it’s a Kirby game. If you came here for plot, you definitely came to the wrong game.
6/10
Graphics: Throughout the years, Kirby games have been known for a certain cutesy ascetic and this game is no exception. Kirby is a bright pastel colored puffball (exact color depends on which player number it is) who will be wandering around in bright vibrant rooms and fighting generally bright cutesy looking villains.
This whole game will played in 2D but graphically is closer to 2.5D where everything is 3D rendered and looks pretty good. The villains you face will take advantage of the 3D space with some of their attacks, but the result is a game that both plays well in 2D or 3D viewing, but takes advantage of the latter if you let it rather well.
7/10
Sound: Much like the graphics, this game holds to traditions in the sound department as well. Expect to hear most of the actual voice work to take on a more child-like element, but also mainly be used for grunts or gibberish to be heard along side written text. Expect to hear game-like sounds for lightning and fire and hitting things with a hammer, and expect it all to be designed not to sound real so much as what you might hear in a world that is only “kinda real” and “kinda a dream.”
But the one sound you should not expect to hear is the classic high-pitched vacuum-like sounds Kirby usually makes when devouring his enemy whole…. because the most trademark weapon in the franchise is missing from the game since you are fighting only bosses and there is no one to eat.
Music-wise, this game is a pleasant surprise, however, as it sounds absolutely amazing. There are not a lot of tracks, but it’s a great little selection of orchestrated classic tracks from the history of the franchise. Expect it to pick at your nostalgia pretty strongly.
8/10
Gameplay: And sadly, this is where the game falls apart completely, and for the worst possible reasons. Kirby’s free outing literally kills itself with microtransactions.
At it’s core, Team Kirby Clash Deluxe is a boss run-title where you will spend most of the game in small arenas with the boss you chose to fight and up to three ally Kirbies either being controlled by other players or an AI. When you load the game, you will find yourself in a small town with a trailer shop, a statue, a message board, a tree, and a mailbox.
The lesser items here are the statue and the mailbox, which in turn are used to either activate an amiibo with the game for bonus items or enter passwords for the same respectively. These bonuses can help you out but will not go far to negate the issues you will have with the game, especially if you play on the go since the password feature requires you to go online to work. Nor is this the only place online requirements will get in the way of your enjoyment, but more on that later.
The tree will be one of the three sources of gem apples you will be offered in this game which is the currency you will use for everything, and I mean everything. When you start, you will be offered 5 for free and the chance to collect more every 12 hours real-time, limiting you to using this source twice a day if you play as much as you can. You can increase the volume of apples you get each time, but in order to do so, you will need to visit the shop and buy apples for real cash, first. The bigger the pack of apples you buy (the more you spend in a single go of your real-world cash) the more apples will be generated from that point on.
And while this blatant baiting to drop coin in the game is annoying, it is also incredibly inconvenient. Since this is accessing the Nintendo E-Shop to use, you will need internet access to buy these gem apples. This would not be so much of an issue if you could do so from the main store (which you would choose to do at home for the most part understanding what an online store is). The problem here is that you have to do this while in the game, which being a portable machine, there is a good chance you are playing on the go. It may not sound like a huge issue, but it plays directly against the strengths of a console which has no ability to tie to cellular networks, but relies on either playing in local range of other players or of a WAN you can access with it.
Furthermore, you will find you need these apples when in the shop as well. One-use items cost apples to buy as well as weapons/armor for each of the classes you can play, although these later items will also cost shards you get from defeating bosses in the main game. This makes apples a very core resource in the game you squander at your peril.
When it comes time to actually fight, you go to the message board and select weather you want to play single or multiplayer. If you choose to go with friends, you will form teams from others doing the same within signal reach of your DS, with up to four players in any given one, and playing this way will get you extra experience points to level yourself, but only the leader of the party will be able to complete “heroic quests” during the battle or get the apple rewards for doing so (more on this later). However, going it alone will replace your human allies with clones of yourself at your current level.
In either case, once you have your team, you will pick a boss fight you want to play against. Each attempt to fight them will cost you “vigor” which is tracked in the upper right corner of the top screen. You will refill this meter and gain one to the max it can carry every time you gain a level, but if you do not have enough, you will either have to wait till you do or buy more vigor with some of the apples you have managed to save. If you choose to wait, it will be several minutes before you see your meter tick up by 1, making this the most blatantly money grubbing feature in this game so far. In essence, if you want to play more then the game lets you for free, you need to spend cash like some cheap bullshit mobile phone game.
You can gain some apples back from combat buy completing “heroic quests” which in essence are side-objectives like playing a boss as a specific class, using specific moves, or general performance in the battle. However, these can be hard to come by, can each only be completed once, and offer few apples as reward in return, again, alleviating very little of this problem. And as noted before, if you play multi-player, only the leader of the team will even get this option!
Worse, when it comes time to open up new bosses to face off with, you need to spend apples on that as well or you simply can not progress at all! It’s not just good enough to fight and beat the bosses on the way, you have to also make sure you have enough in-game cash before it will let you even open the option to fight the next new encounter (assuming you have enough vigor to do so without, you guessed it, spending more apples or more real-world money on more apples so you dont have to stop for the day).
And this is where I quit in absolute disgust. With such few rewards available, I found myself hitting pay-wall after pay-wall after pay wall, limiting my sessions to under 30 minutes of repeating the same fights or lose those precious few apples that run the world of Kirby. And I understand for weapons and items getting more expensive because they are more powerful and more potent, but when the game demanded 20 apples to open the second MAJOR boss of the game and only offers 5 at a time unless you drop cash, that is pretty steep for what most games would consider standard progress. And considering up to this point it has been demanding anywhere from 6 to 10 to open each and every battle after the first since I started playing, I’ve already been generously patient with the freemium bullshit. Add to that limiting gameplay like this is an EA mobile game, and it was purely to try reach the 8 hour mark that I even dealt with as much as I did. But my patients can only be pushed so far, so for the first time since I set the standards, I am breaking them. This game does not deserve such concern.
3/10
Bugs: To it’s defense, the game did run perfectly. No bugs of any kind occurred in my time playing, although with the game so wrapped around microtransactions, a bug might have been more entertaining.
Overall: I have played some games I hated for one reason or another. Some games I finished, while others I played for what I thought of as the required time before beating the shit out of it in the review. But until now, I have never ever had my patients tried by a game because it refused to let me play that time unless I paid them for the “privilege” mid-game. Had my first experience with F2P games been like this, I would have been a lot harder on the pay-model from the beginning and I now fully understand why people I clashed with about it back in the day thought like they did. There is a fun little game hidden in here, but it’s buried in a pile of microtransaction shit that will literally stop you from enjoying yourself on a regular basis. Nintendo should be ashamed of what they did to this game.
Score:
3/10
Source: Nintendo Store
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