Kirby Super Star Ultra

I've been deliberately avoiding writing in this blog because I really do not want to talk about Super Star Ultra.  This isn't some ridiculous "oh it's gonna be so bad it hurts my eyyyyyes" reluctance to pass judgment, it's that I just have nothing interesting to say about Super Star Ultra.  It's a good, fun game, but good in such a dull, retreaded way that I'm prevented from gushing about anything.  Like, man, did you not play the original?  Well, you should get this.  Otherwise, I guess it's still okay?  I don't know leave me alone *curl up in fetal position*

One problem I have with approaching this game is that I've played Kirby Super Star for the SNES so many fucking times I don't even know if I like it anymore.  The concept of Super Star, giving the player multiple bite-sized games with slightly different mechanics as opposed to one big boi playthrough is clever enough, appealing to the central attraction of Kirby games (bright, easy distraction from the crushing hell of modern life).  And even now, after roughly two dozen play throughs, I would still be more than happy to redo Revenge of Meta Knight.*  But the rest of the segments?  Fuck, man.  I loved them as a kid, but now the algorithm has changed in inperceptable ways, like I'm in Jacob's Ladder and Super Star is dancing with me but out the corner of my eye I think I see Squeak Squad slowly crawling from between its legs.

Because that's the primary issue of Super Star and Super Star Ultra:  Once again, it's just too lazily easy.  Granted, it doesn't have the unrelenting sameness of non-difficulty that Squeak Squad features, but there's still virtually no point in the main game where something is going to even momentarily throw your dinosaur gaming brain for a loop.  Ultra changes very little from the core games, if anything, though adding a few modes that mostly are somehow even easier (I'm pretty certain at this point I could do the Meta Knight mode blindfolded) or, in the case of the updated arenas, try to respond to the ease of the original game but holy shit I see your padding mall order batman, get out of my face.  The only addition I genuinely like was the return of King DeDeDe, if just for the fact that someone on the staff recognized that Revenge of Metaknight was far and way the best thing the original had to offer.

Ultimately, I guess it comes down to whether one religiously played the original Super Star.  Unless you're some sort of weird Kirby fanatic, there's not a whole lot going for Ultra if you've already beaten the original black and blue.  Still, if for some reason you never bothered doing that, you should thank the gods for your luck and get Ultra, because then you will probably never hate yourself again.

*- I love it when games have those "HOW IS HE DOING THIS OUR DEFENSES ARE SO LAME" baddy conversations that you can hear, to the point it makes me sad when I don't hear them, because they have to be astoundingly easy to program.