Kirby Fighters 2 has an adorable identity crisis on his swollen and pink hands. At first it looks like a gateway fighting game, an entry stage even before the popular Super Smash Bros. series. Responsive in both the controls and the Tone, Kirby Fighters 2 is a generally pleasant racket full of Charm. Despite a thin content offer and strange and difficult peaks, Kirby’s recent spin-off is a capable fighter.
There is no knockout or stage life here, just a scrap until someone is knocked out. In addition, most of the characters are Kirby – Well, a variety of Kirby with various copying abilities, as well as other familiar characters who are not Kirby to complete the List. Among the pink puffballs of pain, there are classics from the series like The Link wannabe Kirby sword, The Kirby artist drawing minions to do damage and blow Kirby doing exactly what you think. My favorite is the wrestler Kirby, thanks to his elegant little Lucha Libre-inspired mask and his extremely brutal throws.
One of the highlights of Kirby Fighters 2 is how easy it is to jump and throw the tar out of the cute characters. Between jumping, attacking and inhaling, you just have to use three buttons to attack and a fourth to block. Kirby’s identity spectrum offers a surprising variety, with characters like the Kirby fighter adapted to hand-to-hand action and the Kirby yo-yo who knows how to keep enemies at bay. Each Kirby has unique combos and attacks, and each is relatively easy to learn – most only need a one-touch combination and directional input.
Compared to other fighting games, everything about Kirby Fighters 2 is compact – the stages are small, the fights are fast, and the instant Gameplay is tightly limited. Each stage calls a different obstacle or oddity to navigate, including a runaway train, lava columns and enemies that do not discriminate who you are attacking. Due to the rationalization of these stages, there is just enough space to avoid obstacles and enemy attacks, while always remaining involved in the action and reducing possible pauses in the action.
In addition, Kirby Fighters 2’s wake-up mechanisms mean that you always have a chance to win – if you are knocked out, you will become a ghost on which you can try to get a hit to return to the action with a burst of HP – as long as your teammate is still conscious or at least one character is still in a actionAlthough you can disable the alarm clocks, it is fun and chaotic to know that everyone has a Chance to win until all the enemies are eliminated. Most importantly, in team battles, characters can kiss on the same side to restore HP in action- just like in real life.
The story mode of Kirby Fighters 2 is a more uneven experience. In this mode, you play as Kirby of your choice with a second player or a reasonably intelligent AI partner and climb into a tower to deliver the blow to King Dedede and Meta Knight. Even by the standards of the Kirby game, the plot here is thin, told through text slides to provide a minimum of context before the floors are fought by the enemies.
Between each Consecutive fight, upgrades can be equipped before each action to increase health or attack power, while some improve the effectiveness of recovery pickups or increase damage against bosses. It’s an interesting system that adds a layer of soft strategy between fights, but it can lead to Frustration in the following chapters, namely boss fights.
The boss fights in Kirby Fighters 2 take away a lot of what makes the action so dynamic. When you face opponents your own size, the fights react more kinetically, as grappling hooks and special moves cause interruptions, while fighting Big Boss whites is like hitting a static punching bag with a health bar. They move and trigger movements that keep you upright, but the Push-and-Pull elements that make the action interesting are greatly reduced here. The difficulty of these bosses is mainly related to their exorbitant health and a restrictive time limit to defeat them. Only with a certain set of improvements do you have a Chance, which is much less important in all other battles. Having to overcome bosses that act as annoying difficulty peaks is a crazy decision that betrays the cheerfulness of Kirby games.