Loved this game when I was but a wee lad.

One of the few GB games I own. It is pretty short, but it's still awesome.

never played a kirby title. What is the best one to start with if this is the case?

My parents got me a used copy of this from some store that I think went out of business or just doesn't exist (I remember they used to look at Funcoland ads for finding some Game Boy and Game Gear games). Or maybe they got it online, I dunno. I was too young to know. But anyway, the cart has the name "jason" written on it and it's really picky on when it wants to work. But when it does, very fun game. Now I want to go dig it up and play.

Yeah, this game is even easier than Super Mario Land. It's quite fun to play though. And the music at the final level Mt. DeDeDe and in the final boss is one of the best game tunes ever.

I loved playing it over and over again. However I remember that I was afraid at the bosses when I was a kid. I always had to ask my brother to finish them off for me, haha. Boss fights make me so nervous Not anymore though... haha.

and to think I was playing pokemon when I first got the gameboy...Ive played every kirby game EXCEPT this one. Aw great, now I have to go buy this somewhere

Oh geez, now I wish I still had my cartridge... I'm-a gonna look up a copy on eBay.

A very good game, one of the first I ever played.

I have to respectfully disagree with the score / conclusions regarding this game's place amongst the rest of the series. It would cite this, Kirby's Adventure, and Kirby Super Star as the 3 top games of the series, with every single other Kirby game being several orders of magnitude lower in quality.

Dream Land, in particular, while being "easy" at first (yet significantly less in the unlockable mode, as you mentioned), nonetheless displays the most tightly inventive and entertaining presentation and level design of any of the early handheld Kirby games, and easily ten times the polish of SML or even SML2, if you ask me. It's shortness is also its virtue here: every screen and every location feels fresh and feels necessary to the game's quick journey, with no apparent filler or needless repetition of a stage or theme.

Some of the transitional animations were also quite remarkable for its time, like the sequence before the final level, where you ride on the star into DeDeDe's castle and bounce and slide down that long hallway; the ending sequence was also more charming than just about anything that ever graced the GB.

Bottom line: it's a travesty, in my mind, for this game to score lower than SML. Kirby's Dream Land is everything SML is not: wonderful animation, sprites, enemies, locations, and presentation down to every detail. Either game can be beaten in one sitting, but with SML it just feels like a series of haphazard attempts to mimic the console Mario, while with Dream Land it feels like a little cartoon story book that is just the perfect length with not a dull or repetitive moment.

as a kid this was one of the best gb games but after all the upgrades kirbys been through its hard for me to want to play the game

Wow. Lots of Game Boy reviews lately.

@warioswoods: I agree with the score, I just disagree with SML.You make great points. But I feel this game should not score higher. Why? When I play a game (man, I'm going to sound like Alex for this line), I want them to get good. Not good "for a Wii game" or good "when it first came out." I compare every game to every game. Not GB to GB, 360 to 360, no, I compare them to everything else. I'll compare 360 to Wii, and even GB to DS. Why should I get this when I could get Squeak Squad or Nightmare in Dreamland? Price is the only reason I could think. I find reviewing retro games a hard task, because people are blinded by nostalgia. I could explain it, but it's best to watch "Zero Punctuations Double XBLA Bill" review. Some retro games are undoubtedly good by today's standards, such as Banjo-Kazzoie, Super Mario 64, Pokemon G/S/C (not RBY, because of the remakes), and Final Fantasy VI, and are deserving of the 9s they score. However most aren't anymore, despite how good they were "when they came out."

@E-160 Feraligator: You must be new here? Celebrating the GB's 20th anniversary, NLife is reviewing 20 GB games in 20 days.

I bought this game off eBay back in the day. I really liked it.

@Bahamut ZERO: Well, I'm sort of new here. I only joined last month.

And I didn't know that NLife was doing this to celebrate the GB's 20th anniversary. I must be an idiot. XD

Loved Kirby's Dreamland (still do). One of my favourite non-Mario platformers, and probably the best made for a handheld console. At least an 8 I think, but for me a 9.

Nintendo Life, will you review Balloon Kid (if you haven't already)? I only got to play the first couple of levels, but it struck me as a great expansion of the Balloon Trip* concept (* a bonus mode that was more fun than the main part of Balloon Fight).

@Panda

Super Mario Land was rated higher, however, and I don't see any way to argue that it's even close to this game in quality; I understand that you didn't review that one, so it's a moot point I suppose.

Regarding the usual debate about how to judge a game from a previous era, it's a tough matter to negotiate properly. I tend to think of a game's rating as a measurement of its perfection within its form; sure, there are things that this game couldn't do technologically, and it is indeed from a very different time with completely different technical challenges; however, I would say that the real question is: how well does the game manage to create an enjoyable and unique experience within those limitations?

That question comes up in other areas where one needs to judge a historical work--music, for instance--and I don't think there's an easy answer, but if you take a musical composition from the Baroque era, composed for one of the much more limited predecessors to the piano and lacking the further developments of music theory, it should still be highly regarded, and is still quite enjoyable, due to the way that it perfects its own form and uses its limitations as strengths.

Kirby is sort of like that, if you ask me. It may be short, and offered on a system with extremely simple graphical capabilities, but it "owns" those limitations and presents a wonderful little journey within them. Super Mario Land, as a counterexample, tried to mimic the console version, and thereby failed to really come into its own, leaving it as a simplified and generally less impressive version of the games it tried to imitate. But again, you didn't review both games, so I don't know what you'd have given the latter.

The Dreamland games don't even exist in my eyes(except for Nightmare in Dreamland, of course), and this one is no exception.

@20

Nightmare in Dreamland was just a lazy remake of the far superior Kirby's Adventure for the NES, which is the second Kirby game and followed less than a year after this one; other than adding Kirby's trademark ability to absorb and mimic his enemies' attacks, that game shares more with Dream Land stylistically than it does with any other game in the series.

I spent hours and hours playing this as a kid. However, I don't think it was as good as Kirby's Adventure!

I already knew Nightmare in Dreamland was a remake of Kirby's Adventure, and therefore not really a Dreamland game. That's why I didn't count it.<_<

Im right there with you Corbie. I love the first two on GB the best myself.

Bah, difficulty does not make quality; anyone can make a platformer difficult, and even the laziest portable clone of SMB would be prone to high difficulty just due to that game's somewhat rigid mechanics. Plus there is the second difficulty mode in Kirby if you want a little extra challenge when you replay it. Yet in every possible measure of quality, design, ingenuity, etc that I would apply, this game is way out in front of SML.

That's certainly no series-based bias, either--I typically regard Mario platformers as much better examples of the genre than Kirby games, but that simply wasn't the case in the Game Boy era, where the Mario titles were lackluster and somewhat awkward, but Kirby was a fresh idea with plenty of creativity and style, long before the series later went stale.

Normally, I'd agree with you about the whole difficulty thing, but I'll admit, there is a limit. For instance, asside from Kirby's Adventure, Kirby 64, and the Spin-offs, I actually find the Kirby series easy to the point of being rather dull. Beating a stage doesn't feel as gratifying when it feels like your victory was handed to you on a silver plater.

@Mickeymac

I agree about that in reference to other games in the Kirby series (Dream Land 2, 3, Mirror, Squad, etc). It's not just the easiness per se that kills those games; in fact, the lack of difficulty is really rooted in the deeper problem, which is bland, uninspired, and repetitive level design. The first Dream Land game suffers from none of those problems, and actually has some pretty decent challenge in the harder mode.

Incidentally, as I've mentioned elsewhere before, the Kirby games that really stand out from a creativity and polish perspective (Dream Land, Adventure, Super Star) are also those that were designed by Kirby's original creator, Sakurai, who did not have any leading role in the lesser games I mentioned above (something I didn't find out until long after I came to my verdict on the games).

As another dig at SML, I should note that Miyamoto didn't have anything to do with SML or SML2, and it shows, as they feel like strangely off-target imitations. It's a good thing they gave up that series and finally created a truly original portable platformer with Wario Land.

Personally, I found Dreamland to be a bit too dull, too, even compared to the other Kirby games. Yes, it did have a bit more challenge to it, but it still wasn't that interesting, and without Kirby's Copy ability, it just came off as a dull, cutesy Mario game, and the GB already has enough of those.

Still you are welcome to your opinion, and I'm glad we had this discussion.

@Warioswoods. Yeah, Gunpey Yukoi was the one responsible to the Mario Land series. They did seem like feeble attempts to ape the "real" Mario games, but I think he did a pretty good job, myself...

I played a little bit of this game, and wasn't too impressed with the level design. It just seemed a little flat and bland to me (though I can't really judge, since I only played the first level or so. ). I will agree though that the most recent Kirby platformers are crap. The only ones I played that I truly liked were 64 and Adventure. NiDL and AM just felt mediocre in comparison. Sure, Adventure was easy as pie like the rest of the Kirbys, but it felt so polished and charming that that one little shortcoming could easily be looked over.

I've noticed you never mentioned KDL2 when you mention the great Kirby games. What's wrong with that one?

Too lazy to type Score? Type Sc instead!

Ha, just kidding. Nintendo isn't lazy.

I borrowed this from a friend once, beat it in 20 minutes and handed it back to him.

It's a decent game, but Kirby's Adventure is the definite Kirby game for me.

@ warioswoods
I agree with pretty much everything you've said here. I too try to keep in mind the context of the title's original release. If I expected everything to match today's standards, then I would have disappointed with games like Punch-Out!!, Lords of Thunder, and Gunstar Heroes, games I experienced for the first time on the VC. I was very impressed with all three of these examples. I've also become interested in silent film recently, particularly the German expressionist ones (Nosferatu, Metropolis etc). Surely they can't hold up against the likes of Transformers 2? (I won't answer that)
I always say that if something's good once, it's good forever.

As for Kirby, for a game about a blob, there is no fat here. There might not be much here at all, but it's all good. As for the difficulty, I think it's comparable to Super Mario Galaxy; not super challenging, but always superbly fun.

Dream Land 3 doesn't sound a lot worse to this. That was reviewed at 6/10.

Personally I prefer to stick to Superstar Ultra which, for me, has superseeded the Dream Lands (from what I can remember of the experience of playing them)

Power Paintbrush is/was awesome too. An essential on the DS whether you are a Kirby fan or not!

I wonder if we'll every get a 3D Kirby Wii game?

Was it ever any good? Compared to the older Double Dragon ('87) and the later Final Fight ('89)? Are games like Space Invaders, Tetris or Super Mario Bros. any less playable than when they originally released? Was Mortal Kombat ever really in the same league as Street Fighter II?

Just because something is popular, it might not necessarily mean it's any good. Will Transformers 2 be held in the same regard as a summer blockbuster as the likes of Star Wars and Jurassic Park ten years from now (if it ever was)? Did Dances With Wolves really deserve the Best Film and Director Oscars more than Goodfellas? Is Twilight a better vampire film than Nosferatu? I don't know! (and dare not presume) I haven't seen Twilight!

Anyway, another phrase I'll use is 'each to their own.'

I remember having the original Kirby's Dream Land on the GB... it was very short but sweet. It's true Kirby lacked the ability to copy powers, at least until Kirby's Adventure. Despite being surpassed by its sequels (like Dream Land 2 and Super Star), this is still a fun platformer to play. It's an 8/10 to me...

I love the last level where you have to beat all the bosses again, that seemed pretty immense when I was a kid. The first game I completed.

I love Kirby's Dream Land, but Kirby's Dream Land 2 is WAY better.

@SuperSonic1990: Ditto.
@dimlylitmonkey: Took the words right out of my mouth. IMO, Altered Beast was never any good in the first place.

But about "If something's good once, it's good forever"... Mario Kart 64 says hi.

@ E-160 Feraligatr

So MK64's no good now? I never thought it was great (I preferred Diddy Kong Racing at the time), but I never thought it was bad either, and I believe there's still plenty of fun to be had with it. About as much as when it first came out actually. Of course MK-DS is much better.