First of all, the visuals of this game are top-notch. The combination of colors, yarn effects, animations and textures makes this game a pleasure to play just by taking in all the beauty and charm contained in each level. Watching someone else play this piece of visual art is already a joy. Actually playing it, because it blends so well the visuals with varied gameplay, is a really great experience. Kirby’s Epic Yarn is one of the most charming and cute games ever made, period. Kids will absolutely love it!
Beating this game may be too easy for experienced gamers, but I don’t agree that it’s because you can’t die, which is what most reviews I’ve read affirm. If you don't care about how many jewels you have at the end of each level, than almost all levels and boss fights become cake walks. But if you try to earn the gold medals, some levels can become somewhat tough, and make you restart from the beginning several times before you are able to get them. So, the game can be more or less easy depending on how you play it. It's similar to having more than one difficulty levels, although in this case the hardest one is still relatively easy. If the enemies were tougher and more aggressive, and the level designs were cleverer, the game would've been more challenging without having to punish you with death at any time. The game might not stop you from reaching the end of the levels, but if you don’t collect enough jewels (or lose them) you don’t earn the gold medal, which means the level isn’t truly conquered, at least in my book.
In action-platformers, the precision and timing that the game demands of you is at least half of what makes a game more or less challenging, so it has to make you start over when you fail too much. But this game also has plenty in common with puzzle-platformers, at least in most levels, in which the pace is more deliberate and the challenge comes mainly from uncovering the levels’ secrets, in other words, in finding the hidden passages and figuring out how to reach certain high/far/blocked places, where a treasure or more jewels are waiting for you. You also couldn't die in Wario Land 3 or Braid and those still were challenging games to beat. So, in the majority of levels, the biggest flaw of Kirby's Epic Yarn isn’t in not letting you die, but in not being puzzling and aggressive enough. Although I wonder if in the most action oriented levels only making the enemies more aggressive would be enough, since the levels couldn't be less linear without hurting the pace. There are also dozens of hide-and-seek and time-limited challenges, some of them quite tough to beat. In conclusion, this game has a great lasting appeal, with 20+ hours of single-player adventure and a fun cooperative multi-player.
One last observation, I don’t understand why this game doesn’t have the option to use the classic controller or the remote+nunchuck controllers, when the thumb-stick would be better than the D-pad for this game, at least to some gamers like me it would.
GAMEPLAY = = = = = = = = ( 8 )
GRAPHICS = = = = = = = = = = ( 10 )
SOUND = = = = = = = = ( 8 )
VALUE = = = = = = = = ( 8 )
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MY GAME SCORE = ((( 8.5 )))