Well! this is it; the Retro-active that convinced me to finally stop lurking around here. For a brief and quick history, I had only stumbled upon NWR a short bit after Craig Harris left IGN, so that's how long I've been quietly listening in, enjoying me some Radio Free Nintendo and to that extent, the opinions of others doing this whole Retro-active thing!
Fair warning, I miiiiight get a bit spoiler-y in the upcoming ramble, as I'm crazy tired and generally run my mouth on subjects like these without really thinking about what I'm saying first, which is really a silly statement considering I'm typing all this.
Kirby and the Amazing Mirror! This game is pretty sweet, and I was super jazzed when back in the day I heard it was going to be The Great Cave Offensive (THe treasure hunting open world section of Kirby Super Star and my second favorite game in that collection next to Milky Way Wishes) fleshed out into a full game, complete with 4 player exploration independent of one another AND the return of some Irby's Adventure Powers that had been absent from the series like UFO and the terribly, TERRIBLY broken Tornado! I did convince my friends to get this beast back in the day, but I think I was probably the only one who was super enthusiastic about this one though; they were all busy with their Four Swords. : <
Regardless, I liked this game quite a lot and it spent many a hour in my GBA before it got ripped off by petty thugs at my high school! ... yyyyeah. oh well, I played it to 100% completion and even did some fun things like mono-copy ability boss rushes and such. I was more than excited when I heard this was going to be one of the ambassador games and I actually ended up knocking this and Wario Land 4 out before moving on to the GBA Port of my favorite game of all time and Fire Emblem 8.
The complaints about the map are VERY valid, especially when you start getting into some of the more complex levels like Peppermint Palace and Carrot Castle. The folks at Hal and Flagship [who I can't remember, but I THINK they MIGHT have been a shell company between Hal and DiMPS of the Sonic Advance/Sonic the Hedgehog 4 fame] tend to in some areas purposefully set it up so you pass through a big room on two separate routes that aren't interconnected at all, and when there's multiple one-way doors to take, this can get hyper confusing at times. When I played through the first time and didn't know about the map, I actually relied a lot on the system of the doors having that glow above them and the little star doors meaning that that route happens to be a one-way.
If you REALLY want a good way to go about getting treasure sand finding the nooks and crannies, there's a special copy ability that you can get that will let you butter through any puzzle with ease, although the Smash ability is also good for that [as well as a hilarious little nod to Kirby's SSBM move set!] Other abilities I suggest are Tornado because it may be a little hard to control, but it gives you craaaaaaaaazy amounts of invincibility frames and cheeses all the bosses so super hard [it even cheeses the final boss harder than the aforementioned super secret copy ability does!], Bomb for being able to deal with timed switch puzzles without relying on the AI being complete dummies, Throw because it does damage like spitting out a cluster of enemies does, and Sword because for no reason at all, they made Sword stupid versatile in this game compared to other games.
I'd also like to address those few situations where they put the giant stone blocks in the way, because I believe those are examples of very bad use of iterative game design. in the opening tutorial path, the game purposefully shows you one of those blocks and shows you that the 4 kirbies can inhale these, but then when these blocks are presented later, they're in REALLY frustrating spots to try and perform this technique. however, repeatedly spamming stone will shake the ground and nudge the block over ever so slightly until it falls through a crack or something.
Anyhow, I could yammer on and on and ON AND ON about how cool I like the Kirby's adventure forest remix that they use for Cabbage Caverns, or the Boss from Candy Constellation or the fun little mini-games and such, but the feature I kinda strangely liked even if it is a cosmetic one were the sprays you could find to change Kirby's color before you'd jump into the game. I'd always be excited to play as a different color every time I'd boot up the game!
That being said... I still want my Full-featured Milky Way Wishes style game. ;_; Seriously, it'd be awesome! Like Mega Man... but with Kirby abilities!~