I played Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards this week on the Switch. I rented it once as a child and it stuck in my head ever since, so I thought I'd see if it lived up to my memories. By and large, it did! Kirby feels a little slow and floaty to control, and some of the shards' hiding spots (which require a certain power to open) were tricky to distinguish, but given that they were adapting Kirby to 3D for the first time, it worked just fine. It's still fundamentally a 2D game in terms of control, but the way the stages will slowly curve or wrap around a background feature now and then is satisfying enough.

The game's distinguishing mechanic is the ability to combine two different copy powers (or two of the same) and get a new variation, which is an absolute delight. It would be fun to see it revisited, but HAL don't like to retread gimmicks. Forgotten Land's system of unlocking variants for the copy powers is a worthy successor, though. Hard to believe it's been 23 years. My old habit with Kirby games was to 100% each file, but once is enough now. It was nice to check in.