Kirby Super Star Ultra

Play your way through all of these and you unlock Milky Way Wishes, which is much more boss-focused than the other games and has a different abilities system. Arena, the final component, pits you against all of the various games' bosses in sequence. The presentation varies in style between the different sections, from bright and bland to relatively intricate sprites on Meta Knight's ship, but the standard is universally high, especially the little 3D cut-scenes that introduce each subgame. Some of the boss battles are quite lovable, particularly the one in the middle of the Great Cave Offensive that pits Kirby against a sequence of RPG-alike foes and narrates the battle as you go along ("Kirby gained 31 Experience! Not that it matters.")

Super Star Ultra's seven components are varied and distinct enough to hold your interest until the end of the game, but that end arrives rather abruptly - after about four hours, assuming you don't spend too long in the Great Cave Offensive. There are few things more dispiriting than getting on a long-haul flight with a new game, playing it straight through to completion, then looking at your watch and realising that there are still the best part of eight hours to go. The games might be individually entertaining, but they don't come together to form anything substantial. Thankfully there is incentive to play through again as Meta Knight with harder bosses, or to try and find every piece of treasure in Great Cave Offensive, but it still doesn't take more than six or seven hours to squeeze every last drop of entertainment from Kirby's squishy form.

The problem with all the games, and indeed with Kirby in general, is that it never forces or even gives you the opportunity to use your adaptable powers in an intelligent or challenging way. Unlike, say, the GBA Wario Land games - which I've sorely missed on the DS - you don't use abilities to solve puzzles or uncover hidden, treasure-packed corners of levels. Instead you're battering your way through a bright but boring platform level with whatever power comes to hand. There's no real challenge to it, and no real old-school platform thrills either thanks to Kirby's trademark ability to float across gaps. It's always been rather difficult to see where Kirby wants to be in the broad spectrum of videogame genres. It's a platformer without the platforming, and a puzzler without any puzzles.