This time I am REALLY bending the definition of Movie Project, since Kirby's Epic Yarn is not even a movie. It's a sidescrolling platformer for Nintendo Wii, and the reason I have put it in with this series, is because to my daughter it was a movie. She never played it, she just watched me play it. Plus all the cut scene cinematics are narrated with a children's story book voice. Hence, I thought it was the perfect game to play with Rini. All the characters are made of yarn, and they don't die, they just get unwound. And Kirby makes the cutest sounds.
Plus, since Kirby is made of yarn, he can transform himself into all sorts of things: a car; a heavy weight; and Rini's favourite, a parachute. With the aid of various power ups, you can also transform into a tank, train, snowboarding penguin, digger, spaceship (than can suck up enimies), and even a dolphin. It's a lot of fun, and quite challenging at times. It's not an impossible game, but there are some elements that can be very frustrating.
Rini didn't know this, but getting the car going was a bit of a pain. I'm used to the Mario side scrolling controls, but if you try pressing 1 in order to go faster, you're in trouble. What you do is tap the direction arrow either left or right twice. The parachute was easy, You just jump then press 2 once more and hold it. I think it was the 'pop' sound that Rini really enjoyed. She would always giggle when I did that!
The game does have it's replayability factors, such as the mini games that you can access once you furnish the apartments for the sprites that are looking for places to live. Yes, you can do interior design in this game. Change wallpaper, flooring, even do reupholstering with over one hundred types of fabric. I only got about half of them, but once I beat the final boss, I didn't really want to go back through all the levels and get the Gold Medal status for each one, and gather all the furniture items, and get through all the mini games just to have 100% completion on every element of the game! It would have been fun to do the bell ringing, but it was enough just to get all the cinematics. Once you achieve 100% in a certain category, a bell appears above the section counter. Once you have everything at 100% you have a full C scale of bells, which is fun to ring and play music. But it you want to play music on the Wii that bad, go get Wii Music. Or better yet, play an instrument!
The boss fights tended to frighten Rini somewhat, but she is a bit of a drama princess, but she always enjoyed watching the parts of Patch Land get sewn together with the magic yarn. My favourite cinematic was the cake eating contest. I didn't mind the children book narration, and it actually gave me the idea to record a reading of a children's book myself.
I can see some older people getting annoyed with the cinematics, but I can also see them enjoying the craziness of the levels. It is a bit of a challenge to get absolutely everything in this game, but to clear all the levels and see how the story plays out isn't quite as tough.
Rini wouldn't know either way, but she had a lot of fun, and if there was another game of similar epic nature that could also teach my daughter shape recognition like the furnishing jobs did, I would welcome that.
Besides, after Rini was watching me play Zelda:Twilight Princess, and she got caught up in the wolf attack action by shouting, "Kill him! Kill him!" I got a little worried. Mario Kart and Kirby are great staples now.
And Rabbids.
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