Going way back to the first Kirby game in the series, Kirby's Dream Land featured a grey blob of some sorts to suck up enemies and spit them out. As it was on the Game Boy, no-one knew the true colour of Kirby. In fact, normally the game came out on the NES, and a similar game would come out on the Game Boy about a year later. Here, Kirby made his enterence on the Game Boy. He didn't get his trademark pink colour and copying abilites until his next game Kirby's Adventure, so it seems this game has some simple game play. Well, lets have a look.

You are greeted with a simple title screen with some music as you watch several Kirby's  walk on the screen. Even back then, multiple of Kirby's seemed to be on Nintendo's mind. The story is that King Dedede has stolen all the food in Dream Land for some midnight snack, and I guess you have to save all the food. How can one just "steal" all the food in an entire country if it's just for a midnight snack. Does he have a button that says "be a jerk", and every time he presses it, something different happens? I don't know. Shouldn't his people like......try and dethrone him if he's doing things like this? But I digress.

There are five levels, each area is a different place in Dream Land. As you venture though the game, you can suck up enemeies, and then spit them out as a star as a sort of attack. How the enemy becomes a star inside Kirby's mouth, I do not know. You can't fly when you have an enemy in your gob, so be careful. If no enemies are around, you can fly and in turn, you automatically suck up some air, in which you can use that as an attack. How enemies die by being breathed on, I do not know. Maybe Kirby is that powerful. So if I walk into them, that'll kill them as well, right *walks into an enemy and takes some damage*.....I thought wrong....But this attack is useful for those cute flying heads. Trying to suck them up will turn them into demonic beasts and will chace after you. They scared me by the element of surprise = (

The game allows you to enter some doors if you come across them, and in them might be some power-ups that will heal you. This can range from coffee to a tomato with a M on it. At some stage, you'll find a floating star in a level in which you can grab hold of. This will take you to the next part of the level. You'll often come across some guy in a bobble hat with no visable arms throwing bombs at you. You just defeat them and carry on. They're small time compared to what's up ahead. Every level features a boss. This can range to a tree with a face to a cloud with an eye.

The game has a fair bit to offer the player, even after you complete the game. Apon completion, you are given a code for a harder game. This just features less health, as far as I'm concerned. The enemy placements are the same and there seem to be the same amount of enemies. I  might not have been paying attention....Anyway, after you complete that harder version, what next? You'll have to complete it and find out! It's a farily short game, so you should do it wth out any problems, even though the game doesn't feature a saving ability.

The graphics are pretty good. I like how they used both sharp (such as the background) and smooth graphics (such as Whispy Woods) to create something pretty decent to look at. The animations in the sprites seems a little jagged, but that adds to the charm. They made 75% of everything really cute! For it's time, they sure did capture what was cute, and what could be scary......*Shivers*......Oh no, it's not spikes this time. I meant the scarfys. They really creep me out. To me, they are as bad as spikes. The music is a mixed bag to me. Some of it is catchy, while some of it is annoying. The boss music one one of the things they did right, setting the tone of battle rather nicely. The first level's music has to be a classic, though.

The difficulty is a tad easy to begin with. I found the first level a breeze, and I wasn't even trying. Later on, however, I did die a few times because the first level threw me off on the difficulty. After that, the game seemed overall normal, with the last two levels generally being more of a pain than the first three. The "increased" difficuly version is more of a challenge to me. Having less health makes me pay more attention to not getting hit all the time (even if you only have three bars to begin wth). Even though the game didn't support saving, it still held a score, which is odd, as every time you turn off the game, the score would reset itself. I wonder what their thinking was behind that? And why couldn't they add the save feature in the first place?

Overall, I give this game 7.7/10         The game was the first in the series, so you can't blame it much for that. What they did create was a fun side-scrolling game featuing a bunch of cute little things. The music (well, a little more than half of it) was quite well done and the graphics were fairly good to look at for a Game Boy game. The game play is rather simplified due to no powers being absorbed when you suck them up, but as it's the first game in the series, you know they'll add it to all future games. Even though the game play was pretty simple, it was the kind of simple that rivaled Mario, only a step further with flying. It's quite fun to pick up and play, with some good replay vaule.