Review: Needle

Instead of starting with an introduction of sorts and say we're talking about the ability with points: Needle!

This ability made its first appearance in Kirby's Adventure: that's right, it's old school! Like most abilities in the day, it was pretty simple -- press the button, boom you're spiky. Good for crowd control, but it rendered him immobile. The problem was, there were two other abilities that did the exact same thing: Spark and Freeze. To make matters worse, Freeze had the additional feature of turning foes into ice cubes that you can knock into other foes. While I'm not sure if you could call the copy abilities of today "balanced", they at least now have sense to not include two identical abilities that are both rendered irrelevant.

In the next installment, Kirby's Dream Land 2, Needle made a comeback. Given the vastly reduced ability count in this game, you'd think Needle would stand out more. Nope! Despite there only being seven other abilities, they yet again picked two very similar ones. Now, in all fairness, this game did feature Animal Friends, which set the two apart. They used powers differently than normal, but whenever alone, Needle was identical to Spark; at least it wasn't completely outclassed. Despite the minor tweaking in powers between the other two games, the situation remained the same, so at this point, Needle has faced the problem of redundancy four times. Meta.

(Also, I'm not counting ability combos in this, as they have their own sections, but I'd like to point out Kine's Needle is exactly the same as Kirby. Because Needle was not redundant enough.)

On the other side, Needle was cut from Super Star. And can you blame them? Ice and Plasma incorporated Freeze and Spark, so that niche was covered. Kirby Super Star in general trimmed the fat. And so on, Needle never reappeared in a main series game... up until Return to Dream Land.

Thankfully, Return outfitted this one-trick pony with a few more options. It got a directed spike up, quite like Coo's directed spike down, the ability to shoot out spikes, a la Chuchu, and a dash forward while curling up in a ball; this one is more Sonic that anything, but it has elements of Wheel. Sadly, outside of power combos, this moveset made of recycled bits was the most original Needle has ever been.

And then, in Triple Deluxe, they decided that Needle having more than one attack apparently was a bad thing, and so they took out the ranged and charged attacks, but don't worry! They introduced a new attack! It involves sticking out Kirby's spikes, only upside down! Amazing!

So, yeah, that was the end of Needle, having been dropped for Planet Robobot. So why was it dropped? Well, it's boring. Even at its most varied, this was always a pretty limited ability. In an age where there are eight attacks per ability, Needle had at most half that. This ability is similar to, say, Laser or Ball, except it somehow managed to stick on far longer than it should have.

...Get it? Stick on, it's pointy, eh? Eh?...no? Philistines...

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