Review: Cupid

Ability : Cupid

Title : Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, Kirby Squeak Squad

Reviewer : zPlazzapz


Round the time Amazing Mirror came out, it's easy believe that unique copy ability ideas had became a bit more difficult to come across for HAL. They had used the elements, toy yo-yos, Hi-Jumping, grabbing things, cooking your enemies alive, and every weapon in the book, but one thing they didn't have was some sort of bow wielding ability. Now they could've just chosen a generic purple fedora sniper named Archer to fit the role and that'd be perfectly fine, but they took it a step further and decided that Kirby would once again demolish his opposition with something cute and innocent, and thus Cupid (or Angel for all you that care about the Japanese name) was born. Besides being cute and more fitting to the series, what made cupid so unique was it's uncanny ability to hover in place and fire arrows without a perch, making it a qualified sniper no matter what the environment was. Indeed the concept was ingenious, HAL had their work cut out for them, but the execution was well...less than angelic.

You see, Cupid's arrows must've been made of stones, they arched up a bit and then fell to the ground without traveling past Beam Kirby's whip, you had to be pretty close to your target in order to get them lovestruck, which kinda defeats the purpose of the sniper playstyle Cupid was intended to serve. In terms of Cupid's moveset Kirby could fire off one hit arrows, piercing arrows and triple arrows based on charge, this is a lot of options for an ability featured in Amazing Mirror, but all of these arrows suffered from the clunky trajectory I mentioned before. It wasn't until the proceeding Squeak Squad the angelic archer got a move that shot arrows straight on, the move had top notch range and decent power but it required the copy scroll, so until you found that using Cupid up against the big bad bosses would be awkward at best.

In the end it's no surprise HAL replaced Cupid for the more reliable Archer, giving it the trajectory we hoped Cupid would return with, Archer reigns superior in combat to the bow toting pair. However in terms of concept, charm and truth to the series itself Cupid wins by a mile, we would've loved to see this ability revamped in Planet Robobot, but sadly that just wasn't the case. Rest in peace Cupid, for at least we can rest assured it went to that big Maximum Tomato in the sky.


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Last Updated - June 22nd, 2016