YMMV / Kirby's Epic Yarn

• Accidental Innuendo: Nintendo sent a mail advertising this game, but most of its recipients were looking at the placement of Kirby's yarn whip instead...
• Awesome Music: Where to start?
• Best Boss Ever:
  • Squashini, with his showiness and creative attacks and awesome music plus being a well-done slot-machine boss. Also a Breather Boss, since it's easier to get the required beads in his boss fight to activate the additional levels in Treat Land.
  • Yin Yarn, for being a Final-Exam Boss done right. Especially his second form.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Maxim Tomatos in other Kirby games are being called "Metamatos" by fans, named after Yin-Yarn's fake one in this game.
  • The Yin-Yarn-possessed Meta Knight and King Dedede in this game are often called "Meta Knit" and "String Dedede".
• Game-Breaker:
  • As if the game wasn't already broken, not being able to die and all, having a second player means having effectively infinite ammo, the ability to Double Jump via standing on your partner's head, and having someone watch your back while you're doing something else.
  • Ravel Abilities in Extra Epic Yarn trivialize nearly every puzzle since you no longer have to turn an enemy into a ball of yarn to break through blocks as every ability lets you do so in some fashion. They also allow Kirby to make nearly every boss battle a curb-stomp in his favor. To elaborate:
    • Knitting Needles let you summon a yarn ball at any time, i.e you get infinite ammo. It also gives you a bit of a floaty jump due to the way rolling up enemies works. If you have a Kirby or the Waddle Dee amiibo, you effectively have easy access to this power.
    • Nylon is a Captain Ersatz of Tornado, except of lasting for really long and letting you move freely, it blocks anything that hits it, projectiles and enemies included, and acts as a Double Jump, which makes it very useful for escaping pitfalls and losing precious, precious Beads. In addition, if you manage to get hit, the vortex absorbs most of the Beads on the screen, which makes both collecting and keeping beads trivial.
    • Marking Pins let Kirby throw rapid fire, extra long range needles, which both give your Yarn Whip that extra oomph and let you destroy enemies from a safe distance.
    • Wire lets you use rapid fire cutting moves that end in a circular slash. When used in the air, it lets you float for ages, as it lifts you up a bit with each attack. If you have a Meta Knight amiibo, you effectively have easy access to this power.
    • Bobbin acts a bit like Yo-Yo, except it reaches EVEN FARTHER! On top of that, it can be held in place, making destroying enemies a matter of when they'll walk into it. Due to its long range, it's also very useful for warding off Devils.
    • Button lets you throw bombs. However, these give you a bit of height when summoned, and since they can be thrown and summoned rather fast, you have a floaty jump on your hands. The bombs also have a good blast radius, much like the Bombers. If you have a King Dedede amiibo, you effectively have easy access to this power.
• Genius Bonus: The kissing angler fish are pretty funny if you know the mating habits of real angler fish. It's however marred by the fact that the females are the bigger ones of the two.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Dedede's hilarious quote "You can't be mean to my Waddle Dees! Only I can be mean to my Waddle Dees!" gets a much darker take in Kirby and the Forgotten Land when he's shown outright caging and capturing Waddle Dees for the Beast Pack because of Fecto's mind-control. But it also becomes Heartwarming in Hindsight when he gets freed. When one Waddle Dee trips and can't get up, Dedede runs back and throws the little guy into the closing elevator while holding off the encroaching Beast Pack.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Many comments and news reports compared this game to Yoshi's Story. Developer Good-Feel would end up making their own Yoshi game a few years later in the form of Yoshi's Woolly World.
  • Kirby's dash turning him into a car falls into this after Car Mouth was introduced in Kirby and the Forgotten Land over a decade later.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • This upset Kirby immensely. ^Explanation The British narration's description of Kirby's reaction to learning he can't get back home became popular as a reaction image.
  • It feels like...pants! ^Explanation Kirby's reaction when he first feels the ground of the new yarn world he's in. The sheer randomness and hilarity of the line has led to it becoming a very popular thing to quote.
  • Mind if I sock it to ya? ^Explanation Yin-Yarn's one-liner to Meta Knight when he sucks him into Patch Land, often lauded as a ridiculous but legendary burn.
• Older Than They Think: This is not the first time Kirby's been made of yarn. Back in 1993, there was a Japanese ad for Kirby's Adventure that had the same yarn art style.
• Polished Port: While it suffers from an lower framerrate and inferior image quality due to the 3DS' weaker hardware and lacks the co-op multiplayer from the Wii original, Extra Epic Yarn is otherwise a solid port of the game that is not only portable, but adds new content such as the Devilish Mode, the Ravel Abilities and additional minigames featuring Dedede and Meta Knight on top of the main game.
• Periphery Demographic: Its unique presentation attracted many gamers of all ages to play this game.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The remake turns off invincibility for "Devilish Mode," also having Kirby pursued by devils throughout the level, as well as giving Kirby 5 "hit points" called Life Pieces. Prince Fluff can appear roughly halfway through the level once and hands out a Life Bead to top off Kirby's Life Piece count. If Kirby's Life Piece count hits zero, he's forced to restart the level.
• Surprise Difficulty:
  • Any review of the game will mention that Kirby is invincible – getting hit only loses beads. In the (timed) minigames, getting hit loses beads and takes five seconds off of the clock. In some of the later stages, the time margin is so strict you have to complete the entire level flawlessly to succeed.
  • Getting a gold medal on many of the later story levels is much more challenging when there is a serious paucity of beads, and the bead requirements become much more strict. Several levels will essentially require you to restart if you make even a single mistake.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The Fountain Gardens theme sounds awfully similar to "Yakko's Universe". The oboe bridge, meanwhile, sounds uncannily like the bridge of Felix Bernard & Richard Bernhard Smith's "Winter Wonderland" (i.e. the "in the meadow, we can build a snowman" part).
  • Capamari's boss theme sounds like the theme to Jaws. Since it's an Underwater Boss Battle, it makes perfect sense.
  • The start of the Butter Building theme sound awfully similar to the start of Green Hill Zone's theme.
  • The Outer Rings theme is reminiscent of "Defying Gravity".
  • The Mole Hole/Digger theme sounds suspiciously similar to the iconic "Fever" from Dr. Mario and also somewhat like "Magic to Do".
  • The Splash Beach and Secret Island music sounds like a tropical version of "Mexican Hat Dance" (aka the stereotypical mariachi music).
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Watch a trailer for this game. Try to feel bad. You will fail.
• That One Level: The worst levels in the game involve taking a hit and being unable to recover enough beads to maintain a gold medal. They're usually in the form of auto-scrollers and/or have plenty of pits.
  • Weird Woods in the remake's Devilish Mode is this due to the fact it's a No-Damage Run and the UFO form doesn't have any weaponry that isn't directly underneath to ward off the We-Devil that's hunting you down. Not to mention, you bounce whenever you run into anything, which can potentially toss you right into spikes or the We-Devil's line of fire, even if you're trying to correct yourself.
  • Cocoa Station in Devilish Mode. Train's "reliable" attack is only available when you pick up the speed power up. It's basically up to luck to hit the Me-Devil even once.
  • Boom Boatyard due to being an auto-scroller where bombs are constantly raining down to destroy the boats you're hopping on and it's very easy to miss any of the collectibles. In Extra, you immediately lose your Ravel Ability hats if they fall into the drink.
  • Not only is Mount Slide a rather frustrating one to collect everything in one go, but Frigid Fjords is a nightmare for 100% runs, and Devilish Mode makes it only worse, since the Off-Roader can only attack the Me-Devil if it's directly underneath or right in front of it after getting the speed power up, but that can potentially just make the Me-Devil drop its spiked ball.
  • Also Cloud Palace, especially if you're trying to get everything in the game. It doesn't help that Kracko is waiting for you at the end of the level.
  • Battleship Halberd is intense, but not too difficult as it's very easy to recover dropped beads after taking a hit. That same level on Devilish Mode in Extra, however, turns it into That One Level for the entire series as it now requires a No-Damage Run.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The addition of Ravel Abilities (this game's take on the Copy Abilities) in the 3DS port has received this reception from some, who felt the addition of traditional Kirby mechanics into a non-traditional Kirby game take away much of what made the original game unique and ruins the slower pace. It doesn’t help that the levels were not modified to take them into account, leading to an already easy game to become even easier as a result and for the abilities to feel superfluous rather than useful. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that some players prefer to avoid using them altogether.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Yin-Yarn is supposed to have Sinister Shades and a Gag Nose, but because his nose is made from a button (which are typically used to represent eyes in this game's artstyle) and his sunglasses can be overlooked as part of his hat, he's commonly mistaken for a Cyclops.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The whole game has a very surreal photorealistic quality to it, and it's seriously hard to look away. Imagine the first time you saw Donkey Kong Country back in 1994.
  • The yarn graphics and textures certainly feel realistic.
• Woolseyism: Pretty much all of the non-visual jokes in the story cutscenes were invented by the localization team and aren't present in the Japanese script, effectively turning the narration into a Gag Dub despite the actual plot remaining the same. For example, the infamous "this grass feels like pants" line was originally just Kirby noticing that the entire world around him was made of yarn, as with his body.