YMMV / Kirby's Dream Land 2

• Contested Sequel: This game is widely regarded as being better than the original Kirby's Dream Land; it's larger in size, more challenging, has more in-depth and interesting level design and brings in the copy abilities from Kirby's Adventure, on top of introducing the Animal Friends, bringing in more variety. However, how it stands compared to Adventure tends to be a divisive topic. Some consider it to be one of Kirby's best 8-bit outings due to the explorative level design and the addition of the animal buddies on top of the copy ablities, while others consider it to be one of his weakest entries due to the slower gameplay, the rainbow drops often being annoying to get and the levels being more unforgiving than in either Dream Land and Adventure.
• Demonic Spiders: Propeller Bombs when they turn angry when you come near them with an animal friend. They are fast, take many hits to kill, and touching them once causes you to lose your animal friend instantly.
• Game-Breaker: Coo, since he can move incredibly fast through the air and has the best attacks with Copy Abilities, especially his Cutter ability.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Captain Stitch, owed largely to his unusual gimmick of being functionally invincible until his spikes are removed, either through firing them at Kirby or knocking them off after a failed rush attack, both of which take a considerable amount of time for Captain Stitch to set up and execute. The only prior boss in a Kirby game to feature a similar gimmick was Nightmare in Kirby's Adventure, and that boss tended to drop his guard on a much more regular basis. Because of this, fights against him are typically much more time-consuming due to the extra level of strategy required, in a series where the typical convention for defeating bosses and minibosses amounts to "hit it until it dies."
  • Jumper Shoot is another irritating miniboss to fight without a copy ability, as he only has one attack that gives out the projectile Kirby needs to turn against him. He'll often spam his other attack, where he'll fly around menacingly like a helicopter rotor. You'll be waiting around a lot.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: In comparison to Kirby's Dream Land and Kirby's Adventure, Dream Land 2 is significantly more challenging, though still a far cry from Dream Land's Extra Mode. In addition to the level design being more unforgiving, some of the puzzles to reach Rainbow Drops fall into serious Guide Dang It! territory.
• That One Boss:
  • Sweet Stuff is pretty bothersome without Kine, due to Kirby having some rather spotty swimming controls and his only attack being a short stream of air bubbles. This attack is extremely weak and hardly scratches Sweet Stuff; the way the player is intended to defeat him is by using Kirby's air bubbles to propel the Tincell Sweet Stuff generates back at him, which is not an easy task when the guy's constantly moving around. Sweet Stuff also has a ramming attack whose direction is absurdly difficult to tell and an electric attack that becomes very hard to dodge after enough of his health is depleted (Kirby can dodge it by staying on the top and bottom of the arena, but in hilly portions, this is rendered impossible). It's not as big of a problem with Kine, who has far better underwater control and the ability to inhale underwater, but the whole fight's an unnecessarily tough challenge without him; this is particularly noticeable in the Boss Rush, where animal friends are inaccessible.
  • Mr. Shine & Mr. Bright are really annoying in this game, even more so than Kirby's Adventure. It's mostly the same fight, but you get a significantly smaller space to maneuver in, and they now have a Combination Attack that can only be dodged if you're in the small spot that Mr. Shine is eclipsing.
  • Dark Matter is absurdly hard, even by Kirby standards. He's a very fast opponent with very fast attacks in both phases of the fight, and the Rainbow Sword does very little damage on its own and can't fire projectiles, meaning that the only way to do anything noticeable to Dark Matter is to deflect his orb attacks back at him. Meanwhile, his second form can shoot lightning from its eye, a very fast attack that can only be dodged by standing directly in front of him (which in itself is kind of a Guide Dang It!, as there's no initial indication that the lightning only fires diagonally), and while fighting his second phase, Kirby is slowly descending back to the surface, giving the player a small window of time to kill Dark Matter before the little puffball burns to death in the planet's atmosphere. Both of Dark Matter's forms also have an astronomical amount of health, making the second phase even harder to complete.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Iceberg Rainbow Drop requires you to bring the Burning ability into water with Kine. But you have regular star blocks in the way of the fire blocks, and they're below you, so the Burning ability can't destroy them. What do you do? You discard the ability, and inhale a Star block and spit it out. Then you QUICKLY swallow the Burning ability star again, and repeat this same process two more times. And if you don't reswallow the Burning ability in time? You have to exit the level and try again, since you can't get the Burning ability in the level. And that's besides the fact that there are quite a few hazards on the way that could cause you to lose the ability anyway...
  • The Cloudy Park Rainbow Drop is another highly obnoxious one. It requires you to, in order, enter the level with Kine, traverse a bunch of obstacles on land and in the air (i.e. what Kine is not built to handle), drop into a hidden door, beat a miniboss for Spark ability, drop into the hidden door again, beat another miniboss for Rick, destroy some blocks with Rick's "Beam" ability for Coo (though, probably unintentionally, you can destroy those blocks without Rick if you position Kirby in the right spot), fly against some wind to the right, beat another miniboss for Cutter, fly back to the left while maneuvering though a bunch of spikes, and then use Coo/Cutter to get the Drop. Screw up any of this and you have to start all over again.

---