Finished this one a few hours ago actually. It seems like the common consensus on this game is that it's decent, but it's one of the more forgettable Kirby games. Personally, I'm really torn on this game. First of all, there's the graphics, and holy shit does it look amazing. It can get a little pixelated and muddy up-close, but I personally love the pastel-esque art style, the backgrounds are all great, and geez the animations are just so adorable to look at. The music is pretty stunning, a nice mix of typical Kirby fare with
Grass Land 1, the excellent melodies of
Ripple Field 1 and
Sand Canyon 1, more relaxing music like
Grass Land 2 and
Ripple Field 2, the incredible and more ambient tunes of
Ripple Field 3 (my personal fav song, partly cuz canvas curse and the awesome levels it played in) and
Iceberg, the short but very catchy
mini-game and
Friends themes, the climactic
final boss themes, and a gorgeous
ending theme. Between the graphics and music, you could probably convince me this was an early 5th gen console game instead of a SNES game.
Gameplay-wise, I mostly had a lot of fun with this game. The level designs are overall pretty nice (except Cloudy Park, most of those stages suck), all of the copy abilities are great as are the animal friends, which give Kirby some slightly different platforming and movement (Nago being my personal favorite) as well as varying up how each of the powerups work (Kine having some especially fun ones). I think the most important part about a Kirby game is that they're fun. And this game really embraces that; there aren't really any horribly broken partner/copy ability combinations, so it's just a lot of fun to mess around with all the combos and not only learn about them but have a lot of fun using them all. That being said, I often realized that it's generally safer to play the game as Kirby, seeing as some of the animal buddies can't fly at all, let alone as easily as Kirby, and Kirby being a smaller character makes him much easier to manuver. Beyond this, there are a few more subtle, but very noticable changes made to the game compared to the other Kirby games: One of my personal favorites is that Kirby does not take contact damage from enemies so long as you hit them from the top of the bottom (which still destroys the enemies, kinda like Mario). But then one of the not so great ones was extending Kirby's health at a whopping 10 units (most give you ~6). This sounds really awesome, but you'll eventually realize that in order to "balance" this, the game gives Kirby a very small amount of iframes after being hit (maybe about 1 second's worth), often resulting in you getting hit multiple times by obstacles should you get stuck in them, and the animal buddy's big sizes don't really help in this regard.
Finally, there's one of Dream Land 3's more infamous inclusions, the Friend system. Basically, every level has a sort of objective you can "optionally" complete. And by optionally, I mean you need to do all of them in order to fight the game's true final boss and not get the bad ending. These objectives aren't told to you outright, as this game has absolutely no dialogue, instead using visuals and sound effects to dictate what's going on. These tasks can range from doing something with flowers, playing minigames, collectathons, that one task with Metroids, and plenty more. For the most part, it was fairly straightforward to figure out what to do, even if I knew some of them already from watching various gameplay bits of this game online. This resulting in some stages that were admittedly quite brilliant, like 2-5 and 3-6, which really make use of the animal friends and copy abilities to let Kirby interact with the environment in some different ways and solve some puzzles. However, there were still some stages that I had to look up hints for since I was pretty lost on what to do (namely 1-2, 3-2, 4-1, and 4-5). Speaking of 4-1, that brings up another issue; a lot of parts of this game can be a drag. Some stages, especially 4-1 and 4-2 (not 5-5, that stage was quite fun despite its length and simplicity), tend to go on for way too long, and the fact that missions are sometimes placed at the end of a level, forcing you to start over the stage if you fail, certainly doesn't help matters. Pretty much all of the bosses also tend to go on for way too long and/or are just plain annoying to hit. Again, copy abilities either are not especially strong or force you to use an animal buddy, whose mobility and size make them pretty unfit for a boss fight, so you're probably sticking to your basic inhales. The exception of course is the final boss, which was weird and kinda easy, but very fun nonetheless.
Geez I wrote a ton on this game, guess that goes to show how much I cared about this game (or how recently it's been since I've played it). In the end, I really liked this game, but there's too many things I didn't like for me to truly love it and proclaim that it's better than Super Star Ultra. Still, it's very underrated and is more than just "a forgettable Kirby game", definitely worth looking into.
Oh and yes, many quality memes have been made with this game's OST