Be absolved, and be free
Have you got a Switch? And NSO? Or anything to emulate NES games?
Play Kirby’s Adventure (NES). You can beat it in an evening.
(and if it helps ease your anxiety, there is no lore. the games are only connected because they feature the same characters.)
To add on to this, Kirby’s Adventure is probably the most polished and “modern feeling” game on the platform. You can play it in 10 minute chunks over the course of a few weeks or months just as easily as sitting down and beating it in a single evening if you prefer.
I was going to recommend Kirby’s Adventure on the NES, but it looks like that’s not really necessary.
To echo what’s already been said, this is probably the prettiest and most polished game on the NES. It feels like a mid-era SNES game with slightly downgraded graphics. It’s also an absolute joy to play, with tons of powers, great music, and a really clever overworld setup.
You can play the Kirby games in any order you want. Any supposed “lore” has been played up by fans to the same degree as the Zelda “timeline”.
To be honest though, it’s even less substantial than even the Zelda timeline. There’s not really much tying the Kirby games together at all except for aesthetics, mechanics and general themes I suppose. It doesn’t have an overarching story to follow and, like Kiki says, the lore’s importance has been overstated to a ludicrous degree. You can play whichever that catches your eye. They’re all fairly similar too, so you won’t go wrong either way.
Kirby’s Nightmare in Dreamland for the GBA is pretty good, and so is the NES original. If you want one of the newer ones I think Kirby and the Forgotten Land for Switch is excellent too. Just hop in, you’ll have a great time, promise.
thank you everyone for the clarifications!! i don’t have anything to play Kirby’s Adventure with though… i do have NSO, but not the expansion pack (that’s a bit too pricy for me at this moment). i assume starting off with the switch kirby games should be fine, hopefully? o:
NES and SNES games come with the cheapest NSO subscription, no expansion pack needed!
I would know as I also do not have the expansion pack and just played Kirby’s Adventure for 30 minutes, inspired by this conversation. 
The only Kirby game I have really gotten into is Kirby’s Dream Course. Other Kirby games are hard for me to get into because I want more mini golf and less floating.
kirby is cool and adventure rules. the GBA ones are the stone coldest for me, and if you’ve got the R4 for it, super star ultra is a buffet of a game. i love the presentation of those GBA/NDS kirbies
I didn’t check some of my ebay purchases for 3 months and when I just looked inside my Gun Survivor 3 Dino Crisis + guncon2 box set I discovered the game wasn’t there. It’s just the gun and the box. but it’s too late!!! I paid in august!!! I am a fool.
I feel for you. I’m also dealing with a missing game. Earlier this year I was testing out my switch copy of Pikmin 1+2 and an imported copy of Romancing SaGa 2 (pixel version). Somehow I put the wrong game in the wrong box, and totally misplaced the SaGa Box/Pikmin cartridge. I’ve looked pretty thoroughly and can’t find it.
The worst bit of all is that the SaGa box has beautiful Tomomi Kobayashi artwork while the pikmin box is bland. I’m also more interested in playing a Pikmin at the moment then this particular version of SaGa 2 so I would feel slightly less bad if it was the other way around.
Second confession of the day - I had a cart open for some animeigo discs while I waited to get the discount for already owning bubble gum crisis. I closed the order today not realizing it was cyber Monday and there was a 40% discount available. Honk
Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions came out just as I was at the height of messing about with PSP hacking. I ripped all of the new rendered cut scenes and poorly uploaded them to YouTube on a burner account. 17 years later, this is still the only time I’ve uploaded to YouTube.
To this day, the sales ramifications of me exposing Luso’s English reveal cutscene has yet to be properly measured or fully understood.
A couple of weeks ago I learned that Stellar Blade and Honkai Star Rail are two different games
i left a reunion with a friend that was living abroad for 3 years because i wanted to go home and finish my yearly LOTR marathon
It took me a very long time to realise that Annapurna Games was the name of a studio, not just a bunch of games made by a female game developer named ‘Anna Purna’.