Starfy is a starfish and the Prince of the floating ocean kingdom of Pufftop. The game's story is pretty standard and cliche-ridden, but it gets its job done. The writing does manage to inject a good bit of humor into the proceedings. Don't worry about this being a sequel in a series, however, as the story is completely stand-alone.

The actual game is hit or miss. As a starfish, a good amount of Starfy's adventure takes place underwater. While underwater, you can swim around in all directions, using his characteristic "star spin" to defeat enemies. There are also more conventional platforming segments on dry land, and sometimes the game mixes water and land in interesting ways. For example, you may have to swim and jump between drops of falling water to reach the top of the screen. It could be best described as "Ecco the Dolphin meets Kirby."

There's usually nothing special about the level-design, amounting to either your standard left-to- right progression or the occasional maze. However, there are some parts that are quite clever, such as a space level in which the gravity is lower and the aforementioned bit with the falling water. Some of the mazes are alright, and there is the occasional worthwhile puzzle, but this isn't the kind of game that will have you scratching your head for solutions.

Mostly, however, Starfy is content with being a rather generic platformer. You'll find yourself in predictable settings such as an ice world, a forest world, and a cloud world. Although the game puts its own aquatiic spin on these locales and populates them with humorous characters, it's hard not to feel that you've seen all this before.

You'll also find yourself in more varied situations such as racing on a minecart or being transformed into different creatures. While they aren't bad, these segments feel uninspired and recycled, as these sorts of segments have been done before, and been done better, in other games. One humorous segment sees Starfy rolled up into a snowball which you must guide to safety, but even this part seems derivative and far too easy.

The game is usually very easy, but there are some segments that offer a bit more challenge. Although more challenge is usually a good thing, here they feel rather jarring and out of place. This is mostly because of the difficulty curve, which doesn't go smoothly from easy to harder, but seems to jump around at random. Even at its harder moments, however, this game is never very challenging. It's on about he same level of difficulty as your average Kirby game, which is to say, not very difficult at all. With its cute visuals and lack of real challenge, it's easy to imagine that this game was geared towards younger audiences.

The world of the Legendary Starfy is full of cute, colorful and memorable characters, and the graphics are neat and vibrant. The backgrounds are a great combination of 3-D and 2-D. Even some of the bosses are rendered in an interesting mix of 3-D and 2-D.