Ok, I got Kururin Paradise and played it a little, and it's awesome.
It's got a very nice graphical style and the music fits right in to the atmosphere.
I don't know japanese so I wouldn't have known anything about what was going on there but I read your Kurukuru Kururin review, and the ideea of a duck flying a helicopter or whatever is neat, but that's still just a rotating bar to me.
Still the encounters before the minigames are pretty nice, there's a duck with a big red hat and very large coat, and another one in a dress. Don't have any ideea what they're saying though.
I also like the way Kururin nods his head to the music or get's distressed when your life is low.
The overworld map is a nice way to keep track of the levels, and you get to see it quite often (not like in Uo Poko where those crazy cats drove their submarine arround once every few levels), and I guess there's some backtracking because I found a key that oped a path that was locked in a previous level. I'll explore it later.
Also I like the fact that some levels where constructed like giant platforms and if you got close to the edges you could see clouds or houses below.
The control of that rotating bar has a preety good feel to it. The learning curve isn't worth mentioning, even if some levels took me quite a few tries to complete. I don't care about the score or time, I just want to finish it.
The minigames have been pretty stressful. The first one where you had to fly the duck through the rotating spikes reminded me of the water levels in Super Mario Bros, in a bad way (mashing a button just to stay in the air isn't one of my favorite activities). The other one where you had to bounce your bar on some springs and gather coins wasn't too great either, I got something like 40 coins out of 400 on my first try and never gave it a second thought.
So I guess I've played something like 18 levels so far (I counted the minigames too), and I'm in that town with the very steampunk feel to it (
here's a screenshot). I'll play some more tonight.