Bottom line: it’s fine. My 8 year old nephew 100%’d this game twice, and that feels like all that should matter. But - this game makes me uncomfortable. Because my nephew did not 100% Super Mario Odyssey, or any game before this, which provides the lens I need to dig into this game’s funny feeling.

That funny feeling started as soon as the game booted up and asked me to share my data. I know many games do this, but seeing it in the context of Kirby planted this seed in my head of “market testing.” That seed blossomed as I played the game and thought about how this game was marketed, how it reviewed, and it’s now franchise record sales. There are so many touchpoints that made me feel like I was playing game product as much as an actual game.

Forgotten Land’s whole gimmick, of Mouthful Mode, feels like a reaction to Mario Odyssey as much as an imitation. People responded well to the weirdness of Mario becoming a photo-realistic T-Rex and chilling in New York City. And by well, I mean twitter loved it. And by loved it, I mean it had high engagement. The weirdness was gif-able. My real world friends are still weirded out by the real people in Odyssey’s New York City. (I hate them!)

And so we get Carby. Carby is weird. It’s transgressive. It’s meme-able in the same way Mario’s capture mechanic was. Making characters that can glom onto any real world thing or object is marketing genius for building unexpected associations with your character and product. The merchandising potential is high while having to maintain few new character trademarks. Gimmicky transformations are nothing new to Kirby. Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Planet Robobot featured plenty. But something about the way they are used in Forgotten Land put me on edge. And I think that’s because the basic gameplay of playing as Kirby in the Forgotten Land is boring.

The best Kirby games have smooth movement and a wide range of character actions for Kirby that make it fun to explore his otherwise simple levels. Transitioning to 3D in Forgotten Land came with some compromises that took away freedom of movement without offering substitutes. Kirby can no longer fly vertically infinitely. It’s perfectly viable to fly over levels in most 2D Kirby games, but the act of mashing the jump button gets tiring enough that you’ll eventually fall back to properly engaging with the game. Kirby no longer can run. The input for doing so in 2D was a double tap, something that can’t be registered as easily in 3D. So instead of adding another button for running, Kirby’s stuck on one speed.

As a result of these restrictions, the level design is plain. The camera lets you tickle it, but the levels are linear enough you’ll forget the option exists. Walk around, projectile spam with the same-y feeling copy abilities at enemies who mostly stand around giving the stink eye. Wait for a gap in canon ball blasts, hop over a bottomless pit. After enough of these elements have been remixed to feel like a game level, it usually ends with a Mouthful Mode transformation sequence. Yes, its funny when Kirby becomes a vending machine or a set of stairs, but you’re kinda wandering through barren levels getting pointless trinkets until something funny happens and then the level ends. Because if the level ends on something funny, that’s what you remember, so it must have been a fun time, yeah?

Forgotten Land reminded me of the difference between how critics and customers play games. Critics binge games, so love tangible details that are easy to write about. Variety and novelty work well on them because they are unlikely to replay levels, and games with lots of different powers and meme-able moments are easier to remember and describe to fill space. For me, it feels like the set pieces and gimmicks are to distract from the fact the base interactivity of the game character just isn't that fun or engaging.

Nothing sparks my intuition for a game’s insecurity like checklists, and Forgotten Land is brazen. Finishing any level immediately shoves a scorecard in your face with everything you did and did not accomplish. I appreciate games that let you track trinkets, but the presentation belies the intent. Unlike Mario Odyssey that hid its checklist in a menu you had to seek out, Forgotten Land is constantly making you aware of your “progress.” The main pause menu has a big completion percentage taking up more screen space than anything else. And to finish a world, you need to have accomplished a certain number of checklist items to challenge that world’s boss. These multiple systems in place guiding you to think about playing a level again, mere seconds after you’ve finished it the first time, irk me.

These systems irk me because they exist alongside other systems that feel even more sinister. Not in a vacuum, but because this is a Kirby game. Kirby can upgrade his copy abilities, but to do so, requires you find a trinket and amass quantities of two in-game currencies. One of these currencies is earned in separate challenge rooms from the main game levels. It feels so disconnected from the experience of playing the game one might ponder, “why couldn’t the hidden trinket just… be the ability upgrade, if we had to have one?” And the answer to that is to normalize children to the kind of game environments that have microtransactions.

Forgotten Land does not have microtransactions. However, it does have a “history of Kirby” book containing info about previous Kirby games. Notable, however, is it only shows Kirby games that are currently available for purchase on the 3DS, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch systems. Many of which are free-to-play spin-off games with currencies, upgrades, and menus very similar to the ones found in Forgotten Land - except these currencies cost real-world money. Notably absent from this picture book are older games like Kirby 64 and Kirby Super Star, which contain most of the inspiration in enemy and level design that Forgotten Land is aping.

This context also explains something odd that bothered me about the gacha-style collectible figures in Forgotten Land. (Another system that is pointless and dumb in any video game and is here being used to normalize gambling in a children’s game.) Figurines of enemies and bosses have pointless fluff Pokedex descriptions, but only those introduced in Forgotten Land. Series mainstays have no descriptions, lest they mention their origins and engender curiosity for these older, self-contained, non-monetizable games. (A departure from the historically themed collectables from the 3DS games, I might add.)

All of this modern gaming garbage - the achievements, the crafting, the currencies, the gacha, the base building, the incessantly chittering NPCs, the extreme number of reminders to upgrade, the data collection, the ads - I just hate it. And I know it works. It wouldn’t be here if it didn’t work.

When my nephew played Mario Odyssey, he’d find a challenge he thought was fun, and do it over and over again. He didn’t care that he didn’t get a moon. He didn’t need to collect every dumb hat, or scour the world for every trinket. The gameplay caught his interest, and the menus stayed out of his way. With Kirby, I know that isn’t the case, which makes me go from “wow, he really loved Forgotten Land!” to a sense of unease I can’t quantify.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is… fine. If you’re the type of person who only has time to play a level or two after work, it’s fine. If you are trying to get someone into gaming, it’s fine. (The co-op sucks. (Why no upgrades for Bandana Waddle Dee?)) But it’s not good. It’s expensive without feeling quality. I have no nostalgia for it, but Kirby Super Star is still the best Kirby game on the Switch. I find this expensively-produced mediocrity so weird.

Someone worked very hard on vector graphic animations for every level, (something that also feels like a response to Odyssey’s travel stickers), but the levels are so insipid in concept that the decals do nothing to help you remember what happens within them. The sound design lacks punch, relying on sound effects that have been in use for decades without expanding the soundscape to match the graphical fidelity of a 3D player space. The main theme song is hummable not due to its musical merits, but because it is reused and remixed in so many environments. One rendition has a guitar “wail” so embarrassing it conjures to mind parodies of Christian rock.

There is no greatness in Kirby and the Forgotten Land. There is no pulse that implies the work of great artists, but plenty of fingerprints left by corporate entities. I can more easily imagine the meetings of suits discussing what transformations to be shown in a Nintendo Direct than I can whoever drew the terrible boss designs. It feels like a project not striving to make something good, but a well-managed, well-funded project that allowed its average minds ample time to finish their tasks. I hope none of this nonsense represents KIrby in the next Super Smash Bros. game.

If I ever have to see that stupid sexy cheetah woman again and her terrible glittery eyeshadow I'll scream

Kirby and the Forgotten Land takes the franchise in a new direction. It's clear that Nintendo intended to follow the path of Super Mario Odyssey and create a unique 3D platformer.

When the game was revealed, I finally became interested in a Kirby game. I had played a few in the past, but they were always forgettable. Forgotten Land presented a new opportunity for me to connect with this iconic franchise.

Upon the game's reveal, I noticed some mechanics reminiscent of Mario Odyssey. They even adapted the classic Kirby power to possess enemies and now allow you to transform objects like cars. Although this mechanic is more fitting for Kirby, it reminded me of Mario Odyssey's Cap power.

The best part is seeing Kirby embark on a decent 3D adventure for the first time. It makes this game enjoyable for everyone, not just old fans and kids.

The game is everything it wanted to be, but to be honest, something was missing. I had a great time playing it, but it didn't live up to the level of fun I was expecting.

Even with that said, I can confidently say it's the best Kirby game I've ever played. It's a fantastic game, especially for kids and old fans.

odyssey's main contribution to the collectathon canon was the acknowledgement that to make a robust collectathon experience, there needed to be a constant shuffling of verbs to avoid tedium and vary the challenges available to the player. while this has always been a feature of the genre, the usual approach is to overburden the main character with loads of unlockable powers, or to lock new toolkits behind minigames that limit player expressivity within strict spatial barriers or time limits. odyssey's capture mechanic neatly allows temporary changes in player verbs without overloading mario's basic (though very nuanced ofc) toolkit while also bounding capture use organically via locality with a lot of room for the player to experiment.

while the new kirby obviously doesn't implement the open-area trappings of odyssey, it incorpoates the capture via the new mouthful mode, which overlays whatever copy ability he has with a new basic toolkit from whatever he's swallowed. doing this allows the developers to dip into the deep well of alternative verbs without violating the player's choice of copy ability, but at the same time implementing these takes away from the number of copy abilities available. the weird and wild among kirby's long list of ablities over the years have been culled in favor of these limited mouthful abilities, and since the set of mouthful objects becomes well-worn quickly, it can make the second-to-second gameplay feel monotonous.

however, kirby levels are not iterative in the way that mario levels are, where challenge concepts are evolved over the course of a small period to test the player's abilities in more and more demanding contexts. instead, kirby levels have always bounced from idea to idea with more focus on surprising and disorienting the player; each three-star door could completely flip the level's idea on its head, or shift to something else entirely. with this design technique in place, the mouthful abilities really shine as ways to quickly shift a player's attention towards the new limited verbs before shoving them into something different. these are joyrides, not obstacle courses, and the game only gets better and better as it continues to develop the amount of variety for the player into the endgame. the beginning is shallow and rote of course (as all kirby games are to some extent), but quality only scales up as the adventure goes on. the later levels are a whirlwind of mechanics that consistently delighted me; a veritable funhouse of new ideas and environments. the added treasure rooms bolster the experience as well by offering more compelling tests of the player's comprehension of each toolkit, at least when they go beyond simple gauntlets of enemies.

on pop star this would have only pushed the pink puffball so far, but in this new world the developers wring a lot of fascinating vistas and locales out of this decaying metropolis. each world hews close to tried-and-true world themes with the added twist of navigating human-like architecture, which is new territory for the series and novel for platformers in general. at their best, the overgrown foliage and buried structures paradoxically make the land feel more alive than many of kirby's previous retreads of familiar territory. at worst, they make the engine sputter while simultaneously limiting the scope of the world outside the explicit frame of the camera. while the on-rails approach suits kirby's overall hurried design, it also means that true hidden paths and secrets cannot truly lie outside of the player's view, making them often feel like perfunctory methods of handing out additional coins or ablities. to further develop the world, the devs have added the waddle dee town, which expands as the game progresses to offer a variety of optional content and items. unfortunately it's not much more than an interactive menu, but at the very least it offers a beefy package to those interested in content besides the main levels.

what really sealed this as one of my favorite kirby games were the bosses, all of which really thrive in a 3D space. there's much more room for interesting patterns and dynamic encounters when you aren't limited to 2D, and the developers did a great job overall designing bosses that smartly harness the space (besides sillydillo, who is undercooked and not particularly interesting to fight). with the added bonus of kirby's new witch time-esque dodge ability, trying to take down each boss as efficiently as possible is more interesting than it ever has been before in the series, even if some of the new weapon upgrading can trivialize encounters. in fact, it works so naturally that it fits the kirby series in an odd way: older games have a reputation for secretly housing stellar beat-em-up mechanics, and this game seems to have snuck in its own little character action sequences.

to that end, what this series really needs to shine in 3D is to lean into those aspects. let me carry multiple copy abilities at once and swap between them for combos. give me more enemies with complex attack patterns that don't go down in a single hit. strip out some of the platforming and give me better mini-bosses instead (the variety for them here is noticeably poor). provide an option for a true nightmare difficulty from the beginning. this game is quite good on its own merits, but what truly elevates it is the joy of combat, especially when that final gauntlet of bosses hits absolutely perfectly. another game in this style won't cut it, give us the action game kirby we deserve...

the fact that it leans into those strengths at all at least illustrates that the designers have more confidence in their level design abilities than in star allies, where the combat was again very fleshed out but placed in levels that never even vaguely attempted to leverage the character's strengths. for that alone forgotten land would be up there on my list of kirby games, and given the solid size of the package (ever more important now that the series retails for $60 a pop), I'd say it's worth trying out for any switch owner. it's the first game I've played in a while where I'm actually looking forward to playing a bit more of the post-game content, even if I'm not compelled to do every optional objective. this is about as polished of a kirby experience as we've ever gotten.

EVERYTHING. SHALL BE. CONSUMED.

Only Nintendo could get away with hyping a character’s “long-awaited leap to 3D” for a year only to release a game that’s more or less mechanically indistinguishable from any old 90s mascot platformer - in terms of space-play, this isn’t all that far behind a Gex or Crash Bandicoot, which isn’t necessarily an indictment of the game’s quality but does at least raise this Nintendrone’s eyebrow. The pre-launch misconception that this was gonna be Kirby’s Odyssey making way for a realisation that it barely passes muster as Kirby’s 3D World - but is still somehow receiving heaps upon heaps of praise - feels like a firm demonstration that Nintendo are now the industry’s incumbent entertainment superpower in the same vein as Disney; slap your characters onto something, anything, and you’ll refill those company coffers with ease. £50, please. Poyo!

If Nintendo are Disney, then this is clearly their WALL-E: an all-powerful-all-encompassing entertainment monolith’s vague gesture of critique towards itself and its environment that more or less just gives way to “little guy do cute thing” at the point at which it starts grazing the inconvenient truths. While I was secretly hoping for Kirby’s Climate Change Caper, this is fine too, probably. I definitely have a bad habit of letting my eyes and ears perk up a little too hard when corporate kids stuff starts acknowledging the wicked nature of its own existence, and it’s hardly a crime in our grand scheme of things to permit perfunctory play in consumer post-apocalypse. May as well get our children prepared for their future, I guess. Burying all the hypercapitalist lore in gacha balls that require you to mindlessly twiddle dials of animation for hours on end is a clever play on HAL’s part, preventing me or anyone else with a job from digging too deeply into the setting or what it really means for Kirby and his friends; I checked the comments under the Roar of Dedede OST and felt like I was going insane when people talked about the personal motivations of the Beast Pack and their thematic lineage with the Squeak Squad.

Played through almost all of this as the Bandana Waddle Dee to my girlfriend’s Kirby, which was initially frustrating but ultimately comical, once I let myself go - the game’s unfettered contempt for Bandana Waddle Dee is enjoyable on its own terms, with the camera straight-up ignoring him in many scenarios, aggressively snatching him back towards Kirby like a helicopter parent if he dares show a hair’s breadth of initiative. Watching Kirby grow increasingly godlike while Mr. Dee remains stuck with a wooden spear is just pure cruelty on HAL’s part, culminating in a final boss battle that makes you feel like a Dark Souls Deprived Onebro who’s summoned a SL150 übermage to help him take on one of Bloodborne’s cosmic horrors. I know REJECT MODERNITY / EMBRACE TRADITION is welded tight above the gates of Nintendo’s HQ, but maybe it’s about time we let Bandana Waddle Dee take a retirement package and give Kirby some sort of Ms. Kirby or Kirby Jr. partner who can use copy abilities too. There’s only twelve of them here. It can’t be that hard. Lazy devs, etc.

As a shameful side-note: I initially played this by myself on Yuzu with a bunch of performance tweaking/patching (before my gf just went ahead and bought it, much to my dismay - I see my austere Bandana Waddle Dee playthrough as a form of penance/purgatory/punishment for software piracy), and it was eye-openingly different to the Switch experience, to the point where I’m now considering picking up Breath of the Wild and a bunch of other NSPs just to see what I’ve been missing out on. I might finally be Switch Pro-pilled…

P.S.: Dedede running on all fours is genuinely terrifying. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

So I actually beat the game a few days ago (Wild Mode, if that matters), but wasnt quite sure on my feelings and wanted to give a bit of the post game a shot before writing a review. I figured I could 100% it, but I decided that I had gotten my fill of the game and was ready to move on. So, this game was really solid. Like, the epitome of solid. Its well made, its fun, and even though there are lots of flaws theres nothing "bad" about it. Kirby is really cute, plus the finale gets pretty bonkers and I thought it was dope as hell. What holds back this game for me I guess is just that, I wasn't really impressed.
Before I continue, I would like to note I have tried Kirby's Adventure through Nintendo Online but for all intents and purposes, this was really my first Kirby game. And for me really, outside of the initial fun of the first world and the epic finale, the game didnt really have much of a wow factor. It shows nearly all of the copy abilities and mouthful modes right at the start and rarely does anything interesting with them outside of the optional challenge trials. They aren't utilized or expanded on in any satisfying ways that makes you feel like you're getting better. Theres also the same couple minibosses scattered throughout the entire game and the most variation they get is fighting more than one of them at a time. This gets very annoying with how often they appear. The main bosses are all pretty good though at least. Kirbys movement also just doesnt really feel all that good but thats not a big deal. The music outside of a few tracks (the vocal one) was honestly pretty forgettable too. Despite all this, the presentation is so strong that I was still having a really great time for the first four worlds, and even went as far to 100% them as much as I could. But once the game starts getting into the end game, the fifth and sixth worlds just felt really uninspired and missing anything particularly interesting. I was really losing interest fast, but thankfully the finale like mentioned before was really enjoyable and unique. Two final nitpicks, the target time for some of the challenges gives like one second of leeway and can feel pretty unfair, but they're still doable. Finally theres certain missions where you have to beat a boss while taking no damage, but theres no restart so you'll have to go through the whole level which can be between like twenty seconds or as long as a few minutes of waiting to try again. Doesnt sound like much but its pretty annoying when it adds up.
Anyway.
Despite the fact that this review was almost entirely negative, I want it to be clear that those were only things that stopped me from loving it and none of it is big enough of an issue to stop the game being from a nice wholesome adventure.
I look forward to playing some more Kirby.

In Game Completion - 77%
Time Played - 25 hours +
Nancymeter - 84/100
Game Completion #43 of 2022
April Completion #12

UMA OBRA PRIMA QUE EU NÃO ESPERAVA QUE IA SER TÃO BOA ASSIM

kirby tem um level design muito bom, o jogo é divertido d+ e voce sempre libera coisas novas ao avançar no game, o coop dele é muito divertido, mas o banana waddle dee(não é bandana, não importa oque esteja escrito pra mim é banana) poderia ter mais skills, pode ficar repetitivo para o player 2

outra coisa que me impressionou foi a lore, ela é muito mais profunda doq eu esperava pra um jogo de kirby e foi uma ótima surpresa, em geral é um jogo divertidíssimo que recomendo a todos.

refazer as fazer versão forgo após zerar o jogo é absurdamente divertido e diferente do jogo normal.

eu te amo chinchila azul, não lhe mereçemos.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is one of the harder games for me to rate. The reason for this is what I think of the game vs my own personal feelings with the game.

First what I think of the game. HAL laboratory knocked what they wanted to do out of the park. They made Kirby’s long overdue first 3D adventure a seamless transition from the 2D plane. The game plays the way they want it to perfectly. A platformer that anyone can pick up and play while having a good time. Plenty of copy ability variates that are fun play around and look at. A fun game that anyone can get to the credits. With what they were trying to achieve I would give this a 4.5. Which is where my person feelings come in. While I admit it’s a great game and fantastically made I just had a good to ok time with it. I get that accessibility is something Kirby is all about, and the game is geared towards kids but for me about half way through I found myself just going through the motions to finish the game. The abilities while fun for the first few uses are so interchangeable that it never matters what you have equipped. I get that this is a me problem but I can’t help how I feel. If I went off of the fun I had I would have to give it a 3.5 and it just doesn’t give me as much joy as any of my 4 star games. Still I decided to give this game a 4 because of just how well it was made. Just a side note but this is a perfect game to recommend if you know someone just getting into games because of the lack of difficulty but high in quality or as a gift for a young gamer in your life.

While the gameplay wasn’t 100% for me I still had fun for the most part. What was awesome to me was the music and art. The music got stuck in my head in between playing sessions and went perfect with the game. The art, to me, is the star of the game. Even with the limitations that is the switch and the common world themes of platforming games ( desert, ice, etc) the art shined through. There were many times I was surprised at the spectacles that was put into a Kirby game. Not just every world but every level feels very different from the next which was a pleasant surprise.

Even though I’ve had some negative things to say here I still did enjoy my time overall and think this is an excellent game as well as the best Kirby game I’ve played so far.

ayer plataformero, hoy soulslike, mañana DMCV

Es de los mejores juegos que han salido, punto.

Sí alguien se queja de la cantidad de poderes aléjense de esa persona, cada poder tiene mínimo una mejora y estas no solo son divertidas de usar sino que cambian el como se afrontan los desafíos.

Kirby Forgotten Land is my favorite Kirby game of all time, and I'm not even done with the post-game content. This game has so much charm and a lot of love put into it by HAL. The only thing I didn't really like about this game was the lack of copy abilities (12 of them) and the amount of moves removed from them. I was surprised at the amount of abilities that were in the game, even some staples like Stone, Fighter, and Beam were removed.

Other than that I didn't have any problems with this game because it only goes up, there are no down moments in the game at all. Like when I found out that with the d-pad you could get Kirby to say hi to you or the Waddles Dee's, and the Waddle Dee's I love them. There are over 250+ Dee's in the game but you only need 1/16th of that to actually beat the game, BUT. If you miss out on any Waddle Dee's out in the open or are so obvious to collect, you are a monster and no matter how hard you pray you will find yourself in hell when you die.

Waddle Dee Town is one of my favorite areas in the game. You can say hello to Waddle Dee's and they'll say hi back, you can knock one down and they'll get back up looking sad, it's such a neat detail and I love it. The more Dee's you collect the bigger the town grows and you unlock more buildings that will and can help you in the game. How HAL worked the Star Coins and Waddle Dee's is so good because it gives players an incentive to look around the area for hidden rooms rather than just speed blitzing through levels.

I don't have much to say about the level design rather than I enjoyed just about all of them and I like how detailed each level is, they all have their own story to tell.

Kirby had a stellar transition into 3D and I can't wait for more games like this one.

I'm not usually a big Kirby fan but this was surprisingly solid. While the main game still mostly feels like coasting through a series of frictionless set pieces even on Wild Mode, each level's secrets and achievements ("reunite the ducklings with their mother!" "look at the view from the top of the rocket!" "don't get lost in the mall!") add a layer of appeal and interest that's been lacking in other Kirbies I've played.

The fact that the achievements are initially hidden is particularly clever, incentivizing the player to engage with the level not just as a series of challenges but as a site of play. I don't know if using the sleep ability on this pool chair will get me anything, but rewarding that is within the game's vocabulary so I'll act out this cute little tableau just in case.

The boss design is also shockingly appealing, something I'm not sure I can say about any other Nintendo game I've ever played. I repeatedly went back to fight bosses just for the joy of trying to hone my skills, and the variety of different abilities and their evolution throughout the game ensured that I could try different approaches each time. They aren't FromSoft-level depth, but that's not a fair expectation--clearly there were at least some design notes taken there.

i cried in the ending i cried a lot i cried like a bitch i cried like a baby i cried so many tears i felt like i was gonna pop my eyes out and this is fairly due to the emotional story conclusion but also because kirby music always delivers a range of emotions that i cant even comprehend i swear i dont understand to this day how are the composers capable of inserting so many layers of feelings into the ost of a game like this . not saying that the kirby series doesnt deserve this level of professionality for the music composition department but bear in mind that this series is known for a pink ball protagonist who is always after some food and ends up on a journey defeating some kind of deity or biologically hazardous entity so if i were a new gamer i would expect it to have childish fanfares or cute little platform osts but this game presents a variety of musical compositions that you hardly find anywhere else in this videogame landscape and i cant get enough of kirby i really cant get enough of it

and also i know the composers do heavy drugs you cant just make some of the best music ever made and expect me to believe that you didnt use some sort of psychotropic substances to reach artistic enlightment you just cant change my mind

the game in itself is competent as fuck i loved every aspect of it but the main point is . when the waddle dees told me i could evolve my abilities i was in so much ecstasy i couldve dropped dead in that exact moment i always dreamed of this mechanic in a kirby game and when i saw it without notice i thought i was gonna pass out
really the fact that theres only 12 abilities (which in reality are 10 because one is sleep and the other is the bomb™) didnt really matter to me because i would be able to upgrade them to 2 different abilities so honestly i was having a fucking blast

waddle dee town is stellar theres so much stuff to do even finding waddle dees around the world was fun maybe ill even come back to this game and try to 100% it because its THAT fun
the level design is unmatched and entirely built around kirbys abilities and the art direction is groundbreaking i will dream about the little animation that plays when you enter a new world area for some time and the characters are cute and the lion is hot as fuck . umh who said that i meant the lion made me wet . no sorry i meant

meta knight is also hot and tempting and

THAT FUCKING FINAL BOSS FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK I GOT SHIVERS ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE FIGHT THE OST IS GLORIOUS

anyway this is a masterpiece of 3d platforming sorry

and to the haters: tell me another game where you defeat the final boss with a fucking truck . ill wait

Quite liked the latest joy-athon from the videogame industry's House of Mouse. Probably the most important distinction that wasn't hugely apparent to me in the leadup to Kirby Automata's release is that this game wouldn't take quite as many leaves out of Mario Odyssey's book as it would Super Mario 3D World. Not a problem to me, I personally (much) prefer the latter, and even think the bespoke isolated rollercoaster level format suits Kirby much better.

Where Forgotten Land falls short for me is that it really just doesn't do enough to prove that the additional control axis does a whole lot in Kirby's favor. While movement is a joy, as well as laying waste to flora and fauna while spewing bottomless bombs and flames, it all feels like a typical scrimblo affair - uncannily like Crash Bandicoot 3 at times specifically lol.
This game has 12 copy abilities. Twelve. If Kirby's Adventure on the NES has you beat by over double, you know something's up. The low ability count in turn means that there just isn't a whole lot of enemy variety, exemplified thru the fact that the game boasts a similar number of boss battles of varying size it spreads thinly across its many repeating arena sections. This also means that the environmental puzzles are hilariously rudimentary this time around too. The most you could expect your brain to be teased would be trying to find a Waddle Dee hidden in some offscreen obtuse nook, rather than needing to intuit the environment & scavenge the key ability needed. The abilities themselves are also stripped down to bare essentials too. Gone are the surprisingly complex input movelists of Triple Deluxe and Robobot; mastery of Forgotten Land comes from going to the town hub to menu-somely upgrade your copy abilities to objectively better versions with rather dull statistical upgrades.

Should stress that this is Fine. I don't exactly need Kirby games to be roving epicks of skill and wit, but Forgotten Land is sorely missing the subtle sleight of hand tricks I'd call a series mainstay. Even the title's proud Mouthful Mode gimmick is fully explored in the first world. The variety isn't present where it would be in prior Kirby games and it leaves many checkpoints feeling tiresome and rote.

Still, rly pretty and rly cute with gr8 musique. Not enough games let you breath life back into a devastated town.

The true final boss is fucking sick though. Maliketh, The Black Blade wishes it could.

I don’t know if there’s ever been a truly bad Kirby game; for a series that’s had a relatively consistent dev team cranking out at least one new, frequently full-sized game almost annually for precisely thirty years now, it’s kind of wild that the worst thing you ever hear about them is “this one is a little bit uninspired.” The fact that several of the most recent titles in the franchise are among its highest regarded is equally impressive considering how much the series has adhered to its roots for all this time. There’s generally a spin on the formula, some more transformative than others, but any given Kirby game is going to look and play more or less the same as any other Kirby game regardless of what year it came out and what console it’s on. It makes Kirby one of those series where these small iterative changes - in art style and control scheme, in which copy abilities are included, in which silo of level design is utilized this time – feel a lot more impactful than maybe they actually are in practice. But we all have our favorite little quirks of Kirby game design, even as from the outside they may, somewhat accurately, come off looking very similar. I’ve been going back and playing the very earliest Kirby games lately, most of them for the first time, and it’s solidified these opinions in my head. It’s a series that’s largely unchanging but that’s fine! It’s also largely excellent, obviously aesthetically but also in terms of play and design.

So it was hugely exciting but also maybe a little daunting when Kirby and the Forgotten Land was announced to be taking Kirby into the third dimension only twenty years later than most of their contemporaries. There had been stabs with perspective in Kirby 64 and the 3DS saw the bite-sized experiment in Kirby’s Blowout Blast, but this could have gone so disastrously wrong, right? Kirby’s formula is so tried and true at this point that translating that game feel into a whole other mode of play and getting it to feel as perfect as it does must have been a monumental challenge. But it DOES feel perfect. Kirby moves better than maybe they ever have, movement speed just as quick as you want (Kirby being too slow is a recurring problem in these games imo), wisely capping flight height from whatever ground you jump on, and my god MY GOD find the specific person on the dev team who first wrote “bayonetta witch time dodge roll” on the ideas whiteboard and give them a one million dollar bonus, it’s incredible, the perfect addition.

The game is surprisingly full featured, too. AAA games are a plague of resources at the best of times, and I don’t think anyone would have been surprised if this game had been stripped back in Da Big Transition as so many similar games were and are, even just between hardware generations. Forgotten Land, though, has a meaty campaign with varied extra mission objectives, plenty of side content, a pleasant suite of minigames, a boss rush, the kind of things you expect from the average mainline Kirby game. It’s gorgeous to look at too, surely to do in part with its adherence to fixed camera angles in its tightly authored levels, a wise choice that I would love to see implemented in more 3D platformers.

You CAN see the seams here and there; relatively few enemy types and bosses here in a way that starts to feel conspicuous given the variety of aesthetics in the levels even within the themes of the worlds. There are only twelve copy abilities here, something that I didn’t mind particularly as a lot of extra little functions get baked into a limited upgrade system that keeps several of them fresh throughout the game (some certainly more than others though, and idk that there is as much strategic value in choosing between old and new upgrade tiers as the game thinks there is), and you can definitely see that a few other things got foisted into the scripted Mouthful Mode bits, but for what it’s worth those are varied enough that I never got tired of them and oftentimes they offer enough of a little puzzle or challenge as to be a welcome break in the normal flow of a level. Most of the time when there is an obvious compromise in this game it feels like there’s been a smart way to paper over that potential weakness with clever design.

That’s ultimately Forgotten Land’s greatest strength – even though it reveals most of the tricks in its bag relatively early on in the experience, it consistently finds ways to remix its toolset in ways that feel, if not FRESH throughout the entire game, then never unclever and always fun. There are secrets and optional challenges that I think actually do offer a challenge if you want that (something Kirby has struggled to provide even in moments where it has tried to), but no requirements are so strict as to gate any content in the game; it’s as breezy or stiff as you want it to be and makes for the most balanced difficulty experience a Kirby game has offered. That’s the word that defines the experience: balanced. The highs are high, and what lows are here are also, it turns out, pretty high. I don’t think we could have asked for any better, honestly.

And here we are! You’d think that they’d been been making 3D Kirbys all along. I came because I wanted something easygoing to relax with, and I stayed because someone at HAL clearly played Bayonetta during the making of this. With any luck, Forgotten Land’ll be looked to in the future as a chief example of how to slap an extra dimension onto your series, but it’s got more going for it than even that. Stuff like its bosses, music and level design are all superb from top to bottom and rightfully getting a lot of attention, but it also has lots of surprisingly understated strengths which deserve more.

One of these is the camera. I can’t imagine it being implemented any way other than the way it is, and not just because things like finding optional Dees or challenge rooms through side alleys and hiding enemies or collectibles behind certain objects would be totally trivialised if you could fully control it. It’s hard to describe how much having a fixed camera adds to Forgotten Land’s setting and art direction. Can you imagine how utterly deflated moments like the start of Alivel Mall or Battle for Blizzard Bridge would be if the devs had just thoughtlessly gone with the standard for 3D games and had it statically rest a few metres behind Kirby’s back at all times, letting you point it in any direction? The sense of scale wouldn’t be anywhere near as striking. It transforms the setting from what could’ve just been a surface level novelty in the hands of lesser devs into something that’s so absorbing at times I’d go as far as to call it a selling point.

And on the setting, the way Forgotten Land contextualises stuff into its world is the type of thing you never realised how much you wanted from a Nintendo platformer until you’re given it. I’ve always thought highly of Mario 3D World, but after Forgotten Land, I can’t help but think about how much it might’ve benefitted from making its levels feel like actual places rather than interchangeable floating blocks in the sky. Waddle Dee Town’s the obvious star of the show in this regard, and far more than just a glorified menu. It physically and visually changing over the course of the story makes it feel more like an adventure with a tangible sense of progress, and that’s without going into the charm of the Dees themselves. I would never bother rewatching cutscenes from some boring menu, but the novelty of going to a cinema and waving at my fellow blob-like cinephiles has led me to do it more than a couple of times in Forgotten Land. And the band you unlock after a while is fantastic. Did you notice that the Dees don’t play certain instruments at parts of a song which don’t feature them, or that the notes coming out of their instruments are different colours depending on who composed the song? Greatest sound test mode of all time, by far.

Forgotten Land’s movement seems basic on the surface, but thanks to abilities it has more to play around with than it’s being given credit for. Drill gives you what’s basically an air dash, Ranger lets you hover a bit without using up Kirby’s float, Needle gives you an initial speed boost, etc. But even if it didn’t have nuances like these, that wouldn’t be a knock against it – it’s not uncommon to see Rayman 2 brought up in the conversation of the best ever 3D platformers (rightly so), and it hasn’t much more to its name in this respect than his trademark hovering. That’s because its obstacles are packed together so densely that you’re never really crying out for a long jump or a slide or whatever else. Forgotten Land’s the same, except abilities are multifaceted enough that you have more wiggle room for player expression regardless. You’re not gonna be hitting those target times in Treasure Road without some tricks, kiddos.

Looking at Forgotten Land’s abilities in terms of how few there are also seems myopic considering how smartly they’re implemented. Yeah, there are “only twelve,” but those twelve each cover a bunch of niches that used to be spread across multiple abilities. Is Wheel really needed when Forgotten Land’s version of Needle does everything it did and more? Would Stone be much use when Mouthful Mode’s cone is basically that already, except it doesn't take away whatever ability you have equipped? The variety of older Kirby games is all here, it’s just been achieved with less. Chuck in all the different ability variants (which wisely aren’t just straight upgrades and have pretty distinct purposes) and you’ve got a formula that not only stays fresh throughout the whole game, but which also gives you even more reasons to revisit the top notch bosses and experiment with the sandbox of tools on offer. Fighting Meta Knight in 3D is everything I dreamed it would be as a kid, and he as well as others get even better in the post-game.

Part of me wondered if I’d put too much thought into all this, but Kirby shouldn’t be held to a lower standard just because of his target audience. As the excellent C.S. Lewis would say, “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children isn’t a good children’s story in the slightest.” The quality of and care that’s gone into Forgotten Land’s obvious, no matter who you are or what you look for in games. In the best way possible, it really does have something for everyone, except maybe if you’re a conspicuously absent Waddle Doo.

Hey, Kirby... thanks for everything.

(5-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

I want it to be the same as (brother)'s review.

WADDLE YOUR DEES AND DEE YOUR WADDLES AND DO YOUR WADDLES AND [uncontrollable laughter] POOP YOUR WADDLES

(8-year-old's review, typed by his dad)

WADDLE DEES ARE CUTE!!

WADDLE YOUR DEES AND DEE YOUR WADDLES!!!

KIRBY! I vibed with this game a lot. Playing this was a very relaxing experience all in all. I found myself playing in hour or so sessions and I was able to beat it in a little over a week. I loved all the enemies and all of the game mechanics. The trippy final fight was one of my favorite things I've ever experienced (Probably because I was high but that's besides the point). I am definitely going back to play this some more and get all the collectables if possible. It was a great length if you are looking for a shorter game to play. Over all, I really enjoyed this game and I'm so glad I got to play it.

Unlike the earlier big Nintendo release of Legends Arceus this year (which left me somewhat disappointed), I could tell Kirby and the Forgotten Land has the sauce. 10 minutes in, Kirby was back, and still had all the charm of the old games while taking a grand step forward.

Kirby translating from the 2D/2.5D platformer to a straight 3D platformer seems almost effortless. It's still Kirby at its core; you go around sucking up things to gain copy abilities to become this super powered puff ball of destruction. To add on to this, in this strange forgotten land riddled with the vestiges of widespread commercialism and consumerism, Kirby can interact with foreign artifacts such as cars and traffic cones to essentially embody their structure in what is called "Mouthful Mode," and use these artifacts as analogous to vehicles in other 3D platformers. It's a really nice way of breaking up the pace of the standard gameplay to introduce some quirky and silly mechanisms inbetween. And of course, as par for the course, there are also a lot of collectibles you'll want to snag, namely your captured buddies the Waddle Dees, as they'll expand your home base and give you more things to mess around with. Some of those improvements are great (a fishing minigame? Sign me up no questions asked) but other improvements are more questionable (a golden statue for all the Waddle Dees? Really?). Most are hidden not so discreetly and you'll find them just by peeking around the screen, and that's fine, it's Kirby. The more annoying ones are hidden objectives such as "don't take damage during this fight" or "defeat this boss with this specific ability," and cost me a lot of time; I wish those objectives were just disclosed earlier so I wouldn't have to restart the entire level. Some parts of levels (particularly some Mouthful Mode sections) can be restarted with a blue warp star, and I appreciate that; just wish that was more present on some of the missable objectives.

Atmosphere's always a big part of Kirby games, and that's captured pretty well here as well. You've got this abandoned, rustic world that Kirby and his friends have been marooned upon, and it's up to you and Bandanna Dee to navigate the horrors of shopping malls and Indy 500 racetracks to make it back to Pop Star! Forgotten Land manages to introduce nostalgia through a wild and once populated universe that's somehow even more lively yet more dangerous than before, but still has that classic Kirby cutesy charm thanks to the absolute joy of wandering around the vibrantly colored world around you with Kirby's various antics. I'm not expecting Nier Automata levels of devastation here, so I'm glad that Kirby knows when to hold back and still approaches everything while leaving a big dumb smile on your face.

I'm quite a fan of how the boss battles play out too. Introducing the 3rd dimension into Kirby gives you a lot more freedom on how to approach boss battles, and in particular, legitimizes and strengthens the classic bait and punish model, just with more directions on how to bait and punish. This is further emphasized because there's actually a nice dodge-roll mechanic; dodge-roll at the perfect time when your enemy is attacking, and time slows down temporarily for your foe, giving you a lot of time to reposition and inflict a ton of damage upon the boss. Sure, it's nothing ground-breaking in the realm of 3D action adventure, but it's a very welcome addition to Kirby games, and it definitely feels very satisfying and rewarding pulling it off.

Now having said all that, there are some very obvious areas for improvement. Firstly, I'm automatically taking off a star for being locked at 30 FPS over 60 FPS. Yes, I get it, people would prefer to play stable 30 FPS over unstable 60 FPS with dips, but this is 2022 goddamn it and we have the technology, I have to draw the line at some point. Game feel is really dependent upon how smoothly a game plays out, and frame rate is a huge part of that. Kirby's platforming (especially in 3D) would feel so much more satisfying at a higher frame rate, and it's even more important in boss fights, when perfect dodge rolling earns you so much leeway and you'll need all the frames you can get to react and exploit that defensive option. That's not even mentioning that the game will inevitably tank its frame rate when tons of foilage and background backdrop objects have to be rendered in frame or there's tons of action on screen, even though it's still locked at 30 FPS. I'd be perfectly okay taking a resolution downgrade option (or less intensive graphical fidelity) for a higher frame rate, similar to how a lot of PS4/PS5 games handle this.

And secondly, I agree with a lot of earlier reviews (particularly BeachEpisode's review) that as solid as the transition from 2D to 3D has been for Kirby, Forgotten Land feels a bit... rudimentary at times. Environmental puzzles aren't very complex, because you've only got 12 copy abilities to deal with (and that includes Sleep, the joke ability). I appreciate being able to upgrade their forms and power with Rare Stones, but it's still a noticeable downgrade from the complex movesets present in Kirby's Return to Dreamland, Planet Robobot, and other past Kirby games. Not that there's anything too horrible with spamming one or two of the same attacks from copy abilities, but more depth is always appreciated when it's just fun abusing all the options at your disposal. As a result, some of the levels in later worlds can drag on a little bit when you get a bit tired of using the same attacks and solving the same puzzles over and over. There's only so much they can do with what's available to them in the game, and it's not particularly difficult finding the hidden collectibles and devices needed to free your buddies and gain more scrolls.

At any rate, Kirby and the Forgotten Land was a chill time. I played this to forget about life for a while and play as the ever lovable big eyed big mouth puffball, and more or less got what I wanted; it's a very pretty and well animated game (I'm looking at you, Legends Arceus...) with a relaxing soundtrack and engaging boss battles. I'm looking forward to HAL innovating upon the tech demo that they've put down here; here's to a bright future for an old childhood franchise.

If you had told me earlier this year, or anytime in the last few years for that matter, that I'd have a Kirby game in my top 10, let alone my top 5, I would laugh at your face and go back to gawking at Super Mario Galaxy. So, what happened here? How can a game from a franchise that has eluded my admiration for many years suddenly come out with a new entry that surpasses Galaxy as the king of 3D platformers?

To understand this, let's talk a bit about Mario Odyssey. Easily one of my most anticipated games when it was announced, and the main reason I wanted a Switch (not including BOTW since I could play it on my Wii U if I wanted to). While it ended up being a good game, it was ultimately a disappointment for me and a far cry from what I expected of it. This can be attributed to my general distaste for open world/sandbox games. When it comes to platformers, I prefer more traditional "reach the goal" level design. Ultimately, Odyssey kind of left a void in the Switch's exclusive library for me, where I was craving a great AAA 3D platformer, but there was none. And then came Forgotten Land...

I was very hesitant to even get this game because of how lukewarm I've been on the franchise up to this point. Sure, Robobot was pretty good, but seeing as it seemed to be a fan favorite, I was doubtful that Forgotten Land could barely be as good, let alone exceed it, especially since this was Kirby's first 3D outing. This was something that hadn't been done before, but all the good reviews + my friend's insistence finally got me to budge. I had no idea I would end up loving it as much as I did.

First of all, the presentation. It's a gorgeous game, even with the Switch's limitations. The world is vibrant and super charming, and despite its often-formulaic environmental design (you got your desert levels, ice levels, etc), they're still brimming with enough creativity to make it feel fresh. This extends beyond just the art direction and includes level and boss design, as well. They're fun! I could have done without the recycled mini bosses at times, but no biggie.

Kirby feels right at home in 3D, and if I had no prior knowledge, it would be hard to believe that this is the first 3D Kirby game. You still jump, float, suck, and transform with fun abilities. I especially love the new gimmick of Kirby sucking up objects to traverse terrain and/or access secret areas. I know people love to meme about "Car Kirby," but it is genuinely so much fun driving around as a car despite only being able to in short bursts on rare occasions.

For each land, you need to save an X number of Waddle-Dees to unlock the boss at the end of it. But each level has its fair share of bonus objectives that grant you more Waddle-Dees. The general short length of the levels makes it so that it's not at all tedious to go back and replay them for the sake of finding secrets and completing optional objectives you may have missed. There's also optional timed challenges scattered around the overworld that grants you "rare stones" which allow you to upgrade your abilities. And here lies the reason I prefer this game over Galaxy. The fact that I actually want to go for 100% in this game, and even beating the target times in these challenges (which do not count for 100%), says a lot. I'm not usually a completionist, even for games I really like, unless actual achievements/trophies are concerned.

Heck, as of writing this review, I still have a lengthy post-game to go through with tougher challenges, but I'm already looking forward to it. If it wasn't for Elden Ring releasing this year as well, then Kirby would have certainly taken the spot for my GOTY. It may not be as mind-bending as Galaxy, but all a platformer really needs to be for me is fun, and this game has it in spades.

never thought i'd see a Kirby game that surpasses both Kirby 64 and SuperStar Ultra yet this game manages to do it

its so fun man the levels are so big and fun to explore and every boss fight is amazing

just fucking play it

When it is tasked upon me, Mario 64-like, to collect adorable waddle dees to make a whole bustling town of waddle dees:

“Oh no, not my waddle dees! Not my sweet little waddle dees! Don’t you lay a finger on my dees, don’t you harm a hair on their precious heads! Don’t worry dees, I’m coming to the rescue! There is no journey too far, no mountain high enough or river etc, that will stop me from bringing you all back to safety, every last one of you!”

when one of the conditions for rescuing one of those waddle dees involves beating an enemy without taking damage:

“Eesh, ah… yeah, just sit tight for a while there and ah… I’m on my way, I just gotta… figure out how to ah… well, one way or another I’ll um, maybe after a couple stages or something I’ll get around to it. Don’t worry, I’m coming…”

when one of the conditions for rescuing a waddle Dee is participating in a nonsense-car timed race with unintuitive controls:

“Fuck you, ya little fuckin asshole, I hope you rot in that cage forever”