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.