I don’t have much of a history with Kirby. As far as this series is concerned, I grew up only playing Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, which I thought was a pretty fantastic game. Since then, I’ve gotten the chance to play a little bit of other Kirby games, but I’ve always compared them to The Crystal Shards and held that up, in my mind, as the ideal Kirby game. It had amazing music, a fun little item collection screen after finishing a stage, awesome mixed abilities, multiplayer minigames, and overall was just a wonderful game. However, this new upcoming title, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, seems to finally be doing something different and isn’t quite the same old Kirby. After seeing trailers for it I was pretty interested, so obviously I had to try it out once Nintendo released this demo.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land has seemingly been advertised as a new, full 3D world game. By that I mean it’s not the typical title where you travel as Kirby in purely a sidescrolling fashion. The demo seems to support the comparison people have been making between it and Mario Odyssey. It’s not one fully connected world – you have your separate stages (at least that’s what the demo has shown) – but they do look more substantial than prior series entries, and you’re able to explore more fully and even move the camera around a bit.
I had a good time with this short, yet charming demo. You get to play through three different stages and try out some of the new features. First is the ability to suck up big objects and control them, such as a car or a vending machine. Speeding through enemies, as well as shooting soda cans at them, is quite enjoyable. You’ll also be introduced to the basis of this entry’s story, which involves saving all the captured Waddle Dees. Not only that, but the stages have a variety of goals you can complete, beyond just getting to the end. One of my most favorite new things, though, definitely has to be the gacha collectables. You’ll run into little gacha capsules in some stages, which at the end of the stage you get to open and see what you got. Each gacha figure contains various info about it too. Also, the demo provides you the option of checking out the two player co-op, though I wasn’t able to test that for myself.
I don’t have any major complaints about Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I do have one worry, though, and one minor complaint. My worry is that despite how fun and charming this game is so far, it may be as disappointingly short as Kirby Star Allies was. And my one complaint is that I didn’t see a volume sliders option. The sound effects were just a smidge too quiet for me; I hope the full release contains at least a BGM and SE slider to balance those out. Nonetheless, the settings menu seemed to be substantial other than that one missing part. Nintendo added both the option to choose between a few different control schemes and normal and easy difficulties to pick from – although the “Wild Mode” difficulty wasn’t hard at all, which honestly I think is normal with the series nowadays. But bosses do feel like they’ll take some effort at least, even if the overall stages are easy.
In the end, Kirby and the Forgotten Land still appears to be as fun and charming as it looked in the trailers. I hope the overall game is more substantial than the last title, but either way, it looks like it’ll be a carefree and fun game to sit down with. If you’re a fan of Nintendo games and haven’t checked out the free demo yet, you definitely should.
