Kirby and the For­got­ten Is­land

MISHAWAKA – A new Kirby game has been re­vealed by Nin­tendo, and it is the tit­u­lar pink puff­bal­l’s first three-di­men­sional out­ing in quite some time.

It has been a few months since Kirby the For­got­ten Land was re­vealed, but I was busy eat­ing hol­i­day-themed car­bo­hy­drates and fur­ther dam­ag­ing my sleep sched­ule to put pen to pa­per, or fin­gers to key­board in this case. How­ever, this new game comes al­most four years af­ter its pre­de­ces­sor, Kirby Star Al­lies: a Switch ti­tle re­leas­ing to mid­dling re­views with many play­ers cit­ing its dis­ap­point­ing length as one of the main let­downs, and I found the game to be quite unin­spired. Star Al­lies was stan­dard fare for a Kirby game: walk from left to right, hop­ping or in­hal­ing en­e­mies to gain their abil­i­ties to make it through lev­els, and ul­ti­mately fix what­ever mi­nor in­con­ve­nience that ex­ploded into a galac­tic-level ex­tinc­tion event. 

We are not here to talk about the de­cid­edly av­er­age Star Al­lies, how­ever. The For­got­ten Land has one big perk that el­e­vates it above Star Al­lies, and most other Kirby games: the third di­men­sion. This is the first main­line 3D Kirby game, mean­ing play­ers will get to ex­pe­ri­ence Kir­by’s cutesy, love­able, and friend-shaped-form in a hereto­fore un­used spa­tial per­spec­tive. For peo­ple who want to do more than be filled with hap­pi­ness, warmth, and ado­ra­tion that sim­ply glanc­ing at Kirby will in­duce, there is the mat­ter of the ac­tual game.

De­tails on the plot of the game are sparse, as it has a while be­fore it is of­fi­cially re­leased on March 25. As near as I can fig­ure, how­ever, Kirby washes up on the shore of a mys­te­ri­ous is­land that holds an aban­doned and over­grown city in search of kid­napped Wad­dle Dee’s, lit­tle fel­las sim­i­lar to Kirby in stature and adora­bil­ity, but less pink. The city, and in­deed the rest of the is­land seems to hold the rem­nants of a long-dead civ­i­liza­tion. The ar­chi­tec­ture matches a mod­ern-day, real-world city, but it is clear from var­i­ous ad­ver­tise­ments scat­tered around aban­doned trans­porta­tion hubs and the small res­i­dences that its main in­hab­i­tants were likely older Wad­dle Dee ad­ja­cents. 

The game­play does not seem to change all too much, save for what a move from 2D to 3D plat­form­ing would ne­ces­si­tate: boss fights, tra­ver­sal, puz­zles, and col­lect­ing will now oc­cupy the most cov­eted di­men­sion. How­ever, judg­ing by some of the side ac­tiv­i­ties and points of in­ter­est, The For­got­ten Is­land seems to of­fer more than just a lin­ear and brief story: fish­ing, NPC di­a­logue, dif­fer­ent types of col­lectibles, and what ap­peared to be a bounty sys­tem might flesh out the ex­pe­ri­ence.

Nin­tendo seems to be on a trend lately of giv­ing their most beloved fran­chises mod­ern makeovers; games that re­tain the nos­tal­gic and en­joy­able core but in­cor­po­rate mod­ern me­chan­ics and ameni­ties that bring back old play­ers and en­tice new ones si­mul­ta­ne­ously. Su­per Mario Odyssey and The Leg­end of Zelda: Breath of The Wild started this trend back in 2017, and Metroid: Dread fol­lowed in their foot­steps in 2021. The Japan­ese com­pany seems in­tent on mak­ing se­ries re-defin­ing games for some of their biggest sell­ers, and while Kirby Star Al­lies did not fol­low this trend, I think they might have suc­ceeded in cat­a­pult­ing Kirby back into con­tention with the other ti­tans thanks to The For­got­ten Is­land.