Kirby and the For­got­ten Land Re­view

MISHAWAKA – Kirby and the For­got­ten Land has re­leased this past week, and as a Day 1 owner of it, I am weigh­ing in on its qual­ity.

So, the first thing I no­ticed about Kirby and the For­got­ten Land was how quickly it in­stalled on my Switch; I popped in the car­tridge, and it was im­me­di­ately playable – no up­dates, no patches, just me and Kirby. For the record, even my fa­vorite Switch game, Smash Ul­ti­mate had a ten-minute, day-one up­date, so in the three years since that game came out, Nin­tendo clearly stepped its games up. 

The sec­ond thing I no­ticed about the game is that it looks beau­ti­ful; plenty of pre­vi­ous Kirby games have had styl­ized graph­ics, like Epic Yarn’s crafted, hand-knit aes­thetic, Rain­bow Curse’s clay vi­su­als, and Mass At­tack’s fre­netic an­i­ma­tion, but this new en­try is the first time that Kirby has been walk­ing through 3D en­vi­ron­ments with real-world el­e­ments, like sky­scrap­ers, high­ways, and cars. See­ing lit­tle 0’8” Kirby next to a met­ro­pol­i­tan high-rise is not only re­fresh­ingly dis­ori­en­tat­ing, but im­mensely en­ter­tain­ing. 

Not only level de­sign, but lit­tle me­chan­i­cal de­tails, like foot­prints in the sand for the desert and beach en­vi­ron­ments, mossy and cracked con­crete in city ar­eas, and Kirby get­ting a damp and glossy sheen af­ter he takes a dip in the game’s var­i­ous oceans, rivers, and lakes. Even the hairs on the most ba­sic en­e­mies are metic­u­lously ren­dered and re­act to the hur­ri­cane-force winds Kirby em­ploys for his sig­na­ture in­hale tech­nique. I will also take this time to re­mind you that the “ba­sic en­e­mies” are just cute, furry, or­ange wolves that are no big­ger than Kirby, him­self. I gen­uinely feel guilty every time I start in­hal­ing them or hit­ting them with what­ever power I am cur­rently us­ing.

My ini­tial as­sess­ment of the game’s plot was fairly close for as lit­tle de­tail as I was given. In­stead of sim­ply wash­ing up on the shore of a sin­gle is­land, Kirby gets sucked into a rift in the sky of his home planet Pop­star into a dif­fer­ent world. The first se­ries of lev­els do take place in that same city area that I men­tioned, but the game con­tin­ues quite a ways af­ter that. I can­not speak to much of it, though; I am only an hour into the game for what my sched­ule has al­lowed, but it seems like a good deal of it will be spent re­cov­er­ing the miss­ing Wad­dle Dee’s and help­ing them re­build their ad hoc set­tle­ment. 

The newest bit of The For­got­ten Land is Kir­by’s “mouth­ful” abil­ity. In pre­vi­ous Kirby canon, it has been es­tab­lished that the in­side of our lovely lit­tle pink friend is an en­tirely sep­a­rate di­men­sion, which Kirby can ac­cess at will, al­low­ing him to in­hale en­e­mies and “copy” their abil­i­ties when they are in that di­men­sion. He can spit back out or copy any­thing he in­hales, but that was the ex­tent of his mys­te­ri­ous maw. Now, it seems that Kirby can keep what­ever he in­hales in the front of his mouth, which is to say, “in this di­men­sion.” The up­shot of this is Kirby can keep a car in his mouth with the wheels pok­ing out, form around a vend­ing ma­chine but keep the dis­pen­sary slot open, and/​or swal­low a traf­fic cone to turn into a sen­tient sta­lac­tite. There are many more “mouth­ful” abil­i­ties to uti­lize over the course of the game, and I can­not wait to find them and be mod­er­ately un­nerved by their im­pli­ca­tions for Kir­by’s anatomy.

So, as far as pre­lim­i­nary as­sess­ments go, I am hav­ing an ab­solute ball with Kirby and The For­got­ten Land, and I ab­solutely rec­om­mend it to any­one with a Switch look­ing for a cheery and charm­ing sin­gle-player ex­pe­ri­ence. For those in­ter­ested, there are re­tail­ers of­fer­ing com­pli­men­tary Kirby pouches along­side the pur­chase of the game in-store, so there is no bet­ter time to buy it, be­cause the Lord knows that Nin­ten­do’s first-party games will stay at a cool $60 un­til the heat death of the uni­verse.