It’s crazy to me that such a long-running Nintendo franchise survived the N64, Gamecube, and Wii eras without once getting a single mainline title in 3D. It’s not as if Kirby was dormant as Nintendo series often are, either: the franchise actually boasts a pretty consistent track record when it comes to mainline releases, not to mention a seemingly never-ending onslaught of spin-offs and side games.
Pretty much every popular Nintendo franchise had gotten their 3D coming-of-age, so it felt as if HAL Laboratory had chosen to keep Kirby 2D; opting instead to experiment with Kirby in seemingly every other way than adding another plane for Kirby to move around in.
So when they finally announced that they were making Kirby and the Forgotten Land, the first mainline title in true 3D, I thought it was a sign that the company had figured something out, whatever it was that had prevented them from making this game for the past 20 years. The prospect was exciting, but I was equally worried; It wasn’t hard to imagine the game falling victim to the growing pains that seem inherent in the jump to three dimensions. The game looked new enough that I wasn’t worried it would be awful, though I did wonder how long it would take for Kirby to hit his stride in the new style.(This review contains spoilers for the entirety of Kirby and the Forgotten Land.)
Admittedly, I totally undersold HAL – I expected that Forgotten Land wouldn’t quite reach the heights of the best 2D entries, earn a bit higher than the passing grade it was aiming for and serve as a solid foundation for the next title in a year or two, the Switch’s Triple Deluxe while we wait for the flashier Planet Robobot.
Instead, Kirby and the Forgotten Land comes out swinging. The game feels like a culmination of a decade of 3D Kirbys; its handle over the new formula is so impressive that it’s hard to believe that it’s the first game of it’s kind. The time this game spent in the oven was well worth the wait, managing to make Kirby feel refreshingly new without any compromises. There are no hiccups, no low points, no speed bumps, just a consistently wonderful game from start to triumphant finish.
The biggest compliment I can pay to Forgotten Land is that in the 25 hours I spent playing, I was always thinking “I hope this game doesn’t end soon”, and it never did. Flow is the key word here: the pacing in Kirby is so strong that even though I replayed levels multiple times over to nab all the collectibles, or sometimes spent an hour restarting challenge rooms to hit the target times, I never felt like the game suffered from tedium or any challenge overstayed its welcome.
Part of the reason I could never put the game down was because the basic act of moving was satisfying all on it’s own. It’s truly a delight to move around as Kirby in a 3D space, and his moveset feels perfectly translated from previous games. It comes as no surprise that a considerable amount of development time was spent making sure that the simple act of moving and attacking with Kirby looks and feels just right. The developers go at length in interviews about placing visual responsiveness over realism when it comes to the way Kirby tears through enemies and levels.
Moving on to the levels themselves, Forgotten Land chooses to faithfully adopt the linear design of previous entries rather than the more open playgrounds found in it’s platformer contemporaries. This, I believe, is for the best. The end result is a graceful modernization of the classic style without any of the hiccups that would come with drastically overhauling what Kirby is and making it into something that it isn’t. The game feels new enough on it’s own merit to justify sticking with what works, although not without a few important tweaks to the structure presented in previous games.
I think the biggest question that would come up when trying to design a level around Kirby is “how do you force a player to interact with the world in any meaningful way?”
This was easy when Kirby was limited to four basic directions and level geometry could easily be manipulated to control the reachable play area, but try any of the same tricks in three dimensions, and suddenly the game is uncomfortable and claustrophobic.
Forgotten Land’s solution is pretty smart, actually: the game’s main collectible, hidden Waddle Dees, are tied to a variety of tasks in every level, ranging from finding hidden areas or defeating an enemy with a certain copy ability.
Collecting the captured Waddle Dees are tied to both story progression and rebuilding Waddle Dee Town for more facilities and minigames. Neither of these are exactly new to Kirby, he’s been collecting hidden doodads to unlock doors for years, but the part that makes this scavenger hunt smart design is how the tasks in every level are a) entirely hidden on the first run of a level and b) don’t repeat often, if ever.
An example: The game loves to gift healing items liberally; they are usually never needed (even on the harder difficulty) and very easily ignored. However, make a level’s secret task “Eat 3 different types of ice cream”, and you’ve suddenly given reason for a player to seek out healing items in not only that level, but in every level moving forward. You begin to wonder what will get you a Waddle Dee, and what won't, and because you can never know what won't, you just start doing everything. Often times I’d be absolutely sure that making it through a certain area without taking damage or finding a hidden room would reveal to me a level’s hidden task, only for me to leave with a figure (a worthwhile, but still less rewarding collectible) instead.
The further the game went on, the larger the mental list of tasks I had completed in other levels became, and the more the game forced me to play in the way that it wanted me to. Even simple, straight hallways became the subject of my scrutiny as I tried to find what task the room was hiding from me. I would meticulously grab every health item, knock down every barricade, and kill every enemy, more often than not for no reward at all – but it’s the few times I did get a reward that were always fresh on my mind and kept me exploring.
Even paying careful attention to my surroundings in every level, I would always find myself missing one or two Waddle Dees upon completion. Although getting all 300 Waddle Dees wasn’t required for me to beat the game nor unlock every single building in town, I found that it was so fun seeking them that I would jump right back into a level as soon as I beat it in order to fill in the gaps in my collection.
And it was then I realized the true beauty of Forgotten Land’s approach to level design: the hidden Waddle Dees force you to interact with the various side paths and challenges within a level, but once you return, you realize that the levels have been laid out for you to be able to run through them quickly, as long as you ignore the side paths you were incentivized to explore on your previous visit.
The game reveals one hidden objective every time you beat a stage without finding one, and the list is organized chronologically so you know about where in the level you should be looking harder. If you’ve already completed the first few objectives on the list, you can skip to the later rooms without worrying about missing out.
With the game providing a clear goal every time you step back into a level, alongside streamlining the backtracking process through smart stage design, what was originally a five to seven minute romp can be completed in two. It’s fun tearing through a level as fast as you can while trying to think where you could have missed something. Not-so-coincidentally, learning how to speed through a level with the help of different copy abilities turns out to be great training for Treasure Road, a different set of challenges found on the world map.
Treasure Road is a series of challenge rooms that you unlock either through exploration of the world map or saving a certain number of Waddle Dees in every level. These challenge rooms teach you new things about each copy ability (which is a solution to an artificially created problem since they no longer have tutorials on the pause menu, grumble, grumble…) and then force you to master these techniques by placing you under a strict time limit.
You’ll never find yourself having too much trouble if you only plan on completing them within the allocated time, but trying to get the bonus rewards from completing it in what is usually half that time or less can be pretty difficult. Since you are permanently committed to a set ability in Treasure Road, each level is designed around entirely around testing the strengths of Kirby in that form, whether that be in movement, combat, or puzzle-solving. A lot of the fun I had in this game was trying to optimize my times on Treasure Road in order to clear those bonus times.
Completing a Treasure Road room for the first time gives you a Rare Stone, which provided you have a weapon blueprint (another reason to plunder every corner of every level), allows you to upgrade Kirby’s main arsenal, his copy abilities.
Let’s talk about those copy abilities! Kirby and the Forgotten Land has 11 fun copy abilities and also Ice Kirby.
Like Kirby’s vanilla moveset, many of the returning abilities feel like faithful recreations of these abilities in previous titles. However, extra care was put into making sure every power-up feels good in motion. Needle, an ability that could only attack by standing completely still in the 2D games, is given new life as a Katamari-like ball that can pick up enemies and throw them in any direction. As Bomb Kirby, you can bowl down enemies on slopes, and Tornado Kirby sends Kirby flying through every stage at high speeds. The new abilities, Drill and Ranger, follow the same design principle: Ranger Kirby will automatically aim towards enemies that are even vaguely within his line of sight while moving, and Drill Kirby gets an air dash that transitions into it’s tunneling form.
Unfortunately, the straight-line-attack abilities, Fire, Ice, and Cutter, really suffer from faithful adaptations of their 2D iterations. These abilities slow or completely stop all momentum in a game where you and your enemies are constantly moving, and they feel awkward and clunky as a result. Their base forms are probably the weakest out of any of Forgotten Land’s copy abilities and feel like they should have gotten a major redesign like Needle.
Luckily, their evolved forms address these problems somewhat: Volcano Fire and Dragon Fire give Fire Kirby more range and control, and Chakram Cutter and Buzzsaw Cutter extend the area of effect of the small projectile and gives it more versatility.
The concept of evolving copy abilities as a whole I feel was handled exceptionally well; I was very pleased to find out that evolved copy abilities are not necessarily straight power increases as you move from 2nd to 3rd stage evolutions, rather every evolution iterates on the original moveset, adding or changing different properties.
For example, the 3rd sword evolution, the Meta Knight sword, has lower range but swift strikes, along with the ability to shoot beams at full health. It’s entirely different from the 2nd sword evolution, the Gigant Sword, which has long range and slower strikes, along with a guard that makes Kirby entirely invulnerable when using it. There’s pros and cons to using both, and I found myself switching depending on certain situations the deeper I got into the game.
The philosophy behind the evolved forms seems to be delivering a different style of play instead of outright replacement, demonstrated by the option to choose between any of your available evolutions whenever you swallow an enemy. It helps to cover for the fact that the game only has 12 copy abilities as opposed to, say, Star Allies’ 29. The designers are really inviting the player to experiment, in hopes that they’ll find new favorites in copy abilities that they usually ignore.
(Though it seems that Ice Kirby skipped this part of development, managing to have three forms that play nearly identical to each other, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that base Ice Kirby is not even fun to begin with. Oh well.)
Alongside Treasure Road, this is one of the best new additions to Kirby and I sincerely hope that it is here to stay. The gameplay loop of learning, mastering, evolving, and then learning even more copy abilities make Kirby’s usual arsenal feel progressively more powerful the further you get into the game.
Again, it’s all about flow: All of that I’ve mentioned so far is how the video game tricks you into playing more video game, and when moment-to-moment gameplay feels like a reward in and of itself, Forgotten Land is really good at making hours pass in the blink of an eye.
It’s honestly impressive just how much of this smart design feels completely invisible, and that’s because Forgotten Land’s game feel plays second fiddle to the game’s absolutely phenomenal presentation.
The setting is obviously the most important, seeing as it’s prominently featured in the title. Exploring the ‘Forgotten Land’ is the hook of this game, and I think they give it as much attention as it needs such that it doesn’t feel like a gimmick.
It’s almost poetic that Kirby’s latest and radically new adventure takes place in a world that’s very familiar to all of us, with the new world (They never give it a proper name and it’s driving me crazy because I have to refer to it all the time in this section. My friend has just suggested I refer to it as “Planet Doowa” as per the vocal track, so that’s how I’m going to call it now) being analogous to Earth.
Okay, first things first: I would be lying if I said that the game is free from traditional platformer world archetypes. However, I think it does manage to sidestep the pitfall of generic-ness by smartly working the backdrop of Planet Doowa into each level. Yes, there is a grassland, a beach area, and a volcano, though there’s a secondary theme that runs across every world that ties into the civilization that once inhabited those areas. Natural Plains was once a metropolis, Everbay Coast was the next city under construction, Winter Horns was an older settlement that was still renovated with modern amenities, Originull Wasteland was a dried up sea turned miner town, and the Redgar Forbidden Wastes was an industrial district. Wondaria is the only world that doesn’t fall under a generic platformer world theme, being an abandoned amusement park. This not only makes each world stand out, but aligns the levels within each world under that theme.
So Natural Plains is a grassy metropolis, but that means you might drive around the city streets in one level, go to a shopping mall in another, and through an underground tunnel in the next. Levels aren’t vague approximations that are terraformed to match the aesthetic on the world map, but places that could feasibly exist within that area.
It feels as if they designed the stages as a location first, then the level-specific mechanics within, instead of the other way around. I’m not saying that it’s how it was actually done, but rather the game does a better job at masking a “function-follows-form” design philosophy than other games. It’s like comparing the Comet Observatory and Starship Mario in the Mario Galaxy games – they both fulfill the same purpose, except one feels like a real place, while the other feels like a bonafide video game hub world. (And that’s okay for Starship Mario, but I digress.)
Every level comes with both a title and accompanying track (and we’ll talk about that soundtrack in a second), turning each level into a little story. They might seem like small details, but it made them all the more memorable – off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you the difference between 1-2 and 1-3 in Return to Dream Land; I could tell you the difference between A Trip to the Mall and Rocky Rollin’ Road. Forgotten Land never wants you to forget where you are, the titles helped set the tone of every level by contextualizing the area before you even step foot in it.
It’s a world tour, a cross-continent trip on foot through Planet Doowa, and just like the gameplay, it all flows together perfectly, and a large part of this thematic flow lies in, of course, the soundtrack.
In a game that is so purposefully tight-lipped about it’s mysterious setting, it sure has a lot to say through music, so I’d like to go on this world tour together by discussing the songs you’ll listen to while globetrotting and the strong sense of atmosphere it creates.
The world is forgotten, not empty, and from the first time you emerge onto the streets of the first level, the triumphant main theme tells you that life has blossomed here, in a way that it probably never could back when it was inhabited. The game calls this the “Natural Plains” despite clearly being a ruined city because nature has reclaimed what is rightfully theirs, though what once was can never truly be erased; the Alivel Mall theme is eternally cheerful and easygoing, even if it no longer remembers why.
A lot of the pieces of the soundtrack share the same, eerie vibe as Alivel Mall. Centuries have obviously passed on Planet Doowa yet it’s hard to deny that some locations feel eternally frozen in time. Welcome to Wondaria evokes memories of a summer that’s nostalgic and bittersweet, whereas the Wondaria Dream Parade captures the essence of a fireworks show on the last day before school begins again.
Although maybe it’s not frozen in time so much as timeless, as Northeast Frost Street is a level and song that makes you think about how even centuries after humans are gone, the first day of snow in winter will always be this ethereal, magical sight to behold.
Of course I have to mention the Battle of Blizzard Bridge, the first normal level title to not show complete indifference to Kirby’s existence – you’re getting closer to the game’s first climax, and all lights turn to you and your rampage in a piece that’s both chaotic and inspiring.
Who else could be waiting for you at the edge of the world than King Dedede, with a new theme that reminds you that even in a brand new world, the king is simply unmatched. Roar of Dedede is primal and wild, and the crowd cheering in the background help gets the blood pumping for one of the coolest boss fights in the game. Going back to the other themes genuinely feels like there’s something missing now.
There’s no time for looking back, though – Dedede’s kidnapped Elfilin, so you’re in hot pursuit as you fly across the ocean to The Wastes Where Life Began with a song that’s just as scorching as the desert you now find yourself in. Piggybacking off of Roar of Dedede, this song is equally a representation of some ancient wilderness (the Originull Wasteland is where the Beast Pack comes from, after all) with a side that’s more open and free, which fits with how the level is actually laid out.
Moonlight Canyon feels like a midnight saddle-up to a duel at dawn, which is perfect for the penultimate level before the world’s boss. The song has a great sense of escalation that compliments the level’s emphasis on elevation, and it has a section that feels like you’re soaring through the air – you do just that in the level, too!
Enter the Fiery Forbidden Lands is a medley of themes in the first world, only in minor key, which by itself is already raw as fuck. The level itself is similar to the city found in Natural Plains, only the reclamation is happening in real time: meteors rain from above, crashing into buildings and leaving pools of lava in their wake.
Burning, Churning, Power Plant is the last “normal” level before a series of gauntlet-style levels that feed directly into the endgame, and when the oppressive opening gives way to a hopeful melody, it feels as if you’ve really reached the end of the line. It’s honestly beautiful how this feat of engineering survived so long without anyone to perform maintenance on it, although there is little time to dwell on the romanticism of it all – you’ve got a friend to save!
The Beast Pack’s Final Stand is the single best use of level titles in conjunction with music in the entire game.
To step back a bit, the Beast Pack is not explained in any length for the entire game, they are introduced as capturing Waddle Dees for some unknown purpose, and then that’s it. You fight multiple Beast Pack generals to get here and none of them have any words to share. And for a Kirby game? That’s fine. You don’t need to exposit anything more than “go get these guys, they’re being mean to your friends.” But as a result, the Beast Pack feels like this formless blob, a disorganized list of enemies that get in your way. The bosses show some signs of life, but I just didn’t find myself caring one way or another, they were only an obstacle that I had to cut through.
The Beast Pack’s Final Stand helped make these enemies’ simple, largely untold story feel like it was present the entire time. The music leads you in as you descend on a freight elevator, you’re greeted by an Awoofy that howls an order to charge as this desperate last attempt to stop Kirby begins, and the song turns into a resolute battle theme as you begin to cut through every last one of them in one of the most satisfying levels I’ve ever played in a 3D platformer. What an incredibly special way to make these bit players have dramatic tension and make the subsequent lore-filled endgame feel earned.
We’ve reached the last stop on the main campaign, so it’s time to finally get some answers on what this Forgotten Land really is. Everyone knows by now that Kirby is no stranger to deep lore, so I’m sure I wasn’t alone in excitedly beginning the last level so I could see what it all meant. The game did a fantastic job getting me to wonder about Planet Doowa, but all that effort would be wasted if it couldn’t bring it home in a satisfying way. Well, after beating the boss of the 6th world and a short cutscene, Kirby finds himself on a long elevator ride, and...
Hm.
Here, before I go further, allow me to place you in my shoes, because I think it’s important to understand the full effect of this specific moment on me. And in order to understand, let’s talk about languages!
In a pre-release interview with the developers of Forgotten Land, general director of the series, Tatsuya Kamiyama, goes into detail on the fictional language created for the game. It’s the same language used in the vocal track at the beginning of the game, the same language on every sign or building or logo found in every level. It was decided to be fictional instead of in a real human language so that no matter what your native tongue is, there’s a sense of unfamiliarity baked into the world; not unlike what Kirby himself would feel on this alien planet.
This isn’t unique to Forgotten Land, even among Nintendo games: Recent Zeldas have featured multiple iterations of Hylian, for example, and Animal Crossing has had their animalese since 2001. Splatoon even uses their fictional language in the same way Kirby does, where a world that once was inhabited by humans is given an additional layer of separation from reality through cephalopod speak.
That’s neat! It really is. I think fictional languages are incredibly cool and can add a lot to the mystique of a world, and when they’re purposely designed to feel like you could speak it but just can’t, even better.
Now, seeing as video games can be a very text-heavy medium, these fictional languages are usually translated for us, but always with the understanding that it’s for us, the audience’s benefit. The way Splatoon, Animal Crossing, and Kirby does it is through subtitles over the gibberish text, not losing the feeling of hearing a foreign language but making it so that you can comprehend it.
That’s really the one rule of these fictional languages: let the player feel like they’re an outsider, without actually making them one.
Cool? Cool. Back to Kirby.
The elevator closes, Kirby and some Waddle Dees are shrouded in darkness and complete silence. And then, the most peculiar thing happens: Over the loudspeaker, a shrill, customer service-y voice begins to speak.
In English. Not in the game’s fictional language, subtitled for my convenience, but in English.
To say that I fucking lost it would be an understatement.
It’s such a wonderfully terrifying subversion of this idea, a fictional world behind a barrier of separation – where it’s the player character this time has absolutely no idea what he’s listening to, but you, the audience, does. If Doowa-ese was created and employed as a way to create a barrier between our own world and the Forgotten Land, suddenly using a recognizable human language in the way that they did brought the fictional frighteningly close to reality.
The bright and cheery tour guide begins to explain the abomination that lies at the top of this elevator, a hostile alien known as ID-F86 that invaded the planet, only to be captured and used to study inter-dimensional warping capabilities. Years later, a space-time transition incident left the alien in a comatose state, and they have been left here in this lab ever since. Not kept for safekeeping, but as an exhibit for the people of the Forgotten Land to marvel at.
All I could do was look on in awe and horror as the voice sends Kirby into battle with a bright and cheery “And here we are!”, waiting to see whatever await behind those laboratory doors.
Turns out the game isn’t done lore dumping just yet, but... while I would like to muse on the fascinating story of the inhabitants of Planet Doowa and where they went in the aftermath of ID-F86’s space-time accident, let’s put a pin in that. We’ve reached the end for real this time, so let’s close talking about Forgotten Land’s main story by going over the biggest spectacle in the game: the bosses!
What makes these boss fights so much fun is how they look. HAL made sure that each boss fight have at least one memorable moment within them, whether it be Clawroline jumping down at you from high up light fixtures, King Dedede grabbing a large stone pillar for a weapon in the middle of your battle, or Fecto Elfilis raining meteors from above. The boss fights are just as much fun to watch as they are to play.
I haven’t mentioned the Colosseum, your standard Kirby boss rush mode, but the Meta Knight fight found in it is incredible, and the ability to clash swords and knock Meta Knight’s out of his hand is the coolest thing in the game by far. (Another example of immensely satisfying spectacle!)
The bosses in Forgotten Land feel like the shackles on the franchise have truly been released: foes are allowed to be towering and imposing without taking up valuable screen space, and most enemies (AKA all of them except Tropic Woods) take advantage of the 3D space by being incredibly mobile, prompting you to do the same. You can avoid every attack in the main story simply by always being on the move.
The game gets bonus points for adopting my favorite universal piece of boss design: waiting for an opening between lengthy attacks keeps you out of harm’s way in exchange for a longer, more methodical fight, but you can create your own openings by rushing in, risking damage for a quicker clear time.
Both of these strategies are valid and even encouraged by the game, with both a “Clear without taking damage” and a “Clear within a set time limit” objectives for Waddle Dees found in every boss level.
Fecto Elfilis, the combined form of the comatose ID-F86 and Elfilin together at last, stands as Kirby’s final test in the main story. The best part about this boss fight is how much of it you already know before you even face them atop Lab Discovera. Tropic Woods’ roots, Clawroline’s throwing knives, Dedede’s pillar swings, Sillydillo’s charge attack, Leongar’s laser, and even Meta Knight’s falling rubble; nearly every boss up to this point is lesson in how to handle one of Elfilis’ attacks, only in a far slower speed. In a game already chock-full of smart design, Fecto Elfilis is the perfect bookend to a perfectly crafted platformer.
(Also, I’m done talking about the soundtrack but Two Planets Approach the Roche Limit is one of the coolest names for a final boss theme I’ve ever heard, and this theme is fantastic and it deserves a spot in the pantheon of Kirby boss themes.)
And if that was it, if Kirby and the Forgotten Land rolled credits after freeing Elfilin from his other half and returning home, I still would have been here singing this game’s honest praises til the cows came home. But the game still has one more thing, one final set piece to herald in this new age of 3D Kirby.
I feel like I don’t have anything to say about Big-Rig Mouth that isn’t already explained by the title alone.
I actually haven’t talked about Mouthful Mode at all because there’s honestly not much for me to say. It’s everything you could want out of a new Kirby ability: it’s cute, a little bit terrifying, and absolutely absurd. The game knows enough restraint to not make it feel overused, and it was always a welcome power up whenever I was asked to use it.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land ends by you driving a semi-truck into the final boss. The entire game is worth playing for this moment alone, and I would go so far as to say that I don’t ever want to play another 3D platformer unless the finale is even half as effective as this in making me feel pure, unadulterated joy. Nothing I can say would capture what it was like to play this sequence while a remixed invincibility theme underscores the insanity of it all. It is, without hyperbole, a perfect ending to a perfect game.
So! That concludes the main story, but the game, much like this review, just keeps on going!
Yes, Kirby and the Forgotten Land has a dragon’s hoard worth of content, even after rescuing every Waddle Dee and scoring the best possible times in Treasure Road.
The Colosseum, unlocked by saving a certain number of Waddle Dees, is upgraded with the harder Ultimate Cup! Test your strength against every single one of the game’s major bosses in a 12 battle marathon!
Oh, and hope you’re ready for another scavenger hunt, because Leongar’s – remember him? I might’ve glossed over him while we talked about boss fights, my bad – in trouble, and the only way to save him is by embarking on a second world tour: six “new” levels, created by remixing all of a world’s stages into one incredibly long romp, each ending in a harder, ‘Phantom’ version of that world’s boss. All the while, be on the lookout for pieces of Leon’s soul, in which you have to collect at least 250 pieces of in order to face off against Forgo Leon and the new, improved, and finally canonical boss fight in Morpho Knight.
But of course, after beating all of that, the Colosseum announces the Ultimate Cup Z, a gauntlet of 18 fights including the Phantom versions of every boss, Morpho Knight, and a harder final boss with an entirely new phase thrown in there, too.
All that being said, Forgotten Land doesn’t have a rhythm minigame so it falls just short of Triple Deluxe in terms of content.
In all seriousness, there is Quite a Lot to unpack here, but I’ll start by saying this: it’s not nearly as overwhelming as it may seem at first. Just like actually playing it all, this section will be done before you even realize it’s over.
The remixed levels are long, and although there are some incredibly deviously hidden soul pieces, that really only deters you from achieving 100% on your first try. Most of the soul pieces are out in the open, making it incredibly easy to bypass the minimum requirement and proceed to the all-new content.
Still, is it incredibly annoying when you miss a soul piece in a room and you have no idea where it could have possibly been hiding? Yes, and I think they would have benefit from an audio cue the same way the Waddle Dees had back in the main game.
The remixed boss fights are more hit-or-miss compared to their main story counterparts. Gorimondo, Clawroline, and Sillydillo are all just slightly more aggressive versions of their normal forms, and all of them are pretty fun to get through. I’m very thankful that they don’t ask me to beat them without taking damage.
Illusory Tropic Woods and Illusory Forgo Dedede on the other hand, are absolute nightmares, in more ways than one! I wouldn’t call them hard, but they’re made artificially difficult by the amount of screen clutter that they can generate. The usually on-point camera can do little to save you from this issue – against Illusory Tropic Woods there’s no way to turn, and against Illusory Forgo Dedede it feels as if the constant zoom-outs actively work against you, Kirby disappearing like a dot in the distance. This is made worse by the tinted screen filter laid over every new level, and the end result are fights that can range from a little annoying to flat-out unenjoyable without the right copy ability.
Morpho Knight has a great introduction and an even cooler design. Although he’s better than the other boss fights in the postgame, he still suffers from some design issues. For the final boss of the Forgo Isles, there is far more downtime than one would want, as he spends a considerable amount of time off-screen. It’s fun to learn his attacks, he has more variety than any other boss up until this point, but it feels like the game throws the “find your own openings” philosophy out the window. This boss fight would have been greatly improved with some kind of timing check that nets you big damage if you succeed like the QTE to knock Meta Knight’s sword out of his hands.
Though for something positive, Morpho Knight and the rest of the illusory bosses do continue to teach the player good habits: mastering the dodge helps Kirby get past attacks that at first seem impossible to get through, and scoring a perfect dodge gets you a free hit. These skills are key to clawing through the Ultimate Cup Z, along with taking down the harder version of Fecto Elfilis, which should be a surprise to nobody if you’ve been paying attention.
...My problem is that Chaos Elfilis isn’t the best boss either. Okay, listen, I know what the title of this review is, but look: Chaos Elfilis is a near perfect way to step up the difficulty of the original final boss. The attacks come out faster, they incentivize smart use of the perfect dodge and blocking as mentioned earlier, and with those changes alone, Elfilis feels complete.
However, like Morpho Knight, there are far too many attacks where Elfilis is just completely out of your reach for what can feel like a solid minute. What was once a three to four minute fight can drag for nearly seven or even ten minutes, if you manage to let Elfilis perform his health recovery move.
Fight through it all and bear witness to Chaos Elfilis’ true form: Orb.
Phase 3 of the fight is better in some ways and worse in others. It still suffers from occasional downtime (there’s an attack that does nothing for like 30 seconds) but there’s more opportunities to hit Orbular Elfilis and it takes far less time to take down than Phases 1 and 2 combined. As long as you don’t panic, the fight will be over in no time. Ultimate Cup Z really puts into perspective the weaknesses of these last few boss fights since you are forced to fight them all in one go. It was unfortunate that this was the last thing I needed to complete in order to get 100%, besides grinding for some figures.
That’s about everything Kirby and the Forgotten Land has to offer. I hate to end on a down note, but see? Told you it wouldn’t take that long.
To conclude, I want to talk about the story Leongar tells us before his boss fight, about the people of the Forgotten Land, and about a little song tucked away in the staff roll.
The people of Planet Doowa studied ID-F86 and developed the ability to travel across planets. Sometime after ID-F86 went comatose, the people left their planet behind for “a land of dreams”, which presumably is Dream Land, but hey, who knows.
It’s left unsaid exactly who the people of the Forgotten Land were, but it’s clear to me that we’re supposed to draw the similarities with humans: they made cars, factories, scissor-lifts, vending machines, the list goes on and on. It’s not so hard to believe they found a place so much better than their home planet they just left; some people today suggest that’s what we should be looking for instead of trying to salvage what we have here on Earth.
Leongar holds a hatred towards the previous inhabitants, convinced that they left the Beast Pack in a decaying world to fend for themselves, living out the rest of their days in Dream Land, a far better world than the one than Planet Doowa.
And even if all of this is just a byproduct of Fecto Elfilis’ hold on Leon’s mind, it’s incredibly easy to sympathize with that idea, this inferiority complex that would grow in people who live in essentially the leftovers of a world and were told as such. No matter what the Beast Pack has, there will always be the lingering thought; “what was so special about what the humans found that they decided to leave their home behind?” It’s a compelling idea, and I think even if Forgotten Land chose not to expand on it much, the implications alone are enough to satisfy me. (Although I wonder if there will be DLC down the road, and if it will end up explaining any more, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.)
“From Those Who Departed For Space” is my favorite song in the game. It plays in the staff roll, and that name changed everything about how I feel towards the humans who once lived in the Forgotten Land. The song is sweet, almost like a lullaby, to me it feels like a farewell letter. It makes me think that the “forgotten land” wasn’t really forgotten, and rather entrusted to whoever would come after them. Just because they left doesn’t mean they didn’t love that world and everything in it – maybe something called to them while they were away, and they could no longer return.
Upon completing the game, Bandana Waddle Dee reports that thanks to Elfilin’s powers, they’ve established a connection between Planet Popstar and the new world, and Kirby and friends can now travel freely to and from both. Even if Leon wasn’t ultimately successful in obtaining the power of ID-F86, it seems him and the rest of the Beast Pack can finally see the land of dreams for themselves.
I don’t know what happened to the people who left for Dream Land, and I don’t know for sure if they really did care for their Forgotten Land. But I do think that whoever they were, they've been reunited with their home thanks to the efforts of Kirby and Elfilin – the two have finally become one.
