GAME REVIEW: Kirby and the Forgotten Land (2022)
Despite having been a fairly avid gamer for most of my life, I am loathe to admit that I have never actually played a Kirby game before (Super Smash Bros being the only game featuring the character that I’ve played). Well, before now, that is! We put Kirby and the Forgotten Land on our wish list when we got the OLED Switch last summer and when it went on sale recently, I decided to pick it up. I obviously have absolutely no experience with any sort of Kirby games, though we did watch probably about 90% of Kirby: Right Back At Ya! (aka Kirby of the Stars in Japanese), which was a very cute anime show (don’t ask me why we never finished it… I think we just forgot about it). So, knowing next to nothing about even what kind of games the Kirby franchise has, this was an all-new experience for us to try out!
The story to this game is simple: a big star-shaped hole opens up in the sky and a bunch of Waddle Dees and Kirby get sucked through! Oh no! Kirby awakens and meets a cute little creature named Elfilin, who acts as the game’s sidekick and explains the local setting when needed. As Waddle Dees get rescued in the levels, they begin to put together a home base, where Kirby can return to buy random figurines, upgrade abilities, do tasks and challenges, and even fight in a colosseum.
As the game proceeds, familiar characters begin to appear. Metaknight appears in the colosseum and King Dedede shows up as you proceed through the levels, having come through the wormhole before Kirby had arrived! He causes some trouble and eventually kidnaps Elfilin, which leads Kirby to the final stages of the game to rescue their little friend.
One of the best things about this game, off the bat, is that it has a couch co-op multiplayer option. It seems that online multiplayer is what most games push these days and a lot of people have forgotten that IRL gaming is a real thing for a lot of families and friends these days. While my generation’s parents probably couldn’t care less about video games, people my age grew up with them and my partner and I love to play games together and we have a truly awful time finding anything that we really enjoy playing together (some examples are Salt and Sanctuary and Nex Machina). While I did mostly play this game myself, it was nice to be able to have my partner hop in if/when he felt like it, and the option for him to hop-on/hop-off was as simple as going to the +screen menu. Very fluid and straightforward!
Now, of course, I do know that Kirby’s whole deal is more or less inhaling things and then either spitting them out or absorbing their powers, so that is naturally a big part of the game. There are a lot of different types of powers Kirby can learn, from the traditional sword, fire, ice, and hammer, to more tactical guns, bombs, tornados, and a strange little sleepy cap that puts Kirby to sleep, healing them up. There are a lot of different ways to put these skills to use to accomplish various goals throughout the game and part of its charm is playing around with different abilities. Since they can also be leveled up, it’s worth coming back to some that might not be your favorite on the first upgrade. I didn’t care for the sword’s first upgrade, for example, though I did like the second one.
Now, because this game is set in a post-apocalyptic modern-tech world and not a cutesy fantasy world (though it is still very cutesy!), Kirby now has the option to swallow things from the “real world” as well, which often involves level advancement and saving some of your little buddies. This is all sorts of weird stuff, like cars, vending machines, lockers, lockers that are bolted to a wall, pipes, oversized novelty traffic cones… all sorts of strange things, and usually engaging with them helps you to get secret/hidden items. This does seem to have happened chronologically right after Super Mario: Odyssey visited the real world, so I admit that it felt a bit derivative, world-wise, but ultimately, SM: Odyssey did come out way back in 2017… one could argue that they could have tried something else, but since they seemed to be inspired to do something fun with the “real world” in-game, I ultimately don’t really care if SM: Odyssey did it first (especially since I haven’t played it yet—I just picked it up, so it’s on my to-play list).
The world map is divided into five biomes, which host the basic levels where Kirby rescues the Waddle Dees, finds secrets, and does other little fun quests in order to rescue everyone who was sucked into this world. Completing these opens up some worlds where Kirby can use the special abilities to do challenges and earn special prizes, with extra coin bonuses for doing them quickly. There are little secrets hidden in the world map as well, which may be small coins or treasure levels, where Kirby uses the mouthful abilities from the “real world” in challenges, which also give bonuses for speed.
As someone who enjoys casual games that I can pick up and put down and just relax with, without getting too frustrated or annoyed, this is the perfect sort of game. It’s really mechanically simple, the artwork is cute and enjoyable, and there’s so little story that it doesn’t really matter if you put the game down and forget to play for a month or three. You can pick it right back up again, go back to an earlier level if you need, and then proceed onwards. The music is nice and atmospheric, it suits the scenes, and every once in a while stands on its own and makes you pause to listen.
It’s also worth mentioning that there is some extra content if you happen to play online as well, but as I am not really into that sort of thing, I didn’t try it out.
Now, if I have one complaint with this game, it is related to the ending and how the whole thing turns into a weird anime, so spoilers for this next paragraph. Worth mentioning that I learned almost all of this from the Wikipedia summary because most of this didn’t make sense at the time I was playing and left me really confused:
After what I had kind of thought was going to be the final battle with King Dedede, the entire game completely changes. When we meet the beastlord, Leongar (who has never been mentioned or alluded to before this point in time, as far as I recall) and it turns out that King Dedede had been mind-controlled by him. You find out that the final lab level contains an extraterrestrial life form that is, frankly, just Jenova from FFVII, and is responsible for the space-time rifts that brought Kirby to the New World in the first place. During a warp-experiment, this creature, subject ID-F86, was split into two parts: Elfilin and Fecto Forgo, the former escaping and the latter being placed in containment and seems to be some sort of drippy oversized Elfilin fetus. Apparently Leongar’s plan is to leave the planet the same way its previous inhabitants did by reuniting Elfilin with Fecto Forgo. It then turns out that it was Fecto Forgo who has been mind-controlling everyone in this world and when it breaks free, it absorbs Leongar, Elfilin, and the rest of the beasts. It creates a portal to Planet Popstar where Kirby comes from originally, with the goal of destroying both worlds when they collide. Kirby absorbs a semi-truck and rams Fecto Elfilis so hard that they’re able to remove Elfilin and he thanks Kirby for their friendship before using all of his power to close the rift and save both worlds, though it is discovered that Elfilin can open these portals and travel back and forth between the worlds and the two of them remain good friends. In an epilogue story, there’s an alternate dimension called Forgo Dreams where the colosseum comes back into play and Elfilin is able to re-absorb their missing part and become whole again. [end spoilers]
Now, to be clear, all of this happens at the very end of the game and left me wondering if someone had dropped some anime-tinted acid into my drink when I wasn’t looking. I felt like almost none of that story was foreshadowed and made absolutely no sense, and was so extra that it was insane. The game didn’t need any of that weird over-the-top anime nonsense, I would have honestly been super happy if the game had ended after the last fight with King Dedede. I don’t really like anime these days for exactly this reason—the escalations in the end often are way too much and make no sense story-wise. I honestly think they should’ve made up a much simpler reason for the portals because just tacking a legitimately buttload of random garbage onto the game does not a good story make, and in the last battles to save Elfilin, there are a lot of quicktime events, of which I am not a big promoter (I think they’re often half-assed gameplay).
Ultimately, Kirby and the Forgotten Land is an extremely fun, engaging, cute, family-friendly game that I can recommend for anyone who likes these action RPGs where you run around finding secrets, or if you’re looking for some casual-play couch co-op with your family or friends. Of course, I’ve never played a Kirby game before, so I have no basis of comparison to other games, but suffice to say that I’d be interested in checking out some of the older ones now just based off of how much I enjoyed this game! Just, y’know… watch out for that ending and if you don’t like weird anime escalations, maybe quit after you defeat your traditional final boss.
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