Kirby and the Forgotten Land (April Fools Article) - Review
by Paul Broussard , posted on 01 April 2022 / 6,587 Views
There comes a point in time when a series exhausts everything it could reasonably do. Many a series has started out fresh, but over the course of decades of games, the creative spark slowly ran out. Fortunately, however, simply getting old and stale no longer has to mean the death of your franchise. With the power of programming at hand, there is a solution available to all games running afoul of this particular problem: just do exactly what you were doing, but bigger. When 2D Zelda became tired and old, it went into 3D. When 3D Zelda started boring us, it became a sandbox. When sandbox Zelda becomes bland, I imagine Nintendo will launch “Breath of the Universe” on a quantum computer that somehow fits in your pocket.
Fortunately, Kirby is not at that stage yet. Having only just reached the point where 2D Kirby games have gotten old and tired, the next logical step is to move the series into the third dimension. And so here we have Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which turned out to be a very fitting title since the land will certainly continue to be forgotten so long as nobody remembers to give it a name.
You know the drill by this point. It’s a Kirby game, with exactly as much ambition as my deadbeat son who hasn’t come up from the basement in a week. The unnamed "forgotten land" has supposedly been invaded by some cosmic deity that looks like a mash up of a Build-A-Bear and H.R. Geiger’s alien (or so we’re told; I don’t think we ever see any real signs that it has been besides some Waddle Dees being arrested). It’s up to Kirby to eat his way through the land, inhale a bunch of mostly innocent wildlife, and rack up a body count in the hundreds, just so he can get back at one creature that’s mostly minding its own business at this point. At this point, the lengths that Kirby goes to for revenge would give even Kanye West pause.
And like Kanye West, it's pretty grating to listen to. I’ve never been particularly for or against the music and sound design in Kirby titles; some of the more recognizable tunes like the Dedede theme or Green Greens stick out to me, but overall Kirby music has been about as bland as British fast food. This game, however, picks some of the most atrociously annoying and obnoxious music to ever grace the industry. I miss the Kirby titles that were more like fighting games with a ton of other characters and Kirby, and you would try and knock each other off a platform. Those had good music.
The gameplay for this particular outing is pretty much standard fare, except it’s in 3D now, which makes it instantly much more innovative and thus worthy of a higher rating than I would have normally given it. You travel through some levels, fight some bosses, and free some of the aforementioned Waddle Dees. Although I’m not really sure why we’re freeing the Waddle Dees, to be honest. It could be that the Waddle Dees were all involved in a spree of murders, and the main baddy was actually doing the community a big service.
This is all actually part of a new townbuilding gameplay mechanic where you find unsupervised Waddle Dees in levels and then bribe them to go build stuff for you. As it turns out, Kirby is incapable of creating anything interesting or substantive on his own, and has to resort to buying all the actually talented people to build cool stuff for him, kind of like Xbox. Unfortunately, Kirby’s spending spree means he has nothing leftover, and as a result, once the products are out on the market, I can’t actually afford any of them, kind of like an American looking for healthcare. Grinding for money to purchase anything gets tedious quickly. It's just replaying old levels over and over again, so unless you're someone who just likes doing exactly the same thing repeatedly with no alteration, which is to say either an accountant or a Borderlands fan, then you're probably better off just ignoring this whole thing.
That said, there are also some other very clever new game mechanics that normally I wouldn’t care about, but, since it’s in 3D, they become worth mentioning. One is the new crafting system, which is such an engaging method of getting the player to run around the environment mashing the “pick up” button that I wonder why no other games have tried it. Basically, you can combine materials you find in the environment with other materials to make a thing you can use. It’s very handy and I fully expect that this will not become overused to the point where it loses its enjoyability by anyone else.
There’s also the new Guitar Hero minigame. Every so often, Kirby comes across a boss that forces you to really adapt your playstyle, by which I mean you have to wake up and use your brain for once. Bosses will actually challenge you to music competitions, where you have to press buttons in order in time with the music. However, the genius of it is that it uses such good music from earlier games in the series that I didn’t notice. One of my favorite sections involved a brown monkey showing up and requiring that I play a song on some bongos in tune with the jungle beat. The best part is that Nintendo has learned from the best storytellers in the industry in Sony, and so there’s a mandatory 15 minute walking sequence immediately afterwards for you to contemplate the immensity of Kirby’s musical ability; it doesn't get annoying or tedious in any way at all on repeat playthroughs.
But the real stars of the show are the crime scene investigations. Every so often, you’ll find that one of the Waddle Dees you were supposed to rescue was murdered in cold blood. This requires you to enter detective mode, where the screen zooms in and you have to find highlighted clues, another game mechanic that I’m sure will never stop being fun no matter how many other titles copy it. Your job is to figure out who killed the Waddle Dee, but it’s challenging because sometimes the murderer is you. This forces you to adapt on the fly and come up with a way to shift the blame, because as it turns out, admitting to a murder in public is one of the most cringe inducing and awkward things in video games. And that says something, given that our industry’s premier awards show is hosted by Geoff Kieghly and once genuinely featured this as a paid sponsor.
Outside of these sections, however, the game is very easy, which is good, because I possess less skill at video games than Conan O’Brien. The exception to this is the end game, which transports you to the world of shattered dreams. Here, Kirby is forced into a reality where the shattered hopes of everyone he’s met along the way float along aimlessly. These can range from the seemingly innocuous, like the Waddle Dees’ broken desire to build a meaningful town, to some that genuinely pull on you heartstrings, like Italy’s hopes of making the World Cup. This section can actually become very annoying very quickly, as enemies deal far more damage and can easily one or two shot you if you don’t deal with them quickly, which resulted in me adopting Nintendo’s approach to dealing with fan content, which is to say nuking everything that could remotely be considered threatening and not giving a damn about anyone or anything else.
As the discourse surrounding games like The Last of Us 2 showed, video game fans are all level headed people who are willing to have open, honest, and meaningful discussions about tough topics. And so I am hopeful that we can have an equally meaningful discourse about the shocking moment of Kirby and the Forgotten Land. If you've played the game, then you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, just know that it was a very meaningful scene that really made me question reality in a way that no other game has. It turned out all it took was a pink fluffball, a box of cornflakes, and an argument about the constitutionality of owning a weasel.
It’s hard to appropriately sum up Kirby and the Forgotten Land. It’s an experience like no other. Well, like some other games… just in 2D. But since this one’s in 3D, it’s dramatically better and more innovative. I can only give Kirby and the Forgotten Land my highest recommendation, as a true drama filled experience packed with so much gameplay variety it doesn’t even fit together. This isn’t just the Dark Souls of Kirby games; it’s the Breath of the Dark Fire May Cry of War of Kirby, and that’s every bit as enticing as it sounds. Truly a masterpiece on all levels, and a game so good I would have thought I made it all up had I not played it myself.
This review is based on a copy of Kirby and the Forgotten Land for the NS
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That was a good read. Thanks :-D
That Kirby slap feature looks like a lot of fun!
Clicked for the slap pic...
A 10!?...
...today is April 1...
What I really like about this game is the subtile reference to the Mega Man style gameplay, but also at the same time Pac-Man and of course Need for Speed, since you can do speedruns.
Just started playing this and I agree with everything you've said here. Probably would have given a higher score though tbh
WOW! a 10 huh, guess we have no choice but buy it being the highest rated game in a very long time.
I liked that you used the alternative box art.
That's a bit unexpected. Most people give the game a 7 or 8 out of 10.
Yes but Nintendo didn’t bribe them like they did to me.
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