Kirby and the forgotten land was a great game and I hope we get more things like this from HAL (the project mentioned in a minor post will be saved for the 30th, apologies, in the meantime you get a lotta FL art)
Okay so, I’m not sure yet how popular the theory of Elfilis being one of the heroes who sealed Void Termina is yet, but I really love thinking about it. Right now I believe that the four heroes, who are aeons old as this battle was ancient, have been corrupted and fallen from grace (see Galacta Knight) after that battle for reasons unknown, perhaps it was Void’s influence or their immense power drove them mad, but it seems the former heroes are now interplanetary threats and were imprisoned by various means at some point, case being the Ancients sealing Galacta inside a crystal prison. I also believe that Morpho is actively seeking these four heroes out to pass judgement on them when their time comes, possibly because they’ve been alive so long and it’s a mercy, which may explain why he attacks Kirby as well because Kirby IS a form of Void and he believes he needs judgement as well. But that’s an entirely different topic- anyway, we know absolutely that Galacta was one of the heroes and I like to entertain the possibility Elfilis was too, driven mad by power and destroying planet after planet like Galacta had. Also, it seems either Galacta has the same warp power to create vortices as Elfilis, so he either got it from them or just has the same power because they’re the heroes, maybe it’s a connecting thread. Another fun idea is what if Elfilis is actually one of the ancients- Magolor is only a descendant of them so his appearance could differ for that reason, but it’d be interesting. I got off topic again but! Because of all this I’m now thinking about… thousands and thousands of years ago, not-crazy Galacta and Elfilis being hero companions and friends- and I think Elfilis would’ve had a personality similar to Elfilin since that’s the essence of their soul, and Galacta way back then was a horrendous flirt and a showoff. Like its a really fun idea. Also I’m pretty sure Galacta literally died at the end of Star Allies. Angst potential woohoooo
Thanks for reading this much lmao I wanna talk more about theories and stuff too
so it turns out Morpho Knight Sword really is overpowered and literally cut my Ultimate Cup Z time down by over an hour while also needing only one retry. but that’s fine because that’s the kind of thing I expect from a end-of-post-game ability anyway and it helped me get a few extra Rare Stones for Trader Waddle Dee and in turn contributed to 100% CLEAR!
I should be happy about this, like how I was happy to 100% Super Star and Triple Deluxe and so on, but … I’m actually kind of sad. I was really enjoying everything about this world so much that it’s a bittersweet feeling to have experienced close to all that it can offer. that feeling is something no other Kirby game has elicited, and it makes Kirby and the Forgotten Land one of the best Kirby games in my book. what an absolute triumph for Kirby’s 30th year!
this has been bothering me ever since I saw that name in the credits. it might be the greatest real-world Kirby mystery next to the fate of Shinichi Shimomura. go look up Neichel and it only shows a restaurant in Barcelona and various people with the last name of Neichel. the Japanese and Korean names for the first world, Natural Plains, both roughly translate to Neichel Grasslands (ネイチェル草原 / 네이첼 초원)—with a hard ‘ch’ sound, I might add—so it has to be a pseudonym taken from that because there doesn’t seem to be any kind of Japanese pop idol by that name (which is generally the kind of person I expect to be singing the opening theme to a Japanese video game, I guess).
so I guess it’s a pseudonym, maybe the name of the in-universe singer because HAL would really like you to fully buy into the idea that this was a massive hit on this planet in the before times. but outside of the game world, who is Neichel then? who is singing those quasi-Simlish vocals that’s been stuck in my head every day since Friday? is it one of the voice actors doing double duty? is it a Vocaloid?? is it a random person picked off the dev team who happened to have musical training? is it Shinya Kumazaki revealing to the world that he’s actually always had a killer falsetto??? I don’t even care who it is, I’m just really curious now …
here I was going ‘oh HAL got the pacing for this game so perfect that they even figured out exactly when to take the tutorialising character out of the game’ and now I’m sad because Kirby was sad
so first, as someone who has bad reflexes and coordination and is incompetent at action games, I would like to thank HAL for two things that made me feel seen:
the option to retry from the most recent battle in the boss rush mode because it’s about time we had that option
the Ice ability’s mostly invulnerable guard
and the thing is, those don’t make the Ultimate Cup Z a cakewalk at all (at least for me with no amiibo and no power-up items), and it contains the most insane, frenetic, terrifying, unforgiving, creative boss battles of the game (I daresay in Kirby history in some cases) that really take advantage of the 3D space without being impenetrable. and I won’t spoil the final boss too much here (I mean you can go look it up elsewhere anyway) but it reminds me of various bits of Drawcia and Void while being very much its own cosmic horror. and I guess it makes sense now that they’ve put what used to be pause screen lore in the figures—you have to really earn that lore, and when you do …
nothing but praise for this mode from me, even after it made me realise how bad I was at video games (I mean look at that awful time) and I spent a small fortune in Star Coins on it. (but really where else was I going to spend Star Coins?)
but … 98%? 98% completion??? oh … oh no … it’s a Triple Deluxe situation, isn’t it? I’m going to have to actually collect every single figure, aren’t I? well at least there’s Trader Waddle Dee but …
… oh no … they probably want me to get more Rare Stones by repeatedly clearing the terrifying boss rush … oh nooooooo …
OK, with Isolated Isles complete I’m sitting at 91% save completion—the missing 9% is probably a bunch of sundry things like the True Arena (well, The Ultimate Cup Z), the last Treasure Road level, and so on.
immediately after I wrote ‘oh it’s unprecedented for a Kirby game to have a proper epilogue post-game’ I realised ‘wait Star Allies exists and it has Heroes In Another Dimension‘. really Isolated Isles feels like somewhere between HIAD and a Meta Knightmare-type mode—not that Isolated Isles is a time trial mode, but it’s basically a hyper-abridged Extra Game reusing maps from the main story mode. and unlike HIAD the game actually helpfully lets you know when you’re done collecting everything in a given area (thanks Elfilin), so that’s nice for someone like me that prefers to play without a walkthrough if possible.
overall I really really enjoyed Forgotten Land (and I’m not done yet—can’t leave that save completion at 91% forever). I imagine some Kirby fans have waited for two decades for a proper 3D Kirby game and this delivers so much. I really hope HAL and other developers push Nintendo to make their next console a bit more performant because I’d love to see this game running at 60 fps and not eat inputs from time to time … but honestly it didn’t even detract that much from the experience.
I’d also like to acknowledge how amazing the soundtrack is, which I think we’ve started taking for granted with Kirby games but that doesn’t make it any less true. special shout-out to the track named A Full-Speed Farewell from the New World, which is the final big-rig driving battle music and a brilliant remix of the Invincible Candy theme that made me tear up a little. the godforsaken Invincible Candy theme! not even A New Wind for Tomorrow or the game’s own main theme! but it still sounds great!
final verdict is still 10/10, has Waddle Dee Town, would buy twice and would have been 11/10 with either Parasol or a 1P Bandana Waddle Dee Extra Game mode
