“To think that you’ve made it this far. Aren’t you a persistent little thing? But even you will kneel before us. I, Taranza, cannot allow you to interfere with Queen Sectonia’s plans.”
look, I’m not checking anything Kirby-related on the Internet right now (except for the Nintendo news and Twitter feeds for those Dee-liveries) so I have no idea what everyone thinks of Sillydillo, but I hope you’re all giving this ridiculous boss a lot of love—comes out of absolutely nowhere and then hits you like a godforsaken freight train full of solid tungsten, and frankly offers the most insane, frantic Kirby boss fight in recent memory, in a good way
honestly HAL have done really really good work with these boss fights, especially Clawroline and Sillydillo, so that they make a strong impression but still aren’t too frustrating to figure out, which is good given that they made no-damage runs a mission for every single boss fight. I’m sure this stuff isn’t new to people who have played lots of 3D platformers, and of course I haven’t yet experienced the final few boss fights. but so far everything’s as I would expect from a Kirby game, just in 3D, and that should be taken as high praise
OK, about 12 hours in and at 43% save completion. general summary: still love it.
I think by now I’ve unlocked most of the other minigames, all lovely—and I did not think we would get a sequel to Kirby Tilt’N’Tumble but here we are. (I jest but only because Kirby Tilt’N’Tumble was way more difficult than Tilt-And-Roll Kirby.) the general pacing of how everything unlocks and unfolds seems really spot on—the minigames unlock right when you’re probably a bit tired of the platforming, Elfilin gets captured right when you’re probably a bit tired of Elfilin, etc. so the way the game flows overall feels really smooth.
so far I’ve had only one real moment of rage, which is when Blizzard Bridge wanted me to save a Waddle Dee by doing a no-hit Twin Wild Frosty fight. not even no-damage (which at this point I can cheese pretty reliably with Ice’s invulnerable dodge for the proper bosses, including Dedede whose pre-fight area basically handed me Ice on a silver platter daring me to do the no-damage run first try)—proper no-hit! Drill is a really good ability for this but going underground with it isn’t completely invulnerable, and with two of Wild Frosty going around doing belly flops and stomps and what have you it’s really easy to get hit if you’re not constantly paying attention and ready to move (which I am fundamentally incapable of doing). I guess at least it wasn’t Twin Wild Bugzzy?
but honestly it’s impossible to hold a grudge against this game for very long, and not just because of the cute aesthetics. when you’re not doing a miniboss rush or a boss fight, the level design is as it’s always been for Kirby games at their best—somewhat linear but still encouraging exploration and experimentation without egregiously punishing you for mistakes. yes, you almost always miss out on some of the Waddle Dees the first time you play through, but you don’t necessarily need them all to progress so you can always come back and explore more closely later. plus, as Kirby games tend to be nowadays, this game does hold your hand a little bit so that you’re not too frustrated—having copy abilities strewn about near puzzles is still a thing, and having a retry option specifically for things like races and other Mouthful Mode vehicle segments is excellent.
I know I said before that this feels like it’s really a successor to Kirby 64, and at first it felt like a direct sequel to Kirby 64 rather than all the games that have come since then—pause screen lore has basically been replaced by the figurines, which are basically a nicer version of the Enemy Info Cards that you get from the Kirby 64 picnic bonus game. (I am kind of sad that pause screen info is gone, but the boss lore being in the figurines bothers me a lot less than things like attack combos missing. at least it means I don’t have to go back through a boss fight just to pause and read their backstory …) but having played through more of it, it also still seems quite reminiscent of RtDL—properly revisiting the idea of Challenge Stages with the sometimes frustrating but extremely rewarding Treasure Road, having an in-universe hub for minigames and such, dividing up the worlds in two halves with a key story beat, and so on. it is interesting because 64 and RtDL of course lead into and out of the troubled development of Kirby GCN during which HAL first attempted a properly 3D Kirby, and now that Kirby is properly 3D it’s those two games that Forgotten Land seems to draw from the most. and of course they are two really excellent games to draw from!
this is not to say that aspects from games after RtDL have been discarded entirely though. it’s nice to see the stock items return from Triple Deluxe and Planet Robobot, for one thing. and there’s a real Star Allies-esque sense about the way the story gets presented with a sense of fun—the Dedede fakeout reminds me a lot of the fake credits gags in the main story and Guest Star modes.
so, as I said at the top: still love it. and as someone continuing to play through this completely blind, the fact that it draws from 64 and RtDL now has me super confused about whether to be suspicious of Elfilin’s motives …
oh, oh, oh, it’s another Kirby game doing the acrostic thing with the world names, and as you can see the first three worlds have names with initials that clearly spell … PCR, taking the first letter of the second word in each name. so I’m guessing there are seven worlds and they spell out PCRTEST.
hah, no, it’s going to be NEWWORLD with the last one or two initials coming from the final boss fight like the 3DS games, isn’t it
OK, I’m at about 12% completion (which probably means, what? at least a fifth of the way through the main story?) after about six hours of fairly completionist and barely competent gameplay, and I’m really enjoying it. feels like a real successor to N64-era Kirby, but there’s a lot of nice conveniences that minimise time-wasting—for example, you can immediately retry just the Pilotwings-esque segment in that level, which is really nice, and falling off the world is not an instant reset (which I guess wouldn’t make sense anyway without 1-Ups).
also Waddle Dee Town and the café and the house are all wonderful and everything I ever wanted from this game. 10/10, game of the decade
I am going to take this one day to be actually happy about something and enjoy it
I don’t tend to liveblog games but I may post about this one over the next somewhile. if I do posts will definitely be tagged with ‘kirby spoilers’ and ‘kirby and the forgotten land’ so blacklist those tags!
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
