Kirby’s Dream Land 3 came out originally on the SNES very, very late in its life, slightly over 13 months after the launch of the Nintendo 64. As such, few people ended up playing it, but thanks to its availability on the Virtual Console, more people can now be exposed to it.


The first thing about the game you will notice is how fantastic it looks. Not unlike Yoshi’s Island, the game goes for a hand-drawn look, but unlike the crayon look of that game, KDL3 looks more like it was drawn with Prismacolor pencils. The game will sometimes sport bold colors, but most of the time, the colors will be more subdued and soft. At times it feels like a slightly higher resolution would have been all that’s needed to convince us we’re playing a drawing.

Just like in most Kirby games, you inhale enemies to steal their powers, and while these powers don’t have multiple uses like they did in Kirby Super Star, they can be modified when you mount one of several animal helpers.

Kirby can also puff up and float all over the levels designed around this ability. To prevent you from floating your way over an entire level, the skies are filled with as many enemies as there are on the ground. You WILL have to fight. Kirby games have the reputation of being easy, but quite frankly I bet my death count would be embarrassing. Kirby can take 10 hits before losing a life, but with the sparse healing items and the fact that you don’t heal up automatically after clearing a level, that’s not as generous as it may first seem.

At the cost of one health square, you can summon a companion for a second player to control. If you’re by yourself, that companion can be controlled by the AI, but I found him to be more of a hindrance than help.

You can just blow through the 30 levels, but if you do, you will not get to face the game’s true final boss and see the ending. Each of levels has a secret star that you have to earn sometimes through a minigame, sometimes through puzzle-solving, and these can be a source of great frustration.

There were a few stars that were satisfying to get, for instance one involving a platforming challenge using an animal helper that did not have Kirby’s unlimited floating ability, or another involving cameos from another Nintendo franchise. But I would say that for the most part, these stars were no fun to get at all. The minigames through which you win some of them are incredibly hard, and the puzzles to get some of the others, very obtuse. It’s likely you’ll have to restart the long levels from the beginning over and over again until you finally understand what the game wants from you, or get lucky at the minigames. It feels like a ploy to artificially lengthen the game’s length.

Another frustration is Kirby’s maddeningly slow speed. You can, and will, double tap a direction on the D-pad to run, but that gets old quickly.

Despite the issues, however, I did have a good time through most of the game. I suppose however that I can only truly recommend it to Kirby fans of die-hard platformer fans.