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Kirby and the Forgotten Land Discussion (Nintendo Switch) [game]
 
Kirby and the Forgotten Land on the Switch
8.79/10 from 10 user ratings

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03/25/22, 20:19  
 
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Reviews are out! 84 from 67 reviews so far.

It looks like Kirby's first truly 3D outing is a great success! I enjoyed the demo and my wife likes Kirby games so she would probably play some co-op with me so this feels like an obvious get for me, though I might not get it right away.
03/25/22, 20:19   
Edited: 03/25/22, 20:23
What a charming and delightful game (so far)! This is the kind of thing that reminds me why I love Nintendo. My kids are having a blast as well.
03/26/22, 03:32   
I'm enjoying this game more than I've ever enjoyed a Kirby game before and I'm not even through World 1. That's a good sign for me.
03/26/22, 16:15   
This game is fun! Very charming. Very simple.

...except for the extraneous elements that detract from the elegance! There's a Waddle Dee in town that you give a code to in exchange for coins. And you get the codes by finding these secret walls that have the codes written on them. But wait, at that point, why not just have the coins spawn when you find the secret wall? And at that point, why are we even messing with clicking on walls in the first place? Why not put the coins in a chest at the end of an optional platforming challenge? You know, like the rest of the game already does?

It's like a lot of teams at Nintendo are losing confidence in their ability to make a solid... wait, hold on, this sounds familiar...

Secret_Tunnel said:
The postgame vending machine stuff feels a little gacha-ey. The WarioWare and Rhythm Heaven team is one of my favorites at Nintendo, but they seem to have lost some confidence in their ability to make a solid game with no story or experience points or meta stuff. Rhythm Heaven Megamix had way too much fluff.

What's with all the vending machines and figurines lately!? Paper Mario's been doing this stuff too. Nintendo needs to cut it out before we lose the only remaining developer capable of making a game without any addictive nonsense injected into it.
03/26/22, 22:06   
I don’t know if it’s Nintendo thinking that people LIKE a the gatcha style collection from mobile games or whatever, but yeah, I’m not a fan of the figurine collecting stuff.

I have $30 in credit at Best Buy and I think I’ll be putting it towards Kirby. I’ve just been a little torn on whether I want this digitally or not now that we have two Switches.
03/27/22, 18:29   
This is the perfect "chill" game, especially with a family ravaged by covid right now. We're all sort of rolling around the house in a daze.

It's been fun playing on my own and doing co-op with my boys. I hope 3D adventures become more common for Kirby in the future.
03/31/22, 05:11   
BTW what is the co-op like in this game? Are both character fully playable characters or is it more like an assist mode or something?
03/31/22, 23:29   
Edited: 03/31/22, 23:29
Wooooow, I've really been loving this game. Trying to take it slowly and really savor each level. It's all about the vibes, you know?

Something I really appreciate about this game (and Kirby 64, for that matter) is the variety of contexts each level takes place in. Kirby, among tons of other series, is guilty of doing samey levels. You've got your grass world, your desert world, your water world. And the levels within those worlds seem to be interchangeable and lacking in context.

But then you've got games like this and Kirby 64. In Kirby 64 you still got a water world. But one level might be a beach, the next a reef off the coast, and the next a running river in the woods. Same with Forgotten Land. Each level in each world feels distinct while sticking to an overarching theme. For the most part, the environments are diegetic. Rarely do levels feel like a collection of floating platforms or some themed tileset that the level designers threw together without considering that this is supposed to be a world characters live in. I'm sure most people don't care about this kind of stuff, but for me it makes a huge difference.
03/31/22, 23:43   
@Hero_Of_Hyrule
Agreed on all counts. Goddamn the level designs in this game are good. I've only just reached Winter Horns, and not having learned my lesson from all the previous worlds and their levels, I assumed it would be a pretty standard snow world. But of course it wasn't. It was its own brand of melancholic post-apocalyptic atmosphere combined with the intense saccharin cuteness of all things Kirby, just like everything before it. Same theme, but still its own thing.

People can scoff at the game for its low difficulty, but they're gonna be missing out big time. What a lovely, lovely game this is.
04/07/22, 20:49   
@r_hjort

Yeah, I think the Waddle Dee hunt gives the come enough friction to be interesting. But for me, part of the appeal of Kirby games is their breeziness. You can sail through the main game without much trouble, but there are collectables to focus on if you want a bit more to think about.

At this point, I got all of the waddle dees and have kinda fizzled out in the post game. I've replayed almost every level in the game at least once looking for Waddle Dees, so reused content like the Arena doesn't do it for me. I'm happy to call this one done.
04/07/22, 21:57   
Hero_Of_Hyrule said:
fizzled out in the post game

It's funny that you use this phrasing, because I was just thinking about this exact phenomenon a bunch this morning. You get to a game's final boss, beat it, see the EPIC CONCLUSION, roll credits, you're feeling satisfied, the game is done... AND THEN it eggs you on into trying out the postgame content, and then your interest kinda just... fades...

...end your game on a high note! Don't lead directly into completionist gobbledygook! A fakeout ending that continues into a "second phase" of the game is fine, but the stuff in that second phase better be really good too!

Kirby's long reused postgame levels didn't do it for me, so I put the game down after playing through the first one. I looked up what comes at the end of those extra levels, and it actually is really cool.

I enjoyed the main game a lot though! The combat was actually really fun; I was getting sick of mini-bosses by the end, but then realizing that you do way more damage as Normal Kirby just returning enemies' attacks to them made the combat more complex AND way faster. I wish they'd taught that earlier in the game. But the powerups were a ton of fun too.
04/08/22, 00:51   
@Secret_Tunnel

I feel this a lot. It's an interesting thing where adding content decreases value. I wish more games left me wanting more. I haven't quite finished Elden Ring once, but I don't know if I'll ever replay it. Meanwhile, I've beaten Bloodborne 4+ times and still think about replaying it every couple of months.
04/08/22, 20:09   
Edited: 04/08/22, 20:10
Just beat the final boss. That shit was fucked up. What kind of LSD-fueled-John-Carpenter's-The-Thing-ass-eldritch-horror-bullshit is HAL subjecting our children to?! Was this pitched to Capcom as a Resident Evil entry at some point? I love it.
04/10/22, 20:51   
@r_hjort So the Kirby trend holds huh?

04/10/22, 21:32   
@Zero
I guess so! Don't remember them being quite this...body horror-ish, though.
04/10/22, 22:16   
Beat the last boss yesterday and this may be the best Kirby game behind only Super Star and maybe Adventure. It just feels like a ton of love and effort was put into it.
04/18/22, 00:22   
Edited: 04/18/22, 00:22
Played a lot over the weekend. I'm a couple levels into the 4th world (Winter Horns) and I'm really liking this so far. For people who like to do everything (i.e. me!), there's a lot of game here. As I'm going along I've been fully completing each level's side objectives, doing all of the treasure stages/hitting the target times, and exploring the town hub. File % says I'm only a third of the way through, so yeah, the amount of good stuff here feels pretty substantial.

Secret_Tunnel said:
...except for the extraneous elements that detract from the elegance! There's a Waddle Dee in town that you give a code to in exchange for coins. And you get the codes by finding these secret walls that have the codes written on them. But wait, at that point, why not just have the coins spawn when you find the secret wall? And at that point, why are we even messing with clicking on walls in the first place? Why not put the coins in a chest at the end of an optional platforming challenge? You know, like the rest of the game already does?
I like the Waddle Dee Town, but yeah...it's got a lot of the Animal Crossing: New Horizons "slow, extra dialogue for dummies" stuff going on.

The worst offender for me is when you find an upgrade blueprint. Elfilin tells you to return to the town to bring the blueprint to the weapon shop. When you return to the town there's always this short cutscene where the camera pans over and focuses on the weapon shop, in case you forgot where it was and that you needed to go there. Then when you give the blueprint to the Waddle Dee blacksmith, it doesn't actually upgrade the weapon, it just puts an arrow sign next to the weapon in the shop so now you know you can upgrade it! Then you can go select the weapon yourself and - if you're finally ready to upgrade that weapon(!) - now you can actually use the blueprint. Now you get a cutscene where the blacksmith crafts the weapon, though thankfully this is skippable. At a minimum, why can't you just hand over the blueprint and do the upgrade as part of the same process?! I've had a few moments of returning to the world map and being like "Oh, I didn't actually upgrade the weapon yet."
04/18/22, 16:24   
Edited: 04/18/22, 16:27
100%'d this over the weekend. Overall I had a really fun time with this over the last week & change.

I definitely get what @Hero_Of_Hyrule was saying about burning out on the post-game content. I almost walked away too, but I had come so far and the completionist in me took over, so...that said, it was certainly a choice to (in the post-game) have some of Leon's soul orbs be missable, and to go back and get them you're forced to replay the entire level over again even if you only missed one orb in the first area. Especially when the levels are more-or-less levels that you've played through at least once already. It's not that it takes a particularly long time to run through the rest of the level, but still...WHY? Why is it better the way they implemented it?

Also, as someone who did all of "hit the target time" challenges for all of the Treasure Roads, I'm not sure why those didn't have better rewards. They weren't factored into the 100% completion, but I just enjoyed doing them as they were some of the toughest challenges in the game, but 50 coins is nothing. I think had you gotten something like an extra Rare Stone for completing those, the post-game could have been much less of a grind than it was. Instead, I spent a lot of time doing the same colosseum battles over and over. Again, it's not too time consuming after a certain point, but it's one of a few very curious design choices in an otherwise really well-made game.

r_hjort said:
Just beat the final boss. That shit was fucked up. What kind of LSD-fueled-John-Carpenter's-The-Thing-ass-eldritch-horror-bullshit is HAL subjecting our children to?! Was this pitched to Capcom as a Resident Evil entry at some point? I love it.
Haha, for real, I said the same thing! The last level was basically the last level from most RE games.
04/25/22, 18:39   
Edited: 04/25/22, 18:40
Late to the party... despite feeling that the demo was a snooze, I rented this one from GameFly. And it definitely grew on me, as I just got 100% file completion, and aside from the slow-ish start and the post-credits reused content world, I had a good time all the way through.

PogueSquadron said:
I don’t know if it’s Nintendo thinking that people LIKE a the gatcha style collection from mobile games or whatever, but yeah, I’m not a fan of the figurine collecting stuff.
I'm guessing it's a Japan thing. Those capsule machine toys are really popular there with kids, right? So is Kirby, so the cute little Gotcha figures make some sense, I guess. I was also pleasantly surprised at how generous it is with giving you new figures: I don't think I ever went four pulls in a row without getting a new figure, and often much less. I bet the game weights your chances heavily in favor of getting new figures.

Hero_Of_Hyrule said:
Something I really appreciate about this game (and Kirby 64, for that matter) is the variety of contexts each level takes place in. Kirby, among tons of other series, is guilty of doing samey levels. You've got your grass world, your desert world, your water world. And the levels within those worlds seem to be interchangeable and lacking in context.
That's true of this game, and maybe earlier games in this Return to Dream Land revival era, but I seem to remember Planet Robobot having some pretty unique level themes as well. There was a level where you ran across a bunch of billiards tables! That's actually the only example that comes to mind, but I bet in six years I'll have forgotten most of Forgotten Land as well...

Hero_Of_Hyrule said:
At this point, I got all of the waddle dees and have kinda fizzled out in the post game. I've replayed almost every level in the game at least once looking for Waddle Dees, so reused content like the Arena doesn't do it for me. I'm happy to call this one done.
I felt the same way going through the lengthy post-credits stages, which is the only place I found pacing problems. Going back for missing Dees was pretty breezy, since you can basically sprint to each stage's finish in a minute or two once you find what you missed the first time around. And the Arena stuff was much shorter than I expected, as the bosses melt so fast with the upgraded weapons you have by that point.

@TheBigG753 I agree about the post-game world's collectathon junk (thankfully I didn't miss any because I knew each area had Elfilin tell you when you were done, but it was annoying enough that I had to backtrack in a room several times when I reached the end and didn't see that message). Ditto the target time Treasure Road challenges: I only did each challenge once and really didn't want to go for the target times I missed, so I saved that for the very last thing, only to find that you don't need them for 100%, so now I'm not going to bother. And yeah, having done everything in the game and only getting enough Rare Stones to get Plus upgrades for like two copy abilities was a bummer.


Other random thoughts:

At first I was disappointed that the copy abilities had a much smaller moveset than their 2D counterparts, but in the end I didn't miss the more complex moves as much as I thought I would. They do a great job of differentiating all the abilities that are there as well, which isn't always the case with 2D Kirby.

My one misgiving from the jump to 3D is it can be hard to gauge the distance between Kirby and his foes, but it goes a long way that Kirby no longer takes damage from touching bosses in this game (something I took way too long to figure out). And the 3D arena gameplay suits the series's traditional epic endgame boss battles perfectly. I think I might have actually enjoyed the arena combat and boss battles of Kirby and the Forgotten Land more than Bayonetta 3...

Speaking of Bayonetta, Kirby's modern era Smash-esque dodge ability feels a lot more suitable to 3D battles than it did in 2D. Kirby even gets a bit of Witch Time slow-mo! This is so useful in the later battles, I'm a little surprised the game never really teaches it to the player.

I really liked the Tilt 'n Tumble style minigame and wish there was more of it. I'm less enthused about the fishing minigame, and the restaurant minigame was giving me crazy trouble on Frenzy difficulty until I went in with an actual strategy.

I love that the ultimate power Kirby uses to defeat the final boss is hitting them with a truck.

While going back for Dees was breezier than I'd expected, I wish the game just gave you the requirements for bonus Dees immediately. I'd say this is the only truly "grindy" thing in the game, aside from if you want to Plus upgrade every copy ability, which even the most hardcore Kirby fans will probably skip.

I actually think the way distant enemies and objects animate at lower framerates is charming! I've seen lots of complaints about this online with regards to this year's open world Pokemon games, and I thought it looked kind of neat in those games' trailers as well. I dunno, I assume it's done to maintain the game's performance, and it feels like a better solution than most.
12/04/22, 19:52   
Edited: 12/04/22, 20:17
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