After all these years, I’ve missed out on Kirby’s Dreamland 3 and I never really understood why. Granted it came out when the N64 was new (so nobody cared too much for new Super Nintendo games) and Kirby was arguably more popular on handhelds than most of his typical console games. Though I did love and enjoy Kirby’s Dreamland 2 on Gameboy and now that it’s on the Nintendo Switch’s SNES library, I decided to give it a shot.
Unlike the other two Dream Land games, since it’s on Super Nintendo, it’s all in full color. It’s not a spin-off game by any means. Which means that you play as Kirby, take enemies powers, and make it to the end of the stage, until you run out of stages or lives. There’s not many new powers I’ve noticed in the game, it actually seems like less but I could be thinking of it compared to more recent Kirby games.
There are more animal friends for Kirby to team up with. Rick the Hamster, Coo the Owl, and Kine the fish are back from Dream Land 2. New friends are Nago the cat, ChuChu the octopus, and Pitch the bird. But I seem to favor the original friends more than these newcomers. They all create different powers when Kirby joins forces with them. Some are neat, and some are useless, or they really slow you down.
But you also have sub-bosses and bosses. Most of the sub-bosses are more or less, some kind of guessing game. Which is a little lame, even for a Kirby game. The end of each world has a real boss, and they can be rather challenging. But nothing more or less harder than any other Kirby boss in any of the other games.
But honestly, Kirby’s Dream Land 3 is one of the worst in the series. I thought Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards was a let-down, but they really dropped the ball with Dream Land 3. It seems like perhaps that everyone who was terrible at Nintendo in the late 1990’s, worked on this game alone, while all the other talented people worked on the other games. Now the reason it took me over twenty years to play the game becomes stunningly clear to me.
Score: D
