When Kirby and the Forgotten Land came out on the original Nintendo Switch back in 2022, I was too deep into other games to give it a proper look. I had also heard enough mixed things about it, even if the overall consensus leaned positive, that I was not in a rush. Eventually, I worked out a trade with someone on Facebook Marketplace, and he happened to have a copy he was willing to swap. The catch was that it was the Switch 1 version rather than the Switch 2 edition that exists now. Upgrading through the Nintendo eShop would have cost me an extra twenty dollars, so I passed. Everything here is based on the Switch 1 version, even though I played it on my Switch 2.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land looks and plays the way you would expect a Kirby game to. The series is not in the same kind of trouble as modern Sonic, but Kirby releases tend to land anywhere between genuinely great and quietly disappointing. This is without question the best-looking entry in the franchise, though the visual jump over Kirby Star Allies is not as dramatic as you might hope given the gap between them.
The bigger shift is in how the game is structured. In many ways, Kirby is still Kirby, absorbing enemies and moving through a three-dimensional world much like he always has. My brother brought up the comparison to the PlayStation title Astro Bot, and there does seem to be a oddly familiar resemblance. Sony has never acknowledged it, but the general consensus seems to be that Astro Bot drew considerable “inspiration” from this game, which is a little ironic given that Forgotten Land was not even the most praised Nintendo release of its era. Nintendo builds something, and Sony finds a way to “borrow” from it ever since 1995.
Setting aside any console war debates, one of the things I was genuinely happy about was the co-op mode. My son Alexander has never been willing to sit quietly while I play games, so being able to bring him along for the ride made the whole experience more enjoyable. The setup is forgiving enough that his involvement did not seriously threaten my progress. The second player does not get to be a second Kirby, though. Instead, they play as Bandana Waddle Dee, armed with a spear that he keeps indefinitely since he cannot copy abilities the way Kirby can. He also has unlimited lives, while Kirby gets sent back to the last checkpoint if things go wrong.
The game is divided into themed worlds in the tradition of the series, cycling through environments like forests, snowy areas, lava, and more. Each world contains several stages that are not especially long but are designed with replayability in mind. Unlocking the boss at the end of each world requires rescuing a certain number of Waddle Dees first, which sent us back through stages more than a few times to collect what we had missed.
One of the more satisfying additions is the ability to upgrade Kirby’s copied abilities into enhanced versions. The sword ability eventually evolves well beyond the familiar Link-style hat and basic “Master Sword” blade into something considerably more powerful, which makes the sub-bosses and main bosses much more manageable to slay.
The other major new mechanic involves Kirby swallowing large objects from the environment, which reshapes how the game plays in different situations. He can take in a car and drive it, swallow a traffic cone to squeeze through tight triangle spaces or smash objects beneath him, become a vending machine and shoot soda cans that deal a surprising amount of damage, or transform into a glider and take to the air. These transformations add a lot of variety to how the levels play out.
My kids had a great time with it, though they had to accept playing as Waddle Dee rather than Kirby himself due to them being not so skilled, my stepdaughter Lily included. The game is not particularly long if you move through it without stopping to chase everything down. I finished the final boss somewhere in the six to seven hour range, and honestly, the ending caught me a little off guard because I thought I had more game ahead of me. If you want to find every Waddle Dee, fully upgrade all the abilities, and work through the additional content, something closer to twelve to sixteen hours is probably more realistic. I feel a little guilty for blowing past so much of it, but even played the way I played it, this is clearly one of the stronger Kirby games to come out in recent years. That said, I still have a soft spot for Kirby Star Allies, which came out in the early days of the original Switch and I I favor it slightly more.