Kirby fans finally get to feast. Yesterday, Nintendo announced Kirby and the Forgotten Land, a 3D adventure platformer set in a post-apocalyptic world whose ruin may or may not have been caused by a certain insatiable pink gelatinous mass. Iâm optimisticâcautiously optimistic, but optimistic nonetheless. I havenât been pumped for a Kirby game in [does math] oh noâŠ
As so often happens with these things, the game leaked a bit before the official unveiling, showing up as Kirby Discovery on Nintendoâs Japan site. When a Kirby game featuring bombed-out skyscrapers popped up during yesterdayâs Nintendo Direct, many observers already knew it was coming. They probably just didnât predict the name. (It is and forever will be a tragedy that this game isnât called The Last of Puffs.)
Read More: Kirbyâs Next Game Goes 3D For First Time, And It Looks Sick
The exact nature of the gameplay mightâve come as a surprise, too: fully 3D, apparently open-world platformer adventuring with creative powers and fast-paced combat.
Iâll be honest: Iâm not the biggest Kirby fan. The only game in the series Iâve lovedâlike, burn-entire-weekends-playing lovedâwas Kirby Air Ride, the 2004 GameCube racing game and a genuine masterpiece. The rest, however, have fallen flat for me. And the deluge of annual releases, while a draw for some fans, is kind of A Lot. I mean, seriously, itâs the sort of release cadence that leads to games like Kirby Fighters 2, the street faire version of Smash Bros
But Kirby and the Forgotten Land looks promising. Some of the combat tricks, like Kirby freezing one enemy and kicking it into another, seem a whole lot more creative than âswing sword and swing it again.â And that giant fight against a primate thatâs clearly grown to preposterous sizes because of radiation exposure pretty much seems like Deathâs Door: Kirby Edition. Sign me up.
Update, 12:15 p.m. ET: In a tweet, Nintendo hinted you might be able to use the power of Journalism. Hype meter overloaded.
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1441432251829420036
The exploration has me piqued, as well. From this initial look, I even got vibes of Bowserâs Furyâthe tremendously enjoyable bite-sized take on open-world Mario that launched earlier this yearâexcept on a grander scale. Iâm keen to see how Nintendo applies the Kirby touch to an open-world structure. (Fingers crossed for Warp Star races, perhaps preceded by 10-minute segments in which you travel around a multi-biome landscape collecting stat upgrades and occasionally jumping ship to different types of Warp Stars.)
And sure, post-apocalyptic settings have been done to death, but applying Kirbyâs contagious effervescence to one is just the sort of shot in the arm the genre needs. Massive cataclysmic event? Death on a civilization-wide scale? In Kirbyâs irrepressibly cheery realm of clouds and rainbows? I am burning with a desire to know how that happened.
Plus, Nintendoâs flagship pedigree in the Switch era has been nothing if not stellar. (See: Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Metroid Dread, which, yeah, isnât technically out yet but câmon.) It stands to reason that Kirby and the Forgotten Land could follow in greatness. And if itâs a total bust, well, hey, thereâs always Kirby Air Ride
Wait, I still canât play Air Ride on Switch? Theyâre doing N64 games instead!? FfffffâŠ.
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