whatirby was designed to be easily drawn. Part balloon, part clever bubblegum, creator Masahiro Sakurai envisioned a character so simple that children would write it down in their notebooks for decades to come. And it worked: Nintendo’s ball-shaped mascot is ubiquitous in modern meme culture. However, despite Kirby’s status as an internet icon, for most of his existence, he never quite he had the classic game to match.
Fortunately for Kirby, all that changed last year, with his fantastic first foray into the third dimension: Kirby and the Forgotten Land. It was a success, changing 5 million copies and delighting gamers of all ages (including this 31-year-old). Now, Nintendo has raided its vaults to reanimate an old Kirby adventure: Return To Dream Land’s colorful platformer was largely ignored when it originally arrived in 2011, sent to die on the (then) ailing Wii. Why not give it a second chance on the mega-successful Nintendo Switch?
The problem? The passage of time has not been kind. After Forgotten Land’s playful inventiveness, this feels all too familiar and drab. A no-nonsense basic platformer, this colorful odyssey sees up to four squishy heroes making their way through eight worlds together, gobbling up different power-ups and tracking down the missing parts of an alien visitor’s ship. You must go from A to B, solving some satisfying challenges to sniff out hidden collectibles through levels themed around lush forests, underwater caverns, and icy plains. Until now, so 1998.
Return To Dream Land is never bad, is consistently nondescript. The boss fights, usually a Kirby highlight, are disappointing by the numbers, and the same enemy designs appear over and over again, offering only slight variation on the same three creature archetypes. To his credit, though, this adventure also sees Kirby’s inhalable power-ups in his prime (shout out to the absorbable ability that turns our pink blob into a statue of flexing muscles). These stylish abilities fill the screen with a burst of color, transforming Kirby into anything from a gigantic sword-wielding giant to a lovable angry-looking wizard.
It’s pleasantly silly, much better when you’re playing with a crowd. Recruit a friend or two, and the fun factor of this colorful adventure increases exponentially. Nintendo has tried to reframe this game as a multiplayer hotspot, adding a square full of fun, if forgettable competitive minigame trivia. And a newly added epilogue brings back a bit of the single-player magic of Forgotten Land. Starring Kirby’s alien visitor Magalor, this unlockable mode sees the lost traveler journeying through a mysterious dimension, relearning his forgotten magical abilities. Its intriguingly sinister tone makes it more interesting than anything that has come before.
Before it had a face, Kirby’s unassuming spherical design was intended as a graphic placeholder, but then its creators fell for its squishy simplicity. Return to Dream Land feels like a playable placeholder, ticking all the right boxes without actually being exciting. In multiplayer it’s much more fun, but after the delightfully inventive Super Mario Odyssey-inspired Forgotten Land escapades, revisiting the safe, side-scrolling era of Kirby has little appeal.
