So I heard you want to play Kirby on hard mode: tough bosses, tricky platforming, complicated puzzles, hidden collectibles, and maybe even punishments for failing. The Star-Crossed World expansion in Kirby and the Forgotten Land’s Switch 2 edition certainly introduces new challenges. There’s pressure from time constraints and consecutive platforming sequences, multistep puzzles, and bosses have more health, varied attacks, and phases. In Star-Crossed World, the promise of a more difficult Kirby game reaches its conceptual limits. But how hard can a game built around pressing one button to obliterate the problems in front of you get?
Kirby games are easy and sometimes monotonous because answers almost always precede their questions. To keep things simple, almost every action that Kirby can take requires one button. Vacuum up an enemy or object and shoot it out, or copy its ability and replace your vacuum with whatever new power-up you have. These new verbs are often used to solve puzzles, such as burning a fuse, so they have to be given out to the player ahead of time. Forgotten Land kept things interesting by arranging its questions and answers in a 3D space and blending more clues to hidden collectibles into its various apocalyptic environments to obscure everything just enough.
In Star-Crossed World, 12 levels have been reshaped by the crystalline powers of a legendary meteorite, introducing alternate routes and areas. Each of these levels is stuffed with little puzzles and platforming challenges like the base game and filled with environmental clues to new hidden collectibles. It keeps you engaged, never giving away its secrets too easily. It’s more Forgotten Land, but Forgotten Land had some good ideas to expand on, like its signature gimmick, Mouthful Mode.
Mouthful Mode adds a little bit of friction. Instead of powered-up versions of other abilities, it introduces entirely new verbs that are incorporated into puzzles and set piece moments: drift, illuminate, glide… vend? Three new Mouthful Modes are mixed into Star-Crossed World’s levels: slide, gear, and spring.
Slide is used for bespoke skiing sections that contain collectibles in hard-to-reach places, and you’ll find yourself replaying these sections at least once if you’re concerned with getting everything. Gear lets Kirby climb up walls, introducing entirely vertical platforming sections with a satisfying haptic feeling in the hand. Spring is the most used, and for good reason. It emphasizes jumping and — consequently — falling. Unable to hover, spring plays a bit more like Mario, with moving platforms, timed paths, and the specter of starting a section over if you fall. Over five hours of gameplay, I was entertained by the new ideas and puzzles presented in these levels.
Image: Nintendo
Star-Crossed World also expands on Kirby and the Forgotten Land’s optional endgame, the Colosseum boss rush mode. It’s made challenging by endurance — many fights, limited healing. The game’s true final boss is waiting at the very end of the new Ultimate Cup Z EX, and it’s been supplanted again with a new entity to join Kirby’s pantheon of cute, eldritch, and cute eldritch demons that bow to the pink puffball.
Combat in Forgotten Land is built around another new verb introduced in the base game, dodge, and Colosseum squeezes everything out of Kirby’s few actions. Much like Link in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, closely evading an enemy’s attacks slows time, allowing Kirby to get hits in with vacuumed up stars or whatever copy ability is on hand. Star-Crossed World’s additional bosses add some new mechanics to the base game’s already powered-up variants of its original bosses.
And it all feels balanced around revisiting my old, near 100 percent save with leveled-up copy abilities that resemble demigod-like powers. Tornado turns from a gust into a hurricane, burn from a flame to purple dragon wings of fire. I mostly used my overpowered sword, which was drawn from the grim reaper that multiplies in size and crashes down with fiery tornadoes. Against even powered-up versions of basic bosses, it takes just two hits to deplete entire health bars.
Toward the end of the Colosseum, however, bosses get more health bars and more phases. They also deal out enough blows that losing all of Kirby’s health becomes an inevitable threat. Twenty minutes into the final fight, game over means restarting the run entirely.
Image: Nintendo
That would be punishing if there were not plenty of health items you could buy ahead of time, if scanning Amiibo didn’t drop more healing items, and if copy abilities weren’t so overpowered. But that feeling of being overpowered is, I think, the point. It’s a bathetic balance — the moe kirby versus the end-time demon foretold in legend to reap the planet from beyond this dimension, or fighting a monarchical penguin to orchestral rock with an opera accompaniment. When Kirby decimates a lesser foe with the power of a hurricane, or a split atom, or death itself, I don’t feel like the game is anticlimactic, but has instead ramped up from trivial to lofty.
But Kirby doesn’t flatter your ego, either. I’m no god; we’re all equal when we hold down B for three charges to get the big hit in with our sword. That makes the potential constraints of any kind of hard mode conceptually antithetical to Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Copy abilities are overpowered, always timely, and they create brief spectacles of fun. What thrill you may further seek from the endurance trials of its boss gauntlet is also amplified by this streak of total annihilation coming to a climactic end.
So even when Star-Crossed World does everything it can to add challenge, it can never get too hard — and that’s enough for Kirby.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Star-Crossed World is available now on the Nintendo Switch 2.
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