Star-Crossed World Is More Kirby and the Forgotten Land—And That's Great

Star-Crossed World is simply more Kirby and the Forgotten Land. There are new levels, new Mouthfuls that give Kirby new contextual powers to explore and exploit, new comically adorable shapes to stretch him into, and another, even-more-devious version of this game’s Arena, the Colosseum. That’s it! That’s the whole of this downloadable content. 

And you know? That’s fine. It’s great, even. Kirby and the Forgotten Land, to use a technical term, whips ass. I said as much back at this very publication back in April of 2022 when it was released, only in far more words than that. Let’s save you some time and get to the pertinent, catch-you-up bits:

Forgotten Land might be considered easy, especially at a time when we’re all obsessing over Elden Ring and fresh off another round of difficulty discourse, but there is a difference between “easy” and “boring.” Forgotten Land is certainly not boring: it is brimming with worthwhile things to do and see, and is loaded with levels that do not feel like a chore to replay immediately after playing them the first time. Bosses are often a highlight in Kirby games, and Forgotten Land keeps that tendency going. It introduces nearly all new opponents, and when it pulls from the series’ history, it is sure to add new wrinkles to those bouts, while adapting the old ones to 3D to give them new depth and danger to consider. Each boss has a “take no damage” mission to complete, too, so, good luck with that.

Forgotten Land is also a joyful game, and not just when you manage to complete a hidden mission before the game alerts you to its existence. That’s a vital consideration: who cares if a game is relatively easy if it’s bringing you joy? There is joy in navigating Forgotten Land’s platforming, its challenges, its boss fights, in discovering the attention to detail that HAL incorporated into Kirby’s facial expressions, his animations, the flattening of an enemy under a hammer, the way pieces of the franchise’s past so seamlessly made it into 3D for the first time. The animation is stellar, and the game’s bright colors and generally fantastic visual design ensure that it’s all a treat to look at on hardware that lagged behind even before they went and added another number after “PlayStation.” The soundtrack relies less on Kirby’s past than any Kirby game has in decades—maybe because Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando, who have been composing Kirby titles since 1992’s Dream Land and 1993’s Kirby’s Adventure, respectively, are just two of four composers credited in Forgotten Land—but it’s loaded with catchy tunes that will likely fold into the larger library of constantly rearranged Kirby music before long, and it’s all perfectly suited to the game it’s scoring in the present. It is as vital to the way the game makes you feel while playing it as any of the facial expressions Kirby makes, or his late-game wielding of dual flaming hammers, or the level design that has you coming back just one more time to rescue that last Waddle Dee.

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Star-Crossed World is more of that, in multiple ways. Forgotten Land built itself up as wildly approachable for less-experienced players—my own children are proof enough of this, as the game’s insistence on handling the camera for you and allowing the player to devote themselves to movement and exploration bridged a necessary gap for them, which has since allowed one of them to have already done and dusted a few Metroid games before he turned six years old this summer—but turned up the difficulty in a number of ways late. That’s what Kirby games do. They are simple to approach, accessible even to newer players of games in general, exceptionally forgiving within their genre, but end up challenging you at some point if you go searching for it. Oftentimes they’re at their cruelest after credits roll, so it’s an invitation to more rather than a barrier that stands in the way of feeling like you’ve accomplished something. 

Star-Crossed World is an accelerated version of this, with the earliest new levels of the dozen included simple enough to get you back in the swing of things if you haven’t picked up Forgotten Land in the past few years after clearing it back in 2022, and then the complexity of what it asks of you increases with every stage. The final boss is an absurd [complimentary] jump in difficulty, too, and then there’s the new edition of the Colosseum, in which you face basically souped up versions of every major boss in the game in succession, and then a few more overpowered bosses besides, including one whose first—and only—look you get at them is within this game mode. Familiarity won’t help you here, only properly applying the lessons you have learned elsewhere will do.

The levels might begin in familiar locales, but they all branch off utilizing the bridges and pathways that open up before you as you make the crystal “flowers” bloom—these crystals arrived on the scene after a meteor crashed into the titular forgotten land, and since this is a Kirby game, it’s not just a meteor. It just happens to contain a galaxy-devouring evil entity, whose cage has been weakened by the impact of the blast. You have to go and find the Starries—the DLC’s version of hidden Waddle Dees—to repair that living cage around the evil meteor. And then fight it when—spoilers?—that plan doesn’t work out. Luckily, you are Kirby, and outgunning cosmic horrors that have the power to destroy the universe is kind of his thing, casually penciled in before lunch just in case.

These levels are built around familiar powers and movements, as well as some of the existing Mouthful abilities and methods of traversal, but you also have a new spring that can jump high or crash back down with enough power to wipe out nearby enemies, a sandwich board that allows Kirby both to and be a snowboard, and a gear that allows for clinging to walls, dashing into enemies, and making jumps across vertical surfaces that require you literally stick the landing. They’re all just different enough to use that they fit in well with the existing Mouthful abilities and open up some new platforming designs to conquer, and the Star-Crossed World levels are designed to work well whether you’re coming at them alongside a playthrough of the game’s base stages, or as an addendum to an already completed main campaign. They don’t have bosses—not until the actual one that ends the main stretch of the DLC—so it’s fine if you’re playing without fully upgraded copy abilities or access to the Morpho Knight sword that recovers some of your health the more attacks you successfully land. You probably do want that stuff for that one boss, though. While the rest of the levels fit in neatly alongside the standard ones, the boss feels more like it was designed as the overall campaign’s final confrontation, and a stepping stone to the version of the Colosseum that wants to make you feel bad about needing the temporary item power-ups to get through it on Wild difficulty.

There is nothing new here in Star-Crossed World in terms of convincing you to buy Forgotten Land. It is Forgotten Land, just more of it. It’s less a remix of existing levels than the game’s postgame that isn’t really a postgame since you don’t actually conclude the game’s narrative or face its greatest challenges until you complete it was, but it can be thought of in the same way: as an extension of the existing game, played in a slightly different way, but still very much the same game you were already enjoying. Parts of it are for the sickos, sure, but it’s the same approachable Forgotten Land it’s always been, even if it’s three years later and running at a higher framerate on the Switch 2.

And again: that’s great. Forgotten Land already did the heavy lifting of reimagining Kirby for 3D, of establishing what the game and its specific rules and conventions were, of building out the model that Star-Crossed World follows. It became the best-selling game in franchise history, with over 7.5 million reported sales over a year-and-a-half ago, before the DLC drop and Switch 2 re-release with upgraded performance and visuals hit at the end of August—HAL and Nintendo already knew they had this one nailed down, as it didn’t put up those numbers solely because of the Switch’s massive install base. More of what was mostly already here, but a little different, isn’t a disappointment three-plus years later. It’s a parting gift; what comes next for Kirby will surely be completely different, as it so often is. There is time for completely different later. For now, more Forgotten Land will more than suffice.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin