Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Switch 2 Edition + Star Crossed World Review – Delightfully Enhanced

Kirby and the Forgotten Land was one of the most delightful games on the Nintendo Switch – a fantastic 3D platformer that transitioned Nintendo’s pink puffball into the third dimension without ever losing sight of the special sauce that made his games so appealing to begin with. Kirby and the Forgotten Land was a revelation, an incredible 3D platformer up there with the genre’s best, packed with content, high end production values, and comprehensively bringing Kirby into 3D.

While we are all waiting for Nintendo and HAL to deliver the next 3D flagship entry in the franchise, they have revisited this Switch classic and updated it for the Nintendo Switch 2. Kirby and the Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Star Crossed World says everything you need to know about it on the tin – this is a Switch 2 updated version of the excellent Forgotten Land, with a new campaign bundled in for good measure.

Let’s talk about those updates first. The Switch 2 has excellent enhanced backward compatibility that will play most Switch 1 games better out of the box. Some Switch 1 games can get free updates to make them run and look better on Switch 2; Nintendo has released about a dozen of those patches. But when the work into updating a game for Switch 2 is extensive, and/or comes with new features and content, Nintendo usually packages the update as a paid upgrade under the Switch 2 Edition moniker – and that’s what Kirby and the Forgotten Land gets.

"It might be tempting to compare it to Bowser’s Fury or Shadow Generations, and in some ways, those analogies hold."

The updates here are excellent. The original game was, even in early 2022, pushing the boundaries of what could be done on the Switch hardware. The original game had very aggressive dynamic resolution scaling, running anywhere between 810p to 1080p in docked mode, and frequently dropping below 720p in handheld mode. All of that is gone now, and Forgotten Land on Switch 2 runs at a very clear 1440p image that looks clear and crisp, and does justice to the game’s lovely art style.

More importantly, the original game ran at 30fps. It was a locked 30fps, but for a platformer, the frame rate can and does matter, and as great as Forgotten Land was at 30fps, it distinctly felt like it would be even better at 60fps. And lo and behold, it is. The Switch 2 version of theme runs at a locked 60fps. What’s equally important (at least for some players that I know), the distracting decimated frame rate effect is minimized or outright gone too. Players who played Forgotten Land on the Switch probably remember what I am talking about – objects a little further out from Kirby would run at reduced frame rates in a bid to save resources, so you could have things on the screen running at half the game’s already low baseline frame rate. In Forgotten Land, objects either don’t run at reduced frame rates at all, or if they do, they are much more distant from the player, and the reduced frame rate doesn’t seem to be as aggressive as on the Switch 1.

So those are all nice and necessary upgrades that allow this game to shine even more so than it did before. If you have been hankering for a replay of the game, these updates practically justify upgrading your Switch 1 copy by themselves. But as specified previously, this update also comes with a brand new mini campaign included.

It might be tempting to compare it to Bowser’s Fury or Shadow Generations, and in some ways, those analogies hold. Like those, Star Crossed World is a much smaller affair than a full new game, clocking in at 4-5 hours for completion at a leisurely pace. Like those, it uses the foundation of the base game to build something new.

"It is a shame, however, that the new content is all technically a remix of the existing content."

Where it differs from those two, however, is in how much it uses that foundation. Bowser’s Fury and Shadow Generations are both essentially entirely separate games that just happen to be bundled with their base games. Star Crossed World on the other hand is very much a part of Forgotten Land’s world and story, and even its levels take place in the same levels as the base game – technically. Each of these levels is remixed so thoroughly with new mechanics, new layouts, new aesthetics, and new enemies, that it ends up differing from the level it was originally based on substantially. I played each of the new levels back to back with the original levels they were based on, and while there were often commonalities, generally speaking the new levels felt appropriately “new”.

It is a shame, however, that the new content is all technically a remix of the existing content, and that the new content can be completed relatively quickly, because this is the part of the upgrade package that I am less convinced by. If you wanted to merely play the new levels, and that’s what you were buying the upgrade for, well, it’s not a bad purchase at all, but I do think the new content by itself can’t justify the price of the upgrade. The upgrades to the base game, with the content as a bonus, makes for a reasonably appealing proposition – wanting just the new content, on the other hand, changes that calculus.

Then too is it worth considering that right now, if you are someone who has never played Kirby and the Forgotten Land before, and you want to play it on your Switch 2, without the technical compromises of the original version, you will be spending $80 on the game – $60 for the 2022 original (which still has not had a price increase), plus $20 for the upgrade. Kirby is a marvellous game, but the price starts to get prohibitively high at that point – especially given that there are arguably better 3D platformers available on the Switch 2, from Nintendo themselves, for cheaper than that.

"Kirby and the Forgotten Land is an easy recommendation."

That pricing dynamic creates expectations and scrutiny on this upgrade that it doesn’t deserve. It’s a great graphical uplift with some bonus content thrown in – if that was all it was seen as, things would be fine; but, of course, some people will want to get it only for the new content, and some people will want to get the whole package for the first time now, and both of those scenarios are ones where the pricing ends up adding caveats to what should otherwise be an easy recommendation.

Because Kirby and the Forgotten Land should be an easy recommendation. It’s a top tier game, stuffed full of content and with oodles of charm and flair. This upgrade makes that clear, and allows the game to shine in the way it was always meant to. Nintendo will at some point need to reassess how it prices things, sure, and Kirby itself unfortunately has to deal with the fallout of that. But the actual game and upgrade we get here is an excellent update for an excellent game.

This game was reviewed on the Nintendo Switch 2.