One of the most enduring traits of the Switch is that many companies keep on porting their games over to the console. With the console becoming the third best-selling console of all time, only being beaten by the DS and PS2, there’s obviously a big market for this console, especially with how portable it is compared to most other consoles, and how it’s the least expensive modern console. Of course, Nintendo themselves aren’t foreign to the idea of remaking old games for the Switch as well, with Super Mario 3D All Stars and Metroid Prime: Remastered. And, with HAL stepping up to give us Kirby’s Return To Dreamland Deluxe game, this new remaster proves to be more than just a simple spit and polish.
The story is the same as it has been since it was first released. It begins with Kirby being chased by King Dedede and Bandana Waddle Dee chasing Kirby for his cake while Meta Knight just reads a book and watches on. However, an alien ship called the Lor Starcutter crashes down on the planet, and all the ship’s pieces scatter throughout Planet Popstar. The captain of this ship, Magolor, is stranded on Popstar until Kirby and his friends volunteer to go out and get all the pieces for Magolor. After completing the task, the story takes a turn which adds even more levels, but also a twist or two for the story.
Gameplay-wise, you’re taking control of the super tuff pink puff, Kirby. You can run, jump and fly, inhale enemies, and if they have any abilities, copy them. The abilities you can inhale vary, with them being classics like a sword to slice and cut enemies and ropes, fire to burn your foes, and light fuses. Newcomers, when this was on the Wii, was a whip, which lets you attack enemies from a distance and pull items towards you, water, which lets you put out fire blocks and attack foes with water, and spear, which lets you use a spear to stab foes and fly with a helicopter move made from your spear.
For this new deluxe version, we have two new abilities, with the first one being the sand ability, where you use sand to build sandcastles that hurt those that walk into it, and hide in it not to get hurt, alongside other sand-based attacks. The other new ability is the mecha ability, with Kirby using a mech to fight with lasers, flying with a jetpack, and laying down land mines. In certain stages, you can get an ultra ability, which lets you use a powerful and stronger version of these abilities, letting you use them to destroy entire screens of enemies, or even solve puzzles that are easy enough to see, unlocking portals to another dimension. At the end of each world, you will have to deal with a boss to fight to move onto the next world, putting your skills to the test, even if they are rather easy at first.
Using all these unique and powerful abilities, you are able to go through level after level, fighting your enemies with your many various powers. While each world has its own unique design theme, in each world, it’s pretty easy to mistake one level for another within the same world. Despite this feeling of sameness in levels in each world, the levels themselves still have their own unique gimmicks and set pieces. From what ultra abilities you use in the end to the unique items you can use to fight back against the enemies, the main draw in these levels besides beating them is using the abilities to track down energy spheres. There are 120 energy spheres in the entire game. Within the alternate dimensions, after completing a platforming challenge without any abilities and fighting a sphere doomer, you get 2 energy spheres, rewarding you for the dedication. With each milestone of energy spheres collected, you unlock a door on the Lor Starcutter. They could be doors to copy ability rooms providing an easy access point for every copy ability, the doors to sub games, and the challenge rooms.
The challenge rooms provide a good difficult task for you to do; master the abilities and go through each challenge room, getting as high of a score as possible. With how easy the main game is, these challenge rooms provide a fair yet still hard fight to get the gold and platinum medals. It asks you to be careful with your fighting, as well as getting all the medals to get as many points as you can, not taking damage, and finding the secret rooms. It may look simple at first glance, but when you get deep into it, the challenge rooms can be addicting to try and beat your current records over and over again.
While you could try to play the games only on the Lor Starcutter, there is another option; going on a vacation to another dimension in another time to Merry Magoland. This side mode is unlocked pretty early within the first world, so you don’t have to unlock all the sub-games in the Lor Starcutter to play them. Here, Magolor is running a theme park and has 10 different sub-games, 8 from the past Kirby games, and 2 brand new subgames. The first one is Magolor’s Tome Trackers, where you have to help Magolor find some missing Tomes he’s thinking about, and the other one is Booming Blasters, where Kirby and three other contestants fight each other using guns that get more powerful with each hit. The other returning sub-games are Egg Catcher, where you must eat eggs while avoiding bombs, Kirby On The Draw, where you must shoot pop-up targets in the Wild West, Ninja Dojo, where you must time your shuriken shots to get as close to a bullseye as possible, and so on.
Alongside these minigames, there is a game that can be played online; Samurai Kirby 100. Unlike the original version of the game, where you are battling against either 5 rounds of computer players or against a group of humans to see who has the fastest reaction time, you are fighting against 99 other humans to see who has the best reaction time. It’s a tense time with a fitting samurai theme, waiting for the red exclamation point and loud sound to signify when to hit. However, this is the only minigame you can play online with others, and even then, you are pretty much just fighting against the high scores of others to get the best score in a one-button press game, which is a shame. The other games here range from, at worst, a game that is fun until you master it, all the way up to games that are fun to play over and over again. While you can play these games with friends in local play, having the option for online play would definitely have increased the longevity of these games.
Thankfully, there are also missions with each sub-game to make your stay here more meaningful. They can be from simple tasks like just playing the game with a certain mask, all the way up to performing a near-flawless run of the sub-game. These missions, alongside just playing the sub-games and finding hidden Magolors in the park, earn you stamps towards your stamp card, where you can earn masks to dress up like other characters, and items that can help you in the main story. This not only helps give these sub-games replay value but also gives you a genuine mission when it comes to playing in Merry Magoland. For the first time, mastering these sub-games in a Kirby game has a purpose and counts towards completing the entire game as a whole.
And just in case that wasn’t enough Kirby for you, when you beat the main game, you unlock not only the arena mode, alongside a harder mode for the game with its own harder challenge rooms but also a new epilogue exclusive to the remake called Magolor Epilogue. After ending up in another dimension, Magolor finds himself missing each and every trick and power he once had. However, he finds himself a fruit fragment which could be the key to bringing back his powers. To accomplish this, he has to traverse this dimension and beat the bosses guarding these fragments. These bosses look like repeats from the main story at first, but they all have an elemental advantage over you, which they will more than happily use to grind you into the dirt.
During the levels, Magolor is able to recover some of his missing magic by attacking enemies and picking up gems. Attacking enemies will increase your combo on the top right of the screen. You will be graded for how many magic points you gained during each level alongside how big the combo has ever gotten during the level. Thankfully, unlike Pizza Tower, there is no big reward for keeping a combo throughout the entire level, but getting the platinum rank will still be a tricky task should you try to tackle it. Regardless if you do go after these ranks or not, the area is still a challenge in comparison to the original game, especially the bosses which step up in terms of difficulty from the main story.
You’re not always going to be weak during this mode. As you grab magic points, you get the chance to increase Magolor’s powers and help him become even more powerful than he once was. You can throw magic spheres and upgrade them into fiery orbs, make it so guarding ensures you never take damage, and even fly for longer and longer times. You also will be unlocking abilities after each world, be it throwing bombs, summoning a laser or black hole once your magic gauge fills up all the way, and even further upgrading your abilities. It’s definitely a system that encourages you to go back to earlier levels to see how much better you could do once you become much stronger than you were back then, and it’s just as fun to do so.
As you noticed, this game is packed to the brim with ideas for games; each of which could be conceivably resold on its own on the Nintendo Switch’s online store, albeit not at the $60 price tag the actual game is priced at; maybe $10 at most; $7 ideally. But here, with them all combined together, it not only gives us a fun time going through an adventure but offers extra challenges and incentives to those that want to fully complete this game. And the best part is that all of it is still mostly fun to do. Some of the missions for Magoland can be thumb breakers to even the most experienced Kirby veterans, like winning 2 rounds of Samurai Kirby back-to-back on the hardest level or catching almost every single egg in Egg Catchers on the hardest level. And the extra mode being just the same original game just with less health and harder enemies does feel a bit lazy and like cheap artificial difficulty when you keep dying over and over again at one part.
Regardless, despite those minor complaints, this is the definitive way to experience Kirby’s Return To Dreamland. It still has the nice and colorful graphics and charming music of the first game, just with even more music and graphics with the new modes in this game. The main adventure is still fun to go through and 100%, alongside the new modes and experiencing everything they have to offer. Be it just a casual romp or a dedicated adventure to comb through every bit the game has to share with you, it’s just a classic fun time all around. Kirby has once again returned to Dreamland, and it’s even better than before.
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