Emulator Hour: Kirby's Dream Land 3 (SNES/NS)

 

Oof.

I kinda do not want to talk too harshly about Kirby's Dream Land 3 as played on the SNES Online Switch App on the Nintendo Switch because it was a game that Conklederp wanted me to play as a way of us destressing before falling asleep at night (Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity was understandably too high energy), but she also witnessed enough of my frustration and annoyance while playing the game that I think it is safe here to do so.

I have some history with the Kirby franchise in the form of playing a little of Kirby's Dream Land on the Game Boy, 3D Classics: Kirby's Adventure, and I played the demos for Kirby's Epic Yarn (20 minutes at PAX2010) and Kirby's Star Allies last year on the Switch; after playing Kirby's Dream Land 3, I did play Kirby's Super Star so I have that in the back of my brain too while writing this article, but chronologically, I had not played this title yet before KDL3.  So please keep that all in mind as I attempt to be coherent in my wordings from here on out.

I did not really enjoy Kirby's Dream Land 3.  Outside of the intro cinematic showing the black-blob-force crash-landing in Dream Land (sorry, I just learned it is called Planet Popstar, so now I'm the idiot) and taking over the various characters that inhabit this land/realm, I found the game to be significantly lacking in any description of what you were supposed to be doing besides moving from the left side of the screen to the right.  Sure it follows the standard Kirby format of swallowing and absorbing the power of certain enemies (while others you just swallow with no effect), but the visual depiction and definition of what the effects are after swallowing an applicable enemy leave a lot to be desired.  BUT!, this does make a bit of sense because, in KDL3, you are able to have an optional companion that modifies the abilities, but I will get to that down below because I have more to go on about.

The game is broken up into (technically) six worlds, although the final world can only be accessed if you managed to collect all of the Heart Stars from each of the six levels and a boss fight in all five of the worlds.  What are Heart Stars you ask?  I have almost no idea aside from them being a collectible.  I know that if you do something in each stage, you will meet an NPC who you help (maybe?) and they reward Kirby with a Heart Star at the end of the stage.  How do you get a Heart Star?  Again, no clue, because how you acquire them changes with each level you are in, and I only know this because I am also currently looking at a walkthrough on GameFAQS.  

I genuinely feel that this mechanic of Heart Stars only exists to draw out the length of the game, because if you do not know how to earn a Heart Star, or if you do not accidentally come across something to do in a level that is not immediately moving to the right, then you will most likely have to replay a level again and again until you discover that to get the Heart Star in Level 1 of World 1: Grass Land, you have to not step on any of the flowers in the third room.  Or if you have never played any of the Metroid games, you may not know that you need the Ice Beam (or any ice-based weapon in KDL3) to defeat the Metroids who make a cameo appearance along with Samus; This one, in particular, upset me because it requires outside knowledge that you do not have from this game in order to collect the Heart Star; sure you might already be favoring an ice weapon since the stage is all fire-based.  For me, I decided that I was just going to play each level, make it through, and if I found a Heart Star, then good on me and move on.  If I did not find one, then oh well, and move on.

My last complaint about KDL3 is that I felt that the gameplay felt very sludge-like.  Kirby and his companion if I was using any, would move almost painfully slow.  There were some stages where there were no enemies on screen and I was just walking/running to the right, over hill and under hill with the speed of a fat and overfed Hobbit.  Yes, I could instead have them run (double-tapping forward), but even that felt like it should have been the default speed.  This never felt like a problem with the game itself running slowly on the Switch, only that the characters themselves would move slowly, that they were designed to move at this speed.  I present to you Exhibit A below, from World 1: Grass Land - Level 5:

Not so much a complaint as it is a critique of the way that I played KDL3, was that by the end of World 1: Grass Land, I was not even trying to act like I never used the Rewind feature that is part of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System - Nintendo Switch Online app.  I fully admit that I spammed the hell out of it on most occasions, so purists can claim that I only pseudo-played KDL3 but I did not play it as intended by the developers.  Which is fine.  This is also probably why I had upwards of 29 lives by the end of the game and really did not care about collecting the star pieces (needing 30 for an extra life).  Most of the time though, I would just power through if I took damage, but the times when I was down to one HP left (or the equivalent against whatever enemy I was trying to get past), I would rewind the game so that I could figure out how to not die in the process.  Sometimes this was just from me playing the game too quickly and being careless, other times it genuinely felt that it was a GOTCHA moment designed to eat up Kirby's life.  But for those moments, this was how I would (frequently) play, I offer Exhibit B, from somewhere in World Five: Iceberg:

Now, KDL3 does look very good for an SNES game released in 1997, I have no qualm there.  The multiple layers of background scrolling in some stages is pretty impressive, especially when compared to Super Mario World being a launch title.  The music too, oftentimes, is spot-on as catchy as you would expect to find in a Kirby game.  But for me, there were just not enough saving graces for me to want to go back and collect all of the Star Hearts so that I could fight the final boss and achieve the best ending.  There were moments of fun, like figuring out how the abilities Kirby absorbed would be used by each of his companions, but other times I would be perfectly happy with Pitch and fly, avoiding as many enemies as possible; or just use Kirby's flying ability to, again, avoid as many enemies as possible and in turn, as much of the platforming as possible as well.  Sure Coo is a better flyer than both Kirby and Pitch, but I tended to not like Coo's special attacks as much as Pitch, but that is just me.

I think what a lot of Kirby's Dream Land 3 came down to was that it felt like this was the third game in a series that Nintendo and HAL Laboratory had felt that the player was coming into with a tank full of knowledge about the Kirby franchise and game mechanics.  There did not seem to be a lot in the way of handholding to get the player used to any mechanics and the lack of any description, from what I could tell, about the Star Hearts just seemed to me like an insult to the player and possibly even cheap on the part of the developers.  Sadly, a fun soundtrack and a great-looking game were not enough for me to have many more positive things to say about Kirby's third foray into Dream Land, sorry, Planet Popstar.  But, Kirby's Dream Land 3 will hardly keep me from trying other games in the Kirby franchise in the future.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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