Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition Review - The $80 Grift Continues
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 8 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition
Released: August 28th, 2025
Developer: HAL Laboratory
Publisher: Nintendo
Systems: Switch 2
With Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Nintendo intends to justify charging $79.99 for a last generation game, a vulgar stunt it also pulled with the Legend of Zelda’s Switch outings. Unlike those two, you can’t even get a “free” upgrade by joining Nintendo’s subscription services, instead having to put down an extra $19.99.
Either way, Nintendo’s going to have gotten eighty bucks for this thing, and in exchange you get a… better framerate. The videogame industry really is going down the fucking toilet, isn’t it?
To be more charitable than Nintendo ever will be, Forgotten Land’s extra-premium Switch 2 version has some extra content to show for itself. It’s cheekily presented as its own unique campaign, Star-Crossed World, when it’s actually a few extra levels tacked onto the main game.
These levels are reworked versions of existing ones, but I wouldn’t exactly call them lazy. While they’re not foundationally brand new, they are significantly altered to play like fresh experiences, so that’s something. It’s not twenty dollars of something, but it’s not nothing.
Regardless, Kirby and the Forgotten Land on Switch 2 charges more than twice what you’d pay for something as huge as Clair Obscur. Like every game at this exceptionally absurd new price point, I’ll accept nothing less than absurdly exceptional. It’s only fair, right?
Extra levels or not, Kirby and the Forgotten Land is not absurdly exceptional.
The original game was and is pretty good. Far from my favorite Kirby installment, but it’s adorable and full of fun ideas. Kirby’s “Mouthful” transformations, where he wraps himself around huge objects to gain new behaviors, is some genuinely clever stuff, and the delightful body horror of his pink flesh stretching to gratuitous proportions is highly entertaining.
Star-Crossed World offers three new Mouthful transformations. The first is a gear, which allows Kirby to jab himself into walls and roll around on them. There’s also a spring, which does exactly what a spring in a platformer would do, and a sign board that makes Kirby flat and initiates a decent little sledding sequence.
While none of the new forms are particularly mindblowing - especially compared to making Kirby a car or a gigantic water balloon - they fit in well with the rest of the game. The gear is used for some particularly clever vertical challenges where players need to jump across gaps in walls by jumping and sticking to separate surfaces.
I could take or leave the spring, really. It’s fine, but I could play with a bouncy spring in any number of other platformers. The sign’s sledding courses are also inoffensive, albeit not as fun as the roller coaster and glider sequences in the regular campaign.
Sadly there are no new Copy Abilities, which really hammers home how the additional content doesn’t feel like a full expansion. Three new situational transformations are cool and all, but having new enemies with new powers to absorb would go a long way to making this less of a remixed level pack.
As noted earlier, the Star-Crossed stages at least have enough going on to feel unique, with crystalline paths taking Kirby on all-new routes throughout a level. Naturally, there are plenty of areas purpose built to use the additional Mouthful forms, and they’re generally pretty good.
“Generally pretty good” perfectly describes all of what Star-Crossed World has on offer. It’s decent stuff, but it’s not really all that exciting. Playing an original level after its Star-Crossed variant can be a stark contrast in terms of variety, setpieces, and imagination. What’s more, the older levels look so much better.
See, the main gimmick of these variant stages is that everything is covered in crystal, which unifies the expansion’s content at the expense of color and character. Painting over each environment with blue textures and scattering a bunch of shards everywhere drains much of the vibrancy that makes Forgotten Land a visual treat.
Enemies also suffer from this lack of variety. Rather than bring much in the way of new mobs to the table, Star-Crossed World jams crystal bits into existing character models. It doesn’t look all that good, coming off like a crude and unimaginative way to make things different. Just dump a shard cluster on a guy’s head and call it unique. We couldn’t at least get a palette swap?
The “expansion” culminates in a boss fight that, like the levels, reworks an existing thing enough to feel unique. It’s also long and tedious, refusing to wrap up its shit despite being so slow and boring to fight.
All of this is to say Star-Crossed World is not enough of a reason to pay an additional premium for a last-gen game that wasn’t as enjoyably replayable as a lot of Nintendo’s output. Like, it’s great to play once, but even with the artificial replay incentive of hiding optional objectives from the player, there isn’t much to invite a second crack.
This leaves us with the enhancements made to Forgotten Land’s core during its move to the Switch 2, and it really is just a better resolution and framerate. It’s exactly the same thing, slightly better looking, and it charges significantly more for the privilege. There was nothing dated enough about the Switch version that justified a paid upgrade. That it isn’t a free update to what we already bought is honestly quite slimy.
If you read my Mario Kart World review, you’ll know the policy for these $80 games. It’s an extreme price tag, and that invites extreme levels of scrutiny - if a publisher expects an exceptional amount of money, the game must be exceptionally good, right? Basically, my standards become much higher and the critique will come at a premium, just as the games do.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is an old game with an obscene new price tag that doesn’t offer anywhere near enough to convincingly get away with it. The original game was great, but this package is a cash grab from a company intent on selling its flagships out. It's really sad to see Kirby, my favorite Nintendo series, used to normalize this exploitative new price point.
5.5/10
