Kirby's Dream Land 3 Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 4/29/2025)

[Image from igdb.com]

Kirby's Dream Land 3

Developer: HAL Laboratories

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): 2D Platformer

Platforms: SNES

Release Date: November 27, 1997

Kirby’s Dream Land 3 sticks out like a sore thumb. For one, it’s the third entry in a Kirby subseries that up until now has been released exclusively on the original Game Boy. Propelling the initial line of Kirby games from a handheld to the console running concurrently with it should seem like an ideal upgrade. However, Nintendo failed to realize that the third Dream Land entry is now in the same league as the Kirby heavy hitters, since it’s not restricted by the Game Boy’s primitive hardware. One would likely place higher expectations on Dream Land 3, considering its advantages, but the game is not at all comparable to the epic scale of Kirby’s Adventure or the sheer variety of Kirby Super Star. All Dream Land 3 does is make me reach a point of clarity, that maybe the rudimentary nature of the Game Boy was not what inherently plagued all of the games sharing the same title.

Well, I suppose it’s lovely seeing Kirby with his fluorescent pink hue again. HAL Laboratories decided not to maintain the Game Boy’s minimalism as a defining trait of the subseries, wisely choosing to depict Dream Land with the same colorful detail as they would with any other SNES game. Still, restoring Dream Land to its state of effervescence with a 16-bit machine is too simple. The restoration process in question evidently involved tracing in the black and white bits of the Dream Land series with crayon, intended to emulate the childlike, whimsical visual style of Yoshi’s Island. Given that the Kirby series is catered to the same, particularly young demographic as Yoshi’s protagonist debut, the cherubic tint of colorful paraffin wax works wonders in pronouncing Dream Land’s wondrous atmosphere. HAL Laboratories probably saw the distinctive visual flair of Yoshi’s Island and were kicking themselves that Kirby couldn’t have patented it for himself. Fortunately, the Nintendo higher-ups allowed them to borrow this pastel aesthetic, and it’s the best-looking Kirby game thus far.

Sadly, the visual style is THE only redeeming quality of Dream Land 3. I can’t explain this, but somehow, Dream Land 3 manages to underperform even in comparison to its Game Boy predecessors. To start my laundry list of grievances, Kirby has never felt more lethargic. The pink blob has never been as spry as, say, Sonic, but his rate of movement here is sluggish as all hell. When Kirby runs, I half expect him to utter exasperated noises that signal his shortness of breath, like Eric Cartman running the gym class pacer test. One might suggest that the solution to Kirby dragging ass on his feet is to simply take advantage of his limitless floating ability. However, they’d fail to realize that flying too often will mitigate entire levels. More so than any other Kirby title before it, the levels in Dream Land 3 are ridiculously linear. Lifting Kirby to the ceiling and maintaining that elevated position with his innate physical floatiness practically guarantees a smooth, uninterrupted trajectory to the goal door. I’m not recommending that this is the ideal tactic, but what’s realistically stopping the player from doing this? Hell, I found myself floating to victory with ease several times, and I’d probably stick to my laurels of experiencing the level the proper way if there were more obstacles in my way that inhibited me, or if Kirby wasn’t such a sloth on his feet.

Admittedly, the game does give the player incentive not to coast through each level absentmindedly by puffing him up to the skies. How does providing over fifty copy abilities sound? Actually, the abundance of copy abilities to potentially use in Dream Land 3 is only true on a technicality. All of the abilities, minus the absurdly lame broom ability where Kirby sweeps enemies to death, are pretty standard ones we’ve seen before. Burning, ice, spark, stone, cutter, needle, and the indispensable parasol all make their return to diversify Kirby’s combat. The expansion of these typical copy abilities lies in another returning element that is distinctive to the Dream Land subseries: animal buddies. Rick, Kine, and Coo enlist once again to “aid” Kirby whenever the opportunity knocks, along with the newcomers of the chubby cat Nago, pink jellyfish ChuChu, and the green bird Pitch, who is far less stockier than Coo. Gooey is a returning helper whom I was always hesitant to classify as an animal buddy. Not only does the bouncing, googly-eyed mound of putty not resemble any creature of the animal kingdom, but it also trails behind Kirby like a partner in Super Star rather than carrying Kirby in some capacity. In addition, all he does is mimic Kirby’s ability to copy the physical properties of enemies. When Kirby has a power equipped with an animal buddy attached, the copy ability translates to their physical forms, which is how the modest number of copy abilities is amplified at least four times the number of enemies that supply them.

The variety on display here should stimulate a sense of curiosity, but the majority of the animal buddies emulating the powers is disappointingly lame. Watch all of Dream Land’s Waddle Dees tremble in fear when the broom turns Coo into a feather duster that Kirby bats around. Get real. Every power that Pitch reinterprets is a pain to aim, and Kine protruding a plunger or a lightbulb out of his face hole has the attack range of an X-ACTO knife. ChuChu is the only animal buddy who produces copy abilities of any interest, soaring on the broom with the grace of a witch and puffing out spikes with the needle ability that spreads over five different angles. Besides those perks to ChuChu, she still has a habit of inhibiting Kirby’s flight. It illustrates something I harped on with the previous Dream Land game, in that the animal buddies often feel like handicaps to Kirby rather than enhancements as intended. Extending the range of copy ability used with the animal buddies maintains a sense of curiosity, but I’d rather keep abilities like the wheel and microphone if it means that Kirby will retain his inherent physicality no matter what he copies.

The other form of imploring the player not to rely too heavily on Kirby’s inexhaustible flying is the various missions each level subtly provides. The Dream Land 3 equivalent of the second game’s rainbow drop collectible is the “heart star,” rewarded by completing a task outside of the main mission of traveling to the end of a level. Where Dream Land 2 featured one of these subsidiary objectives per world, its follow-up decides to implement an opportunity to earn a heart star for every single level in the game. Some of the extra-curricular tasks each level provides are genuinely engaging, mostly because they involve Nintendo easter eggs like assembling the pieces of ROB, the NES peripheral, and freezing Metroids for Samus. Still, the constant supplementary effort to consider adds a layer of tedium to each level, even if their presence does provide enough activity so the player doesn’t fly away with impunity. Many of these tasks are locked behind a specific copy ability that the player couldn’t have possibly anticipated. This fosters replayability, but I’d rather watch grass grow than travel through most of these levels again. Don’t get me started on the demanding memorization puzzles that lock a few of these heart stars. The added layer of involvement results in feeling like busy work.

Despite the grating nature of collecting the heart stars, there is actually some validity in persevering to experience the game’s ending. There’s something rotten in Dream Land, and it's that damned dark matter again attempting to consume Kirby’s continent. If Whispy’s shocking transformation from bumbling oak to hideous, savage monster isn’t an indication that something is seriously wrong, then I don’t know what could be a cause for concern. To uncover the source of the corruption, the player must gather all of the heart stars and defeat the classic red herring of King Dedede, whose fight this time is quite disturbing, with his possessed body flailing about in the air. The power of the complete set of heart stars reveals the embodiment of Dark Matter as a floating black eye, and Kirby must dispatch the ocular evil with the fully-powered Star Rod in a space-shooter section like in the previous game’s final battle. When this phase is over, this fight gets shockingly gruesome. The Dark Matter eye will expand to a bulbous, white orb and shoot spurts of blood at Kirby as its projectiles. After this gastly display, Dark Matter’s bulging red pupil will dislodge itself from the outer eyeball as the third phase of this fight, before Dream Land is its tranquil self once more. Not only is the three-phase endurance test fairly challenging for a Kirby game, but the boss itself is downright horrific. To think that they reinvigorated Dream Land’s color just to depict this uncharacteristic nightmare!

Nintendo did not give one iota of a fuck about Kirby’s Dream Land 3. Besides placing it on a console that everyone’s moms likely sold at a yard sale in the first year that the N64 was front and center, the third and final Kirby title that directly stemmed from his Game Boy debut barely bothered to add much of anything to the formula. Its laziness also extends to neglecting to address the issues presented in the previous game, namely, with the integration of the animal buddies and the tedium of the extra tasks that unlock the true ending. What surprises me is that, despite the engine it's running on being capable of producing more steam, against all logic, Dream Land 3 fails to catch up to its predecessors, which were already mediocre at best. Masking all of its issues with an attractive aesthetic will only convince Kirby’s most impressionable demographic (children) of its quality, but I see right through it. Maybe the devout Kirby fans will still enjoy this colorful charade, provided that it doesn’t put them to sleep first.