I played through the Kirby and the Forgotten Land Switch 2 expansion/DLC finally. I thought I’d get it right around my birthday at the end of August, when it came out, and play it immediately, but I was super hooked on Final Fantasy 14 stuff then and had my friends over, so I didn’t really need something to do at the time. Now, though, as I’ve been taking a break from FF14, that made it into the number two spot on my list, right after beating Donkey Kong Bananza. It took a couple nights, maybe five to seven hours total, to get through all of the expansion and find out what was contained within that Star-Crossed World, but I had a fun time doing it. I was incredibly out of touch with the game and it took a few attempts to really get back into the swing of it since I’d forgotten how most of the power-up systems and abilities worked, but I quickly figured it out again. It also helped that one of the abilities is basically the most powerful one you can get and while the utility of the other abilities might make them more useful in the right circumstances, about ninety percent of the expansion involved me using the Morph Sword power. I did look into upgrading it, once I remembered how all the currencies worked, but it didn’t really need an upgrade and the only way to get some of those special currencies is to run the boss rush type tournament things again and again and that’s not exactly my idea of a fun time. Especially because I’m still pretty rusty at the game, even after beating the expansion, and would struggle to take on some of the more difficult fights I did back when I was at the height of my power towards the end of the core content.

All-in-all, it was a pretty fun time. The additional level mechanics introduced by the expansion made for some fun challenges, and the way they were all solidly built on the familiar base established in the core game meant that I was able to adapt pretty quickly once I shook off enough of the rust to function well again. It took a bit longer than I thought it would to really get myself back into the proper exploration, level-design, and mystery-solving mindset for the game, but I was able to figure almost everything out between my recollections of the way the level-design was used to create puzzles for you to solve and the game offering the name of the hidden challenge once you finished the challenge before it. I did have to look something up eventually, but only because I could not, for the life of me, figure out where the missing item was. Evena after that, I only barely found it because the instructions only told me that it was in a specific room and not where, in that room, it was. I wound up spending almost ten minutes looking around that one room for anything I might have missed before I noticed a sneaky camera angle trick hiding the item from me. It probably would have helped to play the game while I was a bit better rested, considering how much of the game’s extra challenges and items are hidden behind perspective tricks that take focus or lucky to notice, but I wasn’t about to wait multiple additional days on the off-chance that I actually got a good night’s rest. Ultimately, I was able to muddle through all of the challenges, but only because I could keep repeating levels, one challenge completion at a time, to get the hints I needed to figure out the next one.

The changes to the music also made the experience a lot of fun as well, given how well they went with the new levels and situations the levels put Kirby in. It was always a joy to launch into a new level, listen to some of my favorite kind of music (I love Kirby game music), and puzzle my way through things as I got some new experiences with one of my favorite games of this decade. The only real downside was how short the expansion was, generally speaking. Sure, there’s still little statues/figurines to collect and a new, more-difficult boss rush to go through in the arena, but that’s not terribly motivating work when I both don’t get any “percent completion” recognition for doing the work like I did in the base game (I am VERY motivated by watching numbers go up) AND have other stuff that I could be doing that would scratch that number-go-up itch. I did think about creating a new file and playing through the whole ding-dang thing again since it’s not like I ever really played the game for the story, but I don’t think that’s really what I’m up for right now. I don’t have enough podcasts to listen to, for one, and the game takes more focus than I could spare if I was watching some Dimension20 while I played. I might have to go back to Breath of the Wild and maybe even Tears of the Kingdom for that. Or Pokemon Violet. I bet that game plays a lot better now, on the Switch 2. Or maybe I just save my time and effort for the new pokemon game that’s coming out the day after I’m writing this or any of the other games coming out later this month or next month. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it that much.

Regardless, I had a good time. The game was every bit as fun as I remember it being and while there wasn’t enough of it, the amount of it that exists was a lot of fun to do. Even the final boss, while not a huge challenge like the last final boss was, did present me with some fun mechanics to play around with. It felt a lot easier to do than the previous one, though. Which makes sense! The previous final boss is a post-game, do-extra-challenges-to-unlock-a-super-hard-boss-fight type final boss where the skill ceiling to even get there is high enough that most casual players aren’t going to try it. This, though, was fairly casual, so I’m sure that contributed to the ease of the final boss. I also think my timing and battle mechanic awareness have improved thanks to almost 2k hours of Final Fantasy 14, so I’m sure that contributed some small amount. The telegraphs in a kirby game are much more obvious than in the FF14 raids I’ve been doing and the price for messing up is also much lower, so I’m not sure it’s comparable. All that I really noticed was how easy it was for me to identify what was going on and how to avoid it without needing to spend much time or effort thinking about it. It was all pattern recognition and muscle memory (though, realizing I’d dodged a fight mechanic without really thinking about it tripped me up enough that I got hit by the very next one). Anyway, I’d keep playing this game forever if they put out one of these little expansions every year. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it. It’s just such light-hearted fun.