Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star Crossed World occupies a strange space in the spate of Switch 2 upgrades. Its upgrades to the original game are relatively modest, offering small performance improvements to a game that already ran well in the first place. But its new content is among the most expansive, consisting of a new mini-campaign that threads itself through original stages and culminates in even tougher challenges than in the main game. It doesn’t revitalize the experience in the same way that the Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom upgrades do on Switch 2. Instead, it adds even more of what made the original so great.
When you start up your existing save in Star-Crossed World, you’ll be greeted by a new island centered on an ominous dark heart, the Fallen Star Volcano. Helpless Starry creatures have been scattered throughout the world, and at the same time, star crystals have fallen that transformed stages and enemies, so being the helpful demigod that he is, Kirby volunteers to rescue the Starries.
Functionally, this means revisiting stages from the original Forgotten Land that have been given new crystalized variants. Those alternative stages coexist along the originals, so they can be selected separately. There are usually two crystal stages per world, making this new campaign about one-third the size of the original campaign. And while pieces of the stages will be recognizable, they mostly feel extremely different. You access new parts of stages by activating crystal touchpoints, which make new crystalline paths to follow.
The crystal effect gives the stages a lovely sparkling feel that looks a little better than the original Switch game. Though not a massive improvement, it’s a nice enhancement that helps the Switch 2 upgrade feel worthwhile. The one drawback is that this crystal effect is the commonality throughout all the stages, which has the result of making the stages visually similar. There’s still variance when you’re following a crystal path through a neon-lit casino versus a craggy volcano, of course, but the crystals mean they look more alike than in the original game.
The Star-Crossed stages largely offer similar challenges to the original, with some tougher enemies that seem primed for the abilities you’ve probably upgraded from the original game. As in the original, the standout are the “mouthful” segments, like a giant gear that lets you climb up across walls or a sandwich board that turns on its side to let you glide down a hill snowboard-style. Those are some of the most inventive and challenging segments across both games, and they’re sprinkled in just enough to make them feel special. The new mouthful forms do accentuate the lack of any new copy abilities for Kirby, though.
The new stages are littered with Starries–you get them for completing the stage but also find hidden ones scattered around, and get rewarded with a Starry for completing hidden objectives. For more experienced players, I found it fun to thoroughly scour stages and try to get them all–or as many as I could–on my first try. Nintendo falls back on its old habits by gating progress behind your current Starry count, but there’s plenty of reason to replay stages to find all of the little creatures. And if you’re really struggling, you can visit a Waddle-Dee in your home base to get tips on hunting down any that you’re missing. Another Waddle-Dee revives the gacha mechanic with trophies of the new environments and crystalized enemies, giving you something to spend the new Starry coins on.
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As you progress through the Star-Crossed World, the dark heart at the center of the Fallen Star Volcano slowly gets enveloped in crystals. Once you’ve finished the regular Starry stages, a new challenge opens that may even be tougher than anything in the main Forgotten Land campaign. It’s a surprisingly sudden difficulty spike, albeit one that felt like a nice end-cap to the entire Forgotten Land experience.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star-Crossed World takes an already-great game and gives you more of it. The upgrade doesn’t feel as essential as the Zelda Switch 2 Edition games, because those helped ambitious games run more smoothly and fully realize their original potential. But it is more substantial than either of those, by nature of adding new story content and stages to explore. Kirby and the Forgotten Land was already a platforming buffet, and this add-on is a great reason to go back for seconds.
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