Kirby's Dream Land 3

About Kirby's Dream Land 3

Kirby's Dream Land 3 (1997) is HAL Laboratory's soft-focus Kirby platformer, the last SNES game Nintendo published in North America, with a hidden true final boss that shocked players with its violence.

Kirby's Dream Land 3 in Depth

Kirby is fishing with his friend Gooey on Planet Popstar when a mysterious dark cloud spreads across the sky, breaking the planet's rings. Warned by Coo, Kirby sets off to save Popstar once again. Like other traditional Kirby games, the aim is to reach the end of each stage, walking, swimming and flying through varied levels with the help of Animal Friends and Copy Abilities. Kirby can inhale enemies and often gains their powers, spit stars, fire air puffs and float, and some areas can only be reached with a particular ability, such as blocks that only break to the power shown on them.

There are two endings, depending on whether every Heart Star has been collected. Without them, Kirby defeats King Dedede, possessed by Dark Matter, then beats him a second time as Dark Matter reveals itself; after the credits a huge shadowed orb with a single red eye appears. With them all, Kirby chases Dark Matter into the sky with the Love-Love Stick, built from the Heart Stars, and faces Zero, leader of the Dark Matter army. Zero, a giant eye, fires blood from cuts in its own sclera, and when weakened its iris rips free in a spray of blood before ramming Kirby, a rare example of graphic violence in a first-party Nintendo game. It returned in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards as 02.

Making Kirby's Dream Land 3

HAL Laboratory developed it as the follow-up to Kirby's Dream Land 2, sharing many of that game's characters, and Nintendo released it on the SNES in 1997, late in the console's life. Its distinctive pastel look comes from the SNES's pseudo-high-resolution mode, which blends adjacent pixels, and the cartridge carries an SA-1 chip. Reception was mixed: GameRankings averaged 66 per cent, Nintendo Life criticised the low difficulty but praised the stylised graphics, and Nintendo World Report gave it nine out of ten for its graphics and music. IGN wrote, "It's not Super Star. But once you get past that, you can appreciate Dream Land 3 for what it is", and ranked it 62nd among SNES games. It reappeared in Kirby's Dream Collection in 2012.