A mildly pleasant outing for the little pink man. Visuals are the strong point here, with detailed expressive sprites done in a crayon style somewhat akin to Yoshi's Island, showing off what the SNES was capable of in its twilight.

The slow pace of the platforming lets the cheerfulness sink in, but it does feel like Kirby's walking through a swamp instead of some adorable locales. While there is a bevy of powers to steal and pals to ride, I found myself sticking to the same few abilities throughout, and eventually I ditched my animal buddies altogether. The levels are fun to run through and pretty well varied, though there is some whiplash in that I found a few of the later stages to be some of the easiest in the game - not that the game is particularly challenging, anyway.

Still, if you want to play some Kirby, there's no reason not to give this a go.

This was quite a pleasant surprise. Unlike Adventure & Superstar, I never really got far in DL3 as a kid because I thought it was just kinda boring. I was originally going to do DL2 before 3 since it came first, but I saw a video on my YT feed about DL3 (His other videos are pretty great too btw), so I took the creative liberty of skipping DL2 for DL3. Yes, I know DL2, 3, and 64 are a trilogy of games but as far as I'm aware you don't need to play them all back to back to understand the lore lol.

The first thing that really wowed me about the game was the graphics. I've always been AWARE of the games style but never really took in how damn good this game looks. 7 years of the Super Famicom lead up to its peak in terms of graphics, and it's not even close. I think playing this game on either a CRT or with a good CRT filter (like the one that comes with bsnes classic) really hammers in how good this game looks and with the methods used to help the games visuals, CRT is the way to go.

Audibly I thought this game's soundtrack was even BETTER than Superstar, which surprised me quite a bit. The soundtrack goes hand in hand with the games visuals and it all leads to one cozy experience that stuck with me more than Superstar. Sure, superstar's soundtrack is def more iconic, but DL3 really hammers in the mood better.

For the gameplay itself, I was kinda surprised on how different it was from superstar. I just assumed they'd just carry over all or most of the abilities from Superstar and go from there, but no, it's more in line with Dream Land 2's copy abilities, bringing back all the ones from DL2 (minus the final boss weapon) and adding the new Cleaning ability. I was pretty disappointed by this at first. Like c'mon, no Wing? No sword? No yoyo? It wasn't until I realized that which ever animal you have WITH a copy ability can change how the ability is performed, which adds some depth & strategy on what copy ability you wanna use or which animal you wanna use. This isn't always the case, however, but it bothered me less and less. I still would've liked more copy abilities, but unlike Adventure or Superstar, there's no real duds here. All the base copy abilities are pretty solid and get the job done. They can get better or worse depending on your animal buddy, but it's not really hard to find a different copy ability.

Speaking of animal buddies, the new animal buddies here are solid. I think some are 100% better than others usually, and Chuchu & Nago were by far my favorite ones to use.

The level design I think is kind of a regression from the other Kirby games a bit? I don't think they're bad by any means, I just found them to be way more simple & and straightforward compared to the steps that Superstar took (BTW yes I'm aware they were directed by separate people). With that being said, I did find 3 to actually be more challenging than Superstar. Might be because you have less abilities to work with, but some of those levels gave me a tough time I won't lie.

I think the biggest thing I'm torn on is the game having multiple endings. The dark matter trilogy are the only games to have multiple endings and I really do not know how I feel about them. On one hand, it adds more depth to the game, on the other, it can lead to genuinely confusing "What am I supposed to do" moments. Each level has an objective you need to complete to get a heart star. You need all of these to access the true final boss and get the good ending. World 1 establishes what to expect out of each level & every subsequent world kinda just expands upon it, for better or for worse (I.E every level 1 involves flowers). I think the most annoying of these are the guessing mini game ones since if you fuck up you can't retry them and you gotta leave the level and do it again. Others like bring X friend to the end or use X copy ability combo with X friend are fine though, some levels make it obvious what you're supposed to do, and others you're not really sure what to do. Probably the worst level was the R.O.B level, I hated that shit so much. It all leads up to the final boss which....I wasn't a fan of. The fight with Dedede is pathetically easy & the fight with dark matter/zero just drags for too long. Plus it's not even that different from what DL2 did or hell even Adventure.

Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot more than I expected. The game just oozes so much soul from beginning to end and it's def going to be one of my go-to "Cozy games". I know a lot of people aren't huge on this one, but I thought it was pretty freakin' sweet. One of my favorites on the Super Famicom for sure.

An improvement from Dream Land 2, but still underwhelming for what I would expect from a Kirby game. The level design is a bit clunky sometimes and the controls can feel strange on occasion. The camera caused a lot of problems since it didn't center the player on the middle of the screen.

And something about the graphics made me feel uncomfortable. Idk if it's the color palette used or the fact that it looked like it was made using crayons, but I feel like it could have been better, despite me knowing that the pixel art is very well-done.

The allies all have their pros and cons, but I will not argue the fact that the cat is objectively the best option most of the time.

Was really excited to get into Kirby's Dream Land 3 right after having played all the prior mainline Kirby titles, hearing a lot of praise for this one. Unfortunately it didn't hit as well for me as it did for others.

Right off the bat just after having played Kirby Super Star, you immediately feel how sluggish and unresponsive Kirby controls in this title, compared to it's other SNES counterpart. With an open mind, I didn't immediately let this sour my taste as I took in the factor that this could just be a slower paced Kirby by design. Eventually though, I really did not like how Kirby controlled and that is a huge minus for me considering KBL2 on the Game Boy controlled better than this.

The game is basically an evolution of KBL2 in both title and design. Everything introduced in KDL2 is brough back and expanded upon, from the same copy ability convention, to the mix and matching with the animal buddies. But is slightly more copy abilities as well as new animal buddies introduced, allowing for much more mix and matching abilities. Initially, I gave this system a pass in KBL2, but did not enjoy it as much in KBL3 due to how sluggish and underpowered all the mixed copy abilities felt in this game. Most of the time you're better off just as Kirby by himself as it feels like the copy abilities are the most effective solo.

Now comes the biggest flaw that really brings this game down for me, the level design. If you want to really enjoy KDR3, you have to go for the 100% completion. All levels have an "optional" mission that grant you a star at the end if you fulfil it's requirements. Unfortunately, to me, fulfilling those requirements are not fun due to the fact that if you miss something while playing a level, most of time you have to restart it. Another big issue with this is that the game does not tell you what the requirement is, so if you're not using the internet or a guide, you'll need to constantly retry the level to figure out what the mission requirement is.
If you try to play the game without doing these optional missions, like I initially did, every level is a boring barren wasteland. Just a left to right stretch from point A to B with a few blocks an enemies in between, but no proper design. I gave KDL2 some slack for not having as good level design as KDL1, but the level design in this game makes KDL2 levels look great by comparison. So yeah, the levels are designed around these optional missions, otherwise you won't have as much fun.

The best thing about KDL3 is the artstyle and soundtrack. This one of the most beautiful looking games on the SNES, making the crayon looking world KDL2 on the Gameboy come to it's full realization on console. These don't look like sprites, they look like actual hand drawn images.

Although the general consensus of this game is very positive, I think this is probably my least favorite mainline Kirby game that I've played. I'm glad the future titles went more for the Super Star route than it did the Dream Land route.

This isnt no Dream Land 2. This punk ass pink punk got himself a highschool clique. This time, I wasn't deadset on abusing the same ability throughout, although like an addict relapsing it happened again in 64. If you were wondering why small gatherings of minors were forbidden at certain malls, well this is because Kirby has been there! This is certainly logical. We have watched his career with great interest and he's still finding more and more people to help him suck. One of his friends is a bit more independant than the others, his name is Gooey and he keeps me from sucking! That is why I avoided using him because I'm not about that life, but it was easy to press the wrong input and summon the fool. Go to bed already!

Eating crayons is good but how about using them for a good artstyle? Now thats making a killing! I'm kidding this absolutely FLOPPED every american was playing Ocarina of Time by then. But still, there are particles, visual feedback, the...flying Touhou witches, moving backgrounds. I'd drink to that, but I must stay sharp, for the fog is still coming. Once again you have to grind out if you wanna book a meeting with the eldritch abomination of a final boss during lunch hours. I suggest looking up some of the ways you can finish levels properly if you do not want to experience the walk of shame upon your way back to the world map. As there aren't many worlds, the darker side of this truth is that levels can take quite some time to finish, but it's reasonably okay. So I guess you can shamewalk a bit.

This guy Dedede is not doing no Ramadan, even his belly is in on the feast. I know he didn't brush his teeth down there. This and the spiders with them freakishly long legs make this the scariest entry in the mascot horror genre. I love spiders too, but maybe not legs. Everybody gangsta when Whispy Woods got a pair of his own and starts chasing you! top cinco rumpscaré yup and then there was a tanuki wow and the world watches in horror as I put him 6 feet under.

I know Kirby was starting to get stale for some people and they wanted another Super Star, but to me that is a better game. I am fine with this. This is definitely one of the games I like. If it wasn't absurd with the invulnerability frames I wouldn't be passed around like a blunt but I guess it'd be less funny. What was Meta Knight doing during all this though like naaaah fuck that harbinger of evil shit I'm hitting my Zzzs.

Dream Land 3 is one of those games that appears lacking on the surface, but everything comes together in such a unique and beautiful way.

The animal friends are back along with three new ones, and it's tons of fun playing around with different ability/animal combinations. Cleaning was added as a new ability, it's really cute (especially with Nago) and many of its animal combinations are surprisingly effective against enemies. The sprites and animations are all super expressive.

The level designs are basic as with most Kirby games, though still quite memorable and fun. Each stage has its own puzzle you must solve to get a heart star, all of which are needed to face the final boss.

The visual and sound direction is some of the best in the entire Kirby series, only surpassed by Epic Yarn and Mass Attack.

You don't have as many techniques and moves as you do in Super Star or any other main game after 64. But, to me, Kirby isn't about that stuff anyway.

If it isn't obvious enough from the above, or from my Epic Yarn review, Kirby games are something I admire deeply not only on a gameplay level, but on an aesthetic one. If I wanted to play an action-platformer, there are many more challenging and engaging options out there for me besides Kirby. But Dream Land 3 offers something I can't get elsewhere, quite literally a land of dreams filled with incredible charm and atmosphere. It even has 2-player coop.

Se a primeira impressão for a que fica, esse jogo é a exceção. Esse jogo é o mais focado em vender pra criança, não que os outros não fossem, mas começando pela estética do jogo que parecer ter sido desenhado por aqueles lápis de crayon, é bem óbvio, e ótimo, é bonito e estiloso.
E acabou os elogios, apesar de eu achar que esse Kirby tem a melhor movimentação, as fases dão um sentimento de que duram 10 horas cada, e ainda tem umas quests muito específicas pra pegar os colecionáveis desse jogo, os Heart Stars, — que assim como nos jogos anteriores, levam ao final secreto — de forma alguma tem como você fazer elas sem um guia. E falando no final secreto, o boss secreto continua super divertido, ou eles manjam muito nisso ou eu sou fácil de agradar, mas o DeDeDe desse jogo é muito buxa... nem com uma segunda fase ele causou dificuldade.

Veredito: Bonito, fez um uso bem melhor dos poderes pros animais, mas foi cada escolha questionável pro level design...

i was actually a little worried going into this game cuz i thought it was just gonna be more dream land 2, and in a way it is, but (pardon my poor explanation) that's not really a bad thing? specifically, i was worried about 100% with the heart stars in EVERY SINGLE LEVEL being required. thankfully, the amount of pain to collect the macguffins has been significantly reduced compared to DL2. every level, with the exception of one, (6-5 in case you were curious) gives you the tools to collect the heart star within the stage itself. this might sound like the lowest of low bars, but this is an absolute godsend compared to DL2. i genuinely wake up in a cold sweat sometimes remembering the cloudy park crystal drop. anyways yeah the game is pretty good and you should play it. if you liked DL2 this should be a no-brainer

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

For the longest time, this was in my top 5 Kirby games. I got this on the Wii U virtual console back in the day, and remember enjoying it a lot. I also remember that I used save states on certain parts and was annoyed at other parts of the game but I generally loved the game's aesthetic and vibe, I guess those aspects overshadowed the bad parts in my mind. What do I think of the game now though? It's not bad at all, but it does have some really annoying issues that nowadays do hamper my experience.

Let's talk about the gameplay first and foremost. Compared to Superstar, it's a big downgrade. Kirby's running speed is very fast, but his walking speed is incredibly slow. This wouldn't usually be an issue however, a lot of them the camera won't pan at the start of a new area until you've gotten until the edge of the screen. Unless you're as careful as can be, if an enemy is there it will hit you. This never happened at all in Superstar. When Kirby floats and gets out of a float, he loses all momentum he's gained and will basically stop in place. Maybe this is so you don't spam the float but it ruins the flow of the gameplay a bit and is an annoyance since Superstar also never did this. It's also incredibly easy to get hit in this game, not only because or the whole screen having to catch up with Kirby, but because the invincibility frames last like a second or less so it's so easy to just get comboed if you're unlucky. This is something I noticed even back in the day, you get hit A LOT in this game and it's quite annoying. One last thing this game downgraded from Superstar, and this one isn't as bad as the other things I mentioned (at least for me) is Kirby's moveset. Kirby goes back to only having one basic move per copy ability. While this is naturally a downgrade compared to Superstar, the animal friends return from Dreamland 2 and do make up for this a bit I think.

Not only are Rick, Kine and Coo back from Dreamland 2, this game adds three new animal friends as well. Nago the cat, Pitch the bird and ChuChu the octopus are the new additions and they're all very solid. Nago is actually my favorite of the six, cuz he feels the best to control but also because he has a very helpful triple jump. Pitch doesn't really have any abilities but he is a cute little guy. ChuChu can only float a couple of times at once but she has the ability to hang from ceilings (it only really gets used once tho lol). Anyways, like Dreamland 2, Dreamland 3 gives each animal friend their own specific take on the copy abilities. With six animal friends now, and 8 copy abilities, that's 48 unique animal friend abilities. There are way less copy abilities in this game compared to Superstar, however with this many animal friend abilities, I feel like it never gets boring since you're more than likely always discovering new ones throughout the game which is fun.

Going into the level's themselves, they aren't great tbh. A good chunk of them are very simple with enemies littered throughout. The level design is way too basic and can get boring some of the time (mostly some of world 3 and 4). They try to combat this with the game's main collectable, the heart-stars, but this can also be a mixed bag. Early on they aren't bad. Each world has six stages, and each of the six stages use the same heart-star conventions. The first always deals with flowers. The second always has you bringing a specific copy ability or animal friend to some part of the stage and interacting with whatever. The third has you playing a minigame a way into the stage. The fourth has you collecting a single object in the stage and bringing it to the end. The fifth has you bringing a specific animal friend to the end of the stage so they can be with their girlfriend/boyfriend. And the 6th has you collecting several objects in the level and bringing them to the end character. Yeah, you get a heart-star from a character at the end of the stage..and they can be pretty fun to see. Mostly because this game cross overed with other Nintendo properties like ROB the Robot and Metroid. Anyways, heart-stars aren't usually too bad to get but the endgame has some really annoying ones. The last couple minigames are like annoying as balls to do without save stating, otherwise you have to redo the stage each time you lose, so I decided to just save state again like I did all the way back in the day. That plus others can just be plain cryptic, and yeah..the collectables aren't super fun to get some of the time.

I know I've spent most of this review complaining so far, and yeah, the gameplay probably is the weakest part of this game, but some of the other aspects are fantastic and make up for the gameplay a bit. The visuals for example are amazing in this game. I still think Yoshi's Island is the best-looking Super Nintendo game, however this is right next to that. This game is a coloring book come to life and it's so nice to look at. It fits Kirby perfectly too and I really wish the modern games tried to do something like this again. Besides the amazing art style, this game is just really charming in general. Whether it's all the animal friend's reactions to Kirby picking other friends instead of them, or the bosses of each world standing idle not fighting you after you purified them by getting every heart-star in the world. Gameplay be damned, it's clear the Kirby3 team were passionate about the actual world and characters. I also always loved the atmosphere in this game. Idk if it's because of the cutesy art style combined with Dark Matter as an antagonist, but this game always felt a bit off in a way I really liked. I don't know how to describe it, but Dreamland 3 fans will probably understand what I mean.

The bosses in general are solid. You have the usual Wispy Woods and some other cool ones. Besides the introduction of Ado (who is basically just Adeline before Adeline), Dark Matter and Zero are great final bosses to the Dreamland trilogy. Dark Matter is cool ofc but Zero is very creepy especially for a Kirby game. The fact it's a giant white sphere that bleeds as you attack it, and the fact its last final form is its eyeball ripped out of the sphere, all bloody and everything, it's so unlike Kirby and just gives the game this eerie feeling I love.

The music in this game is also super good and drives the atmosphere home even more. My favorite songs were probably Grass Land 1, Grass Land 4 and Ripple Field 1. The entire soundtrack is really solid though and like I said, really helps with game feeling atmospheric.

I'm sad this isn't in my top 5 Kirby's anymore. This game has a lot of charm and heart to it but on the gameplay side, it just has too many issues for me to rate it super high. My judgement was clouded back then by the art style and atmosphere, and while those are still great now, I can't deny this game isn't as good as I once thought. I still like it overall, but I will kneel to all the Superstar fans despite not loving that game's structure...that is the superior Kirby game. If they took the gameplay from Superstar and the art style, atmosphere and single campaign structure from this game...I may have gotten my perfect Kirby game. Ah well, a man can dream. I will say tho, I do like this more than Dreamland 2. There isn't a level as bullshit as that trial and error in 2 and this game visually just looks so much better of course. That and I have more nostalgia for it haha. Anyways, next is Donkey Kong Country 3 so look forward to that!

6.5/10

Phenomenal presentation, Dreamland 3's pastel look is so memorable and pleasant. Between that and the soundtrack, it's gotta be one of the most relaxing platformers I've ever played. Sure, it has some occasionally clunky level design but what can I say, I love playing this game and chilling out with it. The level objectives are such a nice little addition, it's just a charming thing to go through and make the various characters happy... some of them are a bit difficult to figure out without a guide but I think most of them are pretty manageable without help. The new animal buddies are all a lot of fun to play with too, Pitch in particular stands out to me as having some really fun takes on abilities. Beyond that, it's a great co-op experience and brings us playable Gooey, so I can't not love it.

Expands DL2 into a more consistently fun and better paced game. Outside of the awesome art style and the animal friends it's just kind of a base line good kirby game. All around solid and always fun but not much special in the context of the whole series. Absolutely hate that the animal friends are sad if you don't pick them tho. If they're really considering doing more 2d kirby along side the new 3d ones I think a dreamland 4 or something to that effect would be a great way to make a new game that feels distinct from the run of modern 2d kirby beginning from return to dreamland whilst justifying it's place alongside 3d kirby by offering something a little different.

- Poyo!!! -
Por fin tuve la chance de jugarlo y terminarlo, y siento que es muy mal juego de Kirby, artisticamente es super bello y tiene muy lindas mascotas.
Pero del otro lado sus niveles son muy X y los poderes se siente muy malos, en cuanto al movimiento es raro y medio tosco.
Se me hizo muy aburrido conseguir todos los corazones para lograr el final, que a mi punto de vista no debía de estar encerrado detrás de esa mecánica de conseguir el 100% de algo xd.
Amo a Kirby pero este juego de plano no lo volvería a jugar o lo recomendaría a nadie xd

It’s never a good signal when a short game, and I’m talking like FOUR HOURS short, feels overly long. Kirby 3 is a fun and often clever game, particularly when it’s showing you new abilities or new ways to use them with your animal pals, but just never differentiates from the rest of the series in a way that feels exciting, and if you’ve played these games recently it really starts to feel redundant. It is the best looking game in the series up until this point, and it is in my mind better than the almost unplayably slowness of the 64 Kirby, but just doesn’t cut it.