Kirby's Dreamland 3 is the second game in what's known as the Dark Matter Trilogy of the Kirby franchise, and one that's really not like any game before or after it.
I think Dreamland 3 does improve on a fair bit from Dreamland 2, but also introduces its new fair share of problems that weren't even present before. KDL3 lacks that tightness KDL2 had in its level design, even if there is more at play here. Nearly every level in KDL2 felt as long as it needed to be; rarely ever was it a game that wasted your time. KDL3 opts to increase the level length; sometimes it works out.. sometimes it doesn't, and levels end up dragging on far longer than they need to. This is a problem that starts to really rear its ugly head in the game's final world, Iceberg, where the later levels have me wondering whether or not the next door I enter is the last.
KDL3 also changes up Kirby's physics quite a bit compared to previous games. He feels more sluggish, with more momentum in his movement (and just the tiniest bit of input lag? Might just be me). Thankfully, most of KDL3 is built very well around his new sense of movement, and you get used to it. Again, though, as late into the game as Iceberg, the level design starts to fall off as I was left to fight with the physics more often than I did before, dying to shit I don't even think was entirely my fault. I refrain from calling these physics bad, but something about Adventure, Super Star and Nu-Kirby feel much better to play around with.
One of my biggest issues with Dreamland 2 was how occasionally, the RNG that dictates which Animal Friend it throws at you will sometimes decide it really hates you, and not give you the required one needed to obtain the level's Rainbow Drop, forcing you to backtrack. KDL3 has no backtracking of this nature to speak of (with the exception of one level in Iceberg), but at the cost of a handful of missions being bizarrely cryptic to figure out, specifically in the back half of the game, to the point where I had to bust out a walkthrough in order to get by. Yeah, game, I should've known to use Coo/Clean against the hue-shifted flower, of course. I think a lot of missions in this game are far, far less esoteric than people make them out to be (and if you had trouble with the minigames with the exception of the one in Take-A-Fucking-Guess-World, you suck), but there's no defending that bad batch.
All of this, however, to say that I can't stay mad at Kirby's Dreamland 3. Where it kind of flops around like a fish in terms of quality, it makes up for it by the good not only outweighing the bad, but its unprecedented atmosphere and aesthetic compared to.. really, anything in the franchise. Dreamland 3 has this childlike sense of wonder in its crudely-drawn crayon aesthetic akin to something like the first Yoshi's Island, which really suits Kirby. The soundtrack is also such a pleasure on the ears, making for one of my favorite OSTs in the franchise with its soothing instrumentation and slight tinge of nostalgia found in various tracks, even adding a slight sense of something I can't describe better than "something feels off" in some of its music.
Kirby's Dreamland 3 is a game respect just that tiny bit more than I like. There's a lot that doesn't work, but a lot that also very much does. And for me personally, it's such a breath of deviation before an era where Kirby found a formula and stuck to it for dear life for over a decade, causing games to blend in even if they were still good. It's a topic I'd like to get into, but until I finish Crystal Shards and the Dark Matter Trilogy, it's a topic I think is better saved for another time.
I think Dreamland 3 does improve on a fair bit from Dreamland 2, but also introduces its new fair share of problems that weren't even present before. KDL3 lacks that tightness KDL2 had in its level design, even if there is more at play here. Nearly every level in KDL2 felt as long as it needed to be; rarely ever was it a game that wasted your time. KDL3 opts to increase the level length; sometimes it works out.. sometimes it doesn't, and levels end up dragging on far longer than they need to. This is a problem that starts to really rear its ugly head in the game's final world, Iceberg, where the later levels have me wondering whether or not the next door I enter is the last.
KDL3 also changes up Kirby's physics quite a bit compared to previous games. He feels more sluggish, with more momentum in his movement (and just the tiniest bit of input lag? Might just be me). Thankfully, most of KDL3 is built very well around his new sense of movement, and you get used to it. Again, though, as late into the game as Iceberg, the level design starts to fall off as I was left to fight with the physics more often than I did before, dying to shit I don't even think was entirely my fault. I refrain from calling these physics bad, but something about Adventure, Super Star and Nu-Kirby feel much better to play around with.
One of my biggest issues with Dreamland 2 was how occasionally, the RNG that dictates which Animal Friend it throws at you will sometimes decide it really hates you, and not give you the required one needed to obtain the level's Rainbow Drop, forcing you to backtrack. KDL3 has no backtracking of this nature to speak of (with the exception of one level in Iceberg), but at the cost of a handful of missions being bizarrely cryptic to figure out, specifically in the back half of the game, to the point where I had to bust out a walkthrough in order to get by. Yeah, game, I should've known to use Coo/Clean against the hue-shifted flower, of course. I think a lot of missions in this game are far, far less esoteric than people make them out to be (and if you had trouble with the minigames with the exception of the one in Take-A-Fucking-Guess-World, you suck), but there's no defending that bad batch.
All of this, however, to say that I can't stay mad at Kirby's Dreamland 3. Where it kind of flops around like a fish in terms of quality, it makes up for it by the good not only outweighing the bad, but its unprecedented atmosphere and aesthetic compared to.. really, anything in the franchise. Dreamland 3 has this childlike sense of wonder in its crudely-drawn crayon aesthetic akin to something like the first Yoshi's Island, which really suits Kirby. The soundtrack is also such a pleasure on the ears, making for one of my favorite OSTs in the franchise with its soothing instrumentation and slight tinge of nostalgia found in various tracks, even adding a slight sense of something I can't describe better than "something feels off" in some of its music.
Kirby's Dreamland 3 is a game respect just that tiny bit more than I like. There's a lot that doesn't work, but a lot that also very much does. And for me personally, it's such a breath of deviation before an era where Kirby found a formula and stuck to it for dear life for over a decade, causing games to blend in even if they were still good. It's a topic I'd like to get into, but until I finish Crystal Shards and the Dark Matter Trilogy, it's a topic I think is better saved for another time.