Kirby’s Dream Land 3 arrived in 1997 as the fifth game in the Kirby series and the third under the Kirby’s Dream Land name. HAL Laboratory developed it, and Nintendo published it for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It was the last SNES game Nintendo published in North America.
That fact alone gives the game a place in the history books. It does not make it a great platformer.
A Dark Cloud Over Planet Popstar
The setup is simple. Kirby is fishing with his friend Gooey on Planet Popstar when a dark cloud breaks the planet’s rings and spreads across the world. Coo tells Kirby that Popstar is in trouble, and the two set off to protect it.
King Dedede is back, but something is wrong with him. Dark Matter is controlling him, and Kirby has to stop Dedede and find out what is going on.
Copy Abilities and Animal Friends
Kirby’s Dream Land 3 is a traditional platformer, classed as Platform and Adventure with an Action theme. The player controls Kirby and gets him to the end of each stage. He can walk, swim, and fly through the levels, using Copy Abilities to avoid and defeat enemies.
His moveset includes the inhale, Star Spit, Air Gun, and floating. Inhaling enemies often gives Kirby their abilities, which he can then use as weapons. Some parts of the world need a certain ability to open them, such as blocks that only break under the ability shown on them.
The game supports single player, multiplayer, co-operative, and split-screen modes.
Two Endings, One Secret Boss
The game has two endings, and which one you get depends on whether you collected all the Heart Stars.
- Miss a star and Kirby fights the possessed King Dedede, then fights him a second time when Dark Matter reveals itself.
- Collect every star and Kirby chases Dark Matter into the atmosphere with the Love-Love Stick, assembled from the Heart Stars.
The best ending leads to Zero, the true final boss and the ultimate leader of the Dark Matter Army behind the invasion of Dreamland. Zero is a giant eye with a red iris. He fights by opening cuts on his sclera and shooting blood at Kirby, and by summoning small Dark Matters as projectiles. When his health drops, his iris rips out of his body, and the ruined body trails away as the last phase begins. Once Zero is defeated, peace returns to the universe.
Zero Remains the Reason to Play
Zero is a rare thing in a first-party Nintendo game: graphic violence, rendered plainly and without apology. The blood, the cuts, the eye tearing free of its own body — this is the moment Kirby’s Dream Land 3 stops being cute and becomes something stranger.
The idea carried forward. Zero reappears in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards as “02” (pronounced zero two), still spitting blood and still built around a giant eye. Kirby 64 followed Dream Land 3 in 2000.
Where the Game Falls Short
The platforming around all of this is ordinary. Kirby floats, inhales, and spits his way through stages that rarely demand much of the player. The Heart Stars give the collectible hunt a purpose, but the road to them is not memorable.
The game’s reach was limited too. Problems with the PAL conversion kept it out of Europe and Australia for years. It finally arrived there as a Virtual Console import from North America on July 24, 2009, for the Wii, and on July 25, 2013, for the Wii U. North America got it on the Virtual Console on January 5, 2009, for the Wii and May 8, 2013, for the Wii U. Japan got it on April 28, 2009, for the Wii and May 8, 2013, for the Wii U. It also appeared in the 2012 Wii compilation Kirby’s Dream Collection and on the Nintendo Classics service. Gradiente published it, and it also ran on the Super Famicom.
What Kirby’s Dream Land 3 Gets Right
Kirby’s Dream Land 3 is a decent platformer with one genuinely bold idea buried at the end of it. Zero is worth the trip. The stages you cross to reach him are not.
GameRankings, the now-defunct aggregator, published a score of 6.6 out of 10 for the game. That number is the site’s, not this paper’s.
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