Ladles and jellyspoons, hold your applause, but I have beaten Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I didn’t even get access in the review period, I just bought it on launch day and blitzed it, because I’m that good of a gamer. I played it on hard mode too, or at least, the hardest of the two modes Kirby has to offer. I’ve upgraded every weapon once (most of them twice), and have rescued 200 Waddle Dees. Like I said, I’m a jolly good gamer. But after playing the game again on easy mode while sweeping for extra Waddle Dees, I’ve discovered it’s the perfect way to experience Kirby.

People will always tell you that playing on the hardest difficulty is the true way to play. It’s not really gaming if you can’t tangibly prove you’re better than 90 percent of the other players, right? It’s part of the reason Soulsborne games are held in such high regard - liking them proves you can play hard games and thus are a real gamer. I try to play all my review games on the default setting, as that feels like the closest you can get to whatever the ‘true’ experience is supposed to be, but in general I barely care what difficulty I play a game on, so I definitely don’t care what difficulty other people play on. At least, that was true until Kirby.

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Kirby isn’t hard, so there’s no real notion of challenge to it on the hardest mode. I died a couple of times to later bosses, but none took me more than three tries. It’s a very simple game, made more interesting by the extra garnishes, which is exactly why easy mode is the way to go. For each level, you get three Waddle Dees for reaching the end, plus anywhere between three and five extra Waddle Dees are hidden around the level. Then there are a few extra Waddle Dees you can get as rewards for completing certain tasks, like finding a hidden room, avoiding the lava, or beating a boss in a certain amount of time. Only the boss timer is influenced at all by the difficulty, and even then I swept up those the first time around on hard mode.

kirby eating burgers
via Nintendo

All hard mode does is make some of the levels slightly more annoying. There is no high level of skill needed, and the Forgotten Land is not an obtuse game that demands you learn its systems inside and out before mastering them. You don’t miss out on any of the experience, the thrill, nor the sense of accomplishment in playing it on easy, you just have a smoother ride of it while you’re investigating high and low for every little secret.

I’d still tell players to use hard mode first and foremost as it rewards more coins, but it shouldn’t take too long to have enough to afford all of the upgrades, especially as the battle coliseum with the boss rush mode easily allows you to pick up lots of coins quickly anyway. But for the true Kirby experience, the one that lets you wander through each level freely to suck up all its secrets, easy mode is where it’s at.

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If anything, it’s a shame that you’re penalised so heavily on the coin front for playing on easy. Hard mode wasn’t designed to push players, so it seems weird that beating levels on a mode that might more accurately be called ‘less easy’ comes with such a stack of rewards attached. Justification for gatekeeping hard mode, or gatekeeping the lack of difficulty options at all, is usually that the devs want us to play on hard mode. Here, they definitely want us to play on easy. And who are you to question the developer’s vision?

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