Much like how Kirby and the Forgotten Land shows Kirby walking through a shopping mall, parts of Shiver Star look an awful lot like a human shopping mall, driving home the point that Shiver Star could be a ruined Earth. Official descriptions of Shiver Star even suggest that its residents left the planet because it got too cold.
Notably, in spite of its icy and abandoned state, Shiver Star is full of cityscapes and machines that continue to function in their makers' absence. Looking at Shiver Star on Kirby 64's level select screen, players might notice that the frozen planet of Shiver Star looks an awful lot like the real Earth the outlines of Earth's continents are very easy to spot. Kirby and the Significance of Shiver StarĪlthough Shiver Star is only the fifth out of six worlds that Kirby visits in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, it's arguably the most memorable because of how mysterious and ominous it is. RELATED: Kirby and the Forgotten Land Should Take Notes From Other Post-Apocalypse Games Maybe Kirby and the Forgotten Land will lean into The Crystal Shards via its similarity to Shiver Star. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shard s featured an abandoned planet called Shiver Star with some similar themes. Kirby has clearly found himself in a very mysterious place, but it's also not Kirby's first encounter with a post-apocalyptic setting. The Forgotten Land's reveal trailer showed Kirby walking around all sorts of abandoned places, including an overgrown shopping mall and a crumbling skyscraper. The game appears to take place in a post-apocalyptic city of some sort. There's another major twist to Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and it's much more mysterious. In a way, it's surprising that it's taken this long for Kirby to get a wholly 3D entry in the main series.
It seems Kirby will be following the lead of his fellow Nintendo platforming star Mario, whose Super Mario series started adding 3D entries a long time ago. Kirby and the Forgotten Land takes the franchise wholly into 3D, for instance. Although the Kirby franchise hasn't stopped gaining new entries or spinoffs ever since 1992's Kirby's Dream Land, Kirby and the Forgotten Land looks like a return to classic Kirby fun, albeit with a couple of significant twists.
In spite of everything else revealed at the September 2021 Nintendo Direct, Kirby and the Forgotten Land was arguably the most welcome surprise among them.