Kirby’s Dream Land 3 was developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo in 1997. It is the successor to Kirby’s Dream Land 2 on the Game Boy, and was the first and only Dream Land adventure on the Super NES.

This plays similarly to Kirby’s Dream Land 2, with Kirby this time having six different animal friends who he can team up with to take advantage of their abilities. The three animals in Dream Land 2 return, with three new friends introduced in this game. The six animals friends are: Rick the Hamster (who can stomp on enemies; run faster; doesn’t slide on ice, and can scale walls); Coo the Owl (who can fly against the wind and allows Kirby to inhale in mid-air); Kine the Sunfish (who can stomp on enemies; swim against strong currents, and allows Kirby to inhale underwater); Nago the Cat (who can stomp on enemies and triple-jump); Pitch the Bird (who has a more versatile copy ability, but more limited flying abilities); ChuChu the Octopus (who can float for a limited time before gradually descending, but is able to cling to and walk across ceilings and can grab items with her tentacles).

Kirby can also inhale and swallow certain enemies to copy their abilities, some of which must be used to break specific blocks to allow access to closed-off power-ups, extra lives, and areas. To copy an ability you must inhale an enemy (by pressing the ‘Y’ button), and then swallow them by pushing down on the d-pad or by pressing the ‘A’ button (both will work the same). To release (get rid of) a copy ability, press the Select button (you need to do this if you want to stop using one ability and copy a different ability from another enemy). If Kirby takes too much damage he’ll lose a copied ability, but he can re-gain it by swallowing the star that he drops as a result of losing it.

One significant new addition to Kirby’s Dream Land 3 is a cooperative two-player mode, where a second player controls Gooey – the silly-looking blue blob from the second Dream Land game. Gooey has the same abilities as Kirby, plus two other additional functions: he’ll explode and leave the game if player two presses the ‘A’ button repeatedly (and can be brought back again by player one), and he’ll also ‘Space Jump’ towards Kirby if left alone for a while. If you’re playing solo you can also summon Gooey and have the computer control him as a companion.

After completing a level Kirby can earn extra lives and other goodies in a jumping minigame, called the ‘Goal Game’. By watching Kirby‘s body movement you can judge when to press the jump button to land on useful items. Later on the minigames change, and – according to the game’s manual – there are six different minigames available.

Each stage features one Heart Star mission requiring that Kirby escort an animal friend to a specific character near the end of a level. These are easy to miss, though. When you collect a Heart Star it will show on the panel in the level select screen.

The game has two different endings, depending on whether you’ve collected every Heart Star or not. If you do manage to collect all the Heart Stars you’ll be faced with a difficult extra boss battle at the very end of the game.

The biggest disappointment with Kirby’s Dream Land 3 are the graphics, which I think are very weakly-coloured and lacking the boldness and charm of something like Kirby’s Dream Course or Kirby’s Dream Land 2 DX. With this being Kirby‘s first SNES Dream Land adventure I had hoped that the graphics would be bold and beautiful, but they’re unfortunately pale and lacking definition. Which is a pity because the gameplay is of a very high standard, but the visuals simply don’t match up to it.

That said: this is still a great game and is a lot of fun to play. Kids will love the cute, non-violent gameplay, and adults will appreciate the depth and challenge of finding all the secrets.

The cartridge contains an “SA-1” co-processor chip, and the game also uses an unusual display mode called “pseudo high-resolution” (which allows for colour blending between two adjacent pixels) to blend dithered sprites together. Because of this there were problems with the game’s PAL conversion, which prevented it from being released in Europe and Australia for many years. Kirby’s Dream Land 3 was also the final SNES game published by Nintendo in North America.

More: Kirby’s Dream Land 3 on Wikipedia