Kirby Could Return To 2D After Forgotten Land

screenrant.com:

Kirby And The Forgotten Land may have brought the long-running platforming franchise into the realm of 3D, but Kirby’s creators aren’t ruling out a return to 2D in the future. The latest adventure starring Nintendo's adorable pink puffball was just released on the Nintendo Switch yesterday and earned glowing reviews from critics for its colorful charm and imaginative new additions to the classic Kirby gameplay formula. This includes Kirby And The Forgotten Land’s Mouthful Mode, which allows Kirby to stretch himself into larger forms like a vending machine or a cute, meme-generating car.

However, the most noteworthy change to come from Kirby And The Forgotten Land is the game’s 3D movement plane itself, which is a first for the traditionally 2D Kirby games. Even when the Kirby series moved away from sprites in favor of polygon models like many other classic Nintendo franchises, the mainline entries before Kirby And The Forgotten Land would always retain the standard side-scrolling formula that players were first introduced to in the original Kirby's Dream Land for the GameBoy Color in 1992. HAL Laboratory director Tatsuya Kamiyama has previously noted the challenge in bringing Kirby into the third dimension with the development of Kirby And The Forgotten Land, and while this effort seems to have paid off in the form of solid pre-launch reviews, his development team is still open to returning to the Kirby gameplay format of old in future installments.

Related: Kirby Games Have No Set Timeline According To Creators

Several members of Nintendo HAL Laboratory recently sat down with The Washington Post to discuss the process of developing Kirby And The Forgotten Land. When the subject of whether or not future Kirby games will