Kirby and the Forgotten Land director says that the final boss difficulty curve was “slightly too steep”

If you’ve played Kirby and the Forgotten Land and if you’ve reached the final boss, you probably know that it is…well, a bit too difficult to say the least. And indeed, the director Shinya Kumazaki admits that things were “a little too intense” at the end. IGN spoke to him at GDC and he had some really interesting remarks about the difficulty as a whole.

Here’s what he said about the concept of difficulty:

“When you’re thinking about maybe your childhood experience playing video games, there might have been games where you just feel like it’s impossible to beat because it’s so difficult. And I think the idea is that to be able to provide something that you can enter easily and is approachable, but also provide that sense of achievement in that you might have an experience where you’re playing a game as a younger self, or even now. There comes a moment when you achieve something or you did something and you’re like, ‘Okay, I can get it now. I did it.’ And that sense of achievement is as a result of the person playing the game – their skill level is going up, and also becoming used to how to play that game.”

All of this leads to the point in the curve where the difficulty “reaches its peak”, which is also where you get to fight the final boss. On that matter, he said the following:

“For the first time in the Kirby series, we provided two different difficulty levels to really try to also provide an option for the experienced gamer audience to get a more fulfilling gameplay experience. And I think we were able to do that. But perhaps the steep uphill curve towards the end of the game, especially the final boss, might’ve been something that’s maybe slightly too steep, and perhaps we can look into maybe balancing it out a little bit. That’s something that I want to continue to explore”

Yeah, reading this makes a lot of sense given how accessible the whole game is compared to…that last fight.

Don’t want to spoil anything, but that last boss fight in Forgotten Land is quite an experience and it might even be one of the most iconic moments in the entire franchise. It’s something you really need to experience yourselves.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is now available on Nintendo Switch.