 Snastro. Earlier this week you saw me slobber over the first two Kirby games, Kirby's Dream Land and Kirby's Dream Land 2 for Game Boy. So now let's take a look at Kirby's Dream Land 3 for Super Nintendo, one of the very last SNES games ever made, released in late 1997. So naturally, one could assume that the jump from the SNES from a Game Boy game would be every bit as good as the jump from the NES to Super Nintendo, just like it was for Mega Man, Contra, Castlevania, and at least a dozen others, right? Well, sort of. Overall, it's really not all that different from the Game Boy games, particularly Kirby's Dream Land 2. They captured the feel of the platforming very well, and all of Kirby's abilities are still here, like being able to fly by inflating himself, and of course, inhale enemies with particular bad guys allowing Kirby to absorb their unique ability. The same interactive characters are back from the previous game along with three additional characters that are brand new. The function of Kirby's Dream Land 3 that hasn't been in any other Kirby game yet is that Kirby can summon a friend at will, this blob thing named GUI. It costs two hit points to summon him, although you can get them back by eating him. Geez, what a weird sentence that is. Other than that, though, this game feels like a port of Kirby's Dream Land 2, but with new levels and maybe a few borrowed ideas for the visual style from Yoshi's Island. There's really not a whole lot different here with Kirby's Dream Land 3 in terms of the gameplay, which likely made it that much easier to ignore at the time, since pretty much everyone else was playing Mario 64 or Goldeneye. I'm not saying that's a slag on the game at all, it's a perfectly good game for what it is, and it's a really great looking game that gets the most out of the SNES hardware. However, one confusing thing about Kirby's Dream Land 3 is how slow-paced this game is. Check out the Game Boy games here to see how fast everything is. Now check out the difference here. When you have a really powerful character like Kirby who has a ton of abilities, the game should be faster-paced in my opinion. Look at the Mega Man X series or Yoshi's Island. Kirby's Dream Land 3 is comparatively slow and deliberate, and as a result gets kind of tedious. I was relieved to find that Kirby's companions speed up the game considerably, but without them the game kind of plods along. I also would have liked to have seen the developers try something different with the level design, since evidently they weren't going to add that much to the gameplay. And yeah, the level design is fine, but again it's very reminiscent of Kirby's Dream Land 2, just with a major visual upgrade on Super Nintendo. So yeah, if you're expecting the usual boost in innovation and gameplay that you might get from a jump from the NES or Game Boy to the Super Nintendo, you might be disappointed in Kirby's Dream Land 3. It's nowhere near the upgrade that Mario, Zelda, Contra, or Mega Man got in the years previous. Now I'm not saying that Kirby's Dream Land 3 is a bad game. I mean it is a Kirby game. How bad could it be? It's still pretty good. I liken it to Mega Man X3. Of course that's a good game because it's Mega Man, but compared to Mega Man X and X2, it falls a bit short, and the same sentiment applies to Kirby's Dream Land 3. But if you want a better Kirby game for Super Nintendo, check out Kirby Super Star, which I'll be looking at next week.