Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe's team explains why characters were given dark outlines

Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe is a Switch revamp of Kirby’s Return to Dream Land on the Wii. The game has received a number of new features, tweaks and adjustments in its transition to Switch, and one of most noticeable from a visual standpoint are the character outlines.

Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe wraps the playable characters in a dark outline that wasn’t present in the original release. In an interview with Nintendo Dream, the team at HAL Labs explained why this decision was made.

There are really two different explanations for why Kirby and the gang have dark outlines this time around, and you can probably guess one of them. According to the team, they felt it was necessary to outline characters prominently in order to players to easier track their characters. Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe is four-player co-op game, and HAL wanted to make sure all players could easily spot their character of choice.

Along with that, HAL said they gave the playable characters dark outlines in order to make this game instantly recognizable when compared to other Kirby games on Switch. This way, when people would see the dark outlines in screens or footage, they would know they were looking at Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe instead of something like Kirby Star Allies.