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Kirby and the Forgotten Land is one of Kirby’s best adventures yet, and it takes the creampuff into the third dimension. That’s not all Kirby tackles for the first time in this game, as he also gets to play around with the all-new Mouthful Mode. Every wonder how the team at HAL came up with this unique mechanic? Shinya Kumazaki, the director of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, spilled the beans in a new interview with Nintendo Dream magazine.

It turns out Mouthful Mode came about as HAL started to think about Kirby in general. Examining the character’s origins and abilities helped the team imagine a whole new way for Kirby to interact with items and the environment around him. Couple that with the team’s desire to create a fresh experience, and Mouthful Mode came to be!

You can see Kumazaki’s full comments on Mouthful Mode’s creation below, as translated by NintendoEverything.

When making the game, we reconsidered the mystery and shape shifting nature of Kirby. The idea of Mouthful Mode has been about for a while. Once we knew this game would be something new in the series, we started with the conversation “What is Kirby?”. We wanted to allow Kirby to do things that existing human characters couldn’t. That idea combined with the challenge of making something new became the concept of Mouthful Mode.

We aimed to make it so Kirby could so calmly and easily stretch his body that people would wonder what on earth his body was, and this was how the new game established itself. In my first rough sketch. I thought about having Kirby inhale mysterious triangles and squares and then transform, but then considered, “Why doesn’t he swallow?,” and “What are the shapes of these objects?”. When I thought about those ideas together, I started considering objects close to me like cars, park decorations and pipes, and how he wouldn’t swallow them but instead stuffs his cheeks full and then takes on that shape.

As you see in the final result, there’s a certain charm to seeing Kirby’s simple shape walking as a circle or a triangle or a square, and the actions he can perform are all different too. This is a whole new world with real world items, but Kirby doesn’t care in the slightest, he’s as chill as ever!

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