Kirby And The Forgotten Land Is Already The Best-Selling Kirby Game Ever

Kirby might be a beloved Nintendo icon, but his games haven't exactly sizzled the sales charts over the years. The pink puffball's latest game, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, has already emerged as the top-selling Kirby game ever, with 5.27 million copies sold worldwide.

That means that Forgotten Land dethrones the previous best-seller, Kirby's Dream Land, which sold 5.13 million copies. True heads will recognize this as the Game Boy entry that first introduced Kirby as a grey blob who didn't even have his signature copy ability yet. Yes, Kirby's come a long way in the intervening years.

While it's difficult to pin this down to any one trend, developer HAL Laboratory and Nintendo have a way of pushing Kirby games out in the waning days of a system's lifespan. For example, the NES classic Kirby's Adventure came out in 1993, well into the SNES era, and highly-regarded SNES entry Kirby Super Star was released in 1996, the same year the N64 came out. Thankfully, Kirby's inclusion as a character in the original Super Smash Bros. undoubtedly boosted his popularity over the years, similar to EarthBound's Ness.

In GameSpot's Kirby and the Forgotten Land review, critic Steven Petite called the game the biggest and most inventive entry in the series to date. The success is well-deserved.