Four years after Kirby and the Forgotten Land proved that Kirby works in three dimensions, HAL Laboratory has shown what it did next. Kirby and the World Beyond was announced during Nintendo's September 9 Direct for Nintendo Switch 2, arriving in spring 2027 - and it is the first Kirby game built around an open world.
The trailer's whole structure is one escalating joke
The reveal starts small and gets absurd on purpose. Kirby explores large connected areas, fights the sort of enemies you would expect, and then throws a boss so hard that it punches a hole through the top of the sky. That hole is the title. Everything before it is setup.
From there the footage shifts: Kirby finds an enormous crystal sword that appears to be draining the energy out of his world, inhales it, and comes out the other side with a transformation and a power level that lets him cut through obstacles the size of landmarks. The trailer ends with him using that sword on the tear in the sky, splitting it wide open, and stepping through into somewhere new.
Open world is the actual news here
Forgotten Land was a 3D Kirby game, but it was not an open one - it was a stage-select platformer wearing 3D clothes, with discrete levels, a hub town, and hidden Waddle Dees to collect in each area. It sold extremely well precisely because that structure was legible.
What the World Beyond trailer shows is different in kind: large contiguous spaces with sightlines that run to the horizon, and traversal that looks like it belongs to Kirby rather than being bolted on. Kirby has always had a free-form movement solution built in - he can float indefinitely - which is the sort of thing that usually breaks open-world level design and here presumably becomes the point of it.
HAL has not said how big the map is, whether the World Beyond is a second region or the whole second half of the game, or how the Copy Ability system scales into open space. None of that was in the trailer, and Nintendo did not put a subtitle-level explanation on screen.
A 35th anniversary game, whether or not Nintendo calls it one
Nintendo attached a second line to the announcement: the Kirby series marks its 35th anniversary next year. Kirby's Dream Land put the character in front of players for the first time on Game Boy, and the franchise counts from there, which puts the milestone squarely inside the World Beyond release window.
That matters mostly for scheduling. Nintendo has spent 2026 running anniversary programming for The Legend of Zelda's 40th - a dedicated Direct on September 8, a concert series, a film - and a spring 2027 Kirby launch gives the company a second anniversary to hang a year of merchandise, eShop promotions and event appearances on. It also explains why HAL's next big swing is getting a Direct segment months out rather than a quiet drop closer to launch.
What it means for Switch 2's 2027
Nintendo's Switch 2 calendar now has real shape past the holidays. Metroid Ravenous takes January 28, Persona 4 Revival lands on May 20, and Kirby occupies the spring window alongside Mega Man: Dual Override, which Capcom also showed during the same broadcast.
For a console that spent its first year leaning on remasters, ports and one enormous Zelda remake, a slate with a new 2D Metroid and an open-world Kirby on it is a different kind of statement. Both are original games. Both are first-party. Neither existed as a rumour a week ago.
