The Forgotten Land is reportedly now the best selling Kirby game ever
The game’s sales figures appear to have overtaken the widely agreed figures for Kirby’s Dreamland
Kirby and the Forgotten Land now appears to be the best-selling game in the Kirby series.
In its results for the first six months of the current fiscal year, Nintendo gave a list of titles which sold more than a million copies between April and September 2022.
One of these was Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which sold a further 2.61 million copies during this period. According to Nintendo, this brings the critically acclaimed platformer’s total sales to 5.27 million.
It’s widely claimed online that Kirby’s Dream Land on the Game Boy sold 5.13 million copies – a stat often attributed to the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association.
If this figure is indeed accurate, Nintendo’s update would mean Kirby and the Forgotten Land is now the series’ best-selling single title ever.
Nintendo had previously stated in August that the game had seen the “highest sell-through” for any entry in the series to date, after it sold 4 million copies in its first 15 weeks.
At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Nintendo was suggesting that the previously cited 5.13 million figure for Kirby’s Dream Land was inaccurate, or whether it was simply saying that Forgotten Land had sold more copies in 15 weeks than any other Kirby title.
This new update appears to have put the matter beyond doubt, however, assuming the widely reported CESA figure is accurate.
Famitsu reported in March that, based on its sales data, the game had enjoyed the biggest Japanese launch in the history of the franchise, selling 380,000 copies in its first week, more than any other Kirby game in Japan.
Further reading
Review: Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a bold and buoyant adventure
Similarly, GfK’s physical-only sales data published by GI.Biz suggested the game enjoyed the best first week’s sales of any Kirby title in the UK, and after its first week was already the fifth best-selling game in the series’ history in the UK, without taking digital sales into account too.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land has received widespread critical acclaim, with a current score of 85 on review aggregation site Metacritic.
VGC’s Kirby and the Forgotten Land review calls it “another accomplished charmer from HAL’s inhalatory hero,” adding: “The platforming won’t give Mario any restless nights, but the exuberant creativity around it makes for a bold, buoyant adventure.”
