Kirby and the Forgotten Land uses several clever tricks to help you land hits and jumps even when you're technically a little off, kind of like aim assist but for a platformer.
Nintendo shared a few clips of these helping hands in action in its most recent Ask the Developer article. One of developer HAL Laboratory's greatest workarounds uses positional hit detection to ensure that even if an attack wouldn't actually connect, if it looks to the player like it would, the game will give them the hit. This tweet from Gosokkyu shows the effect in-game:
one of the ways they've adjusted to make the game easier in 3D is by using positional hit detection based on the camera angle—in essence, even if the attack doesn't truly collide, if it looks to the player like it hit, then it'll hit pic.twitter.com/a41Z8RM9hnMarch 24, 2022
"The game accounts for the player's perspective by tracking the positions of Kirby and the camera," explains HAL's Tatsuya Kamiyama. "It then maps out a range in which attacks may appear to land. If an attack is within that range, the attack will hit. By doing so, even people who are not so good at 3D action games can attack enemies without any stress."
This is functionally similar to the aim assist used in countless shooters – both features give players some wiggle room in whether their attacks are successful – but the tech behind it seems much more sophisticated. Kirby and the Forgotten Land's positional detection was purpose-made to ensure that the pink protagonist's jump to 3D went as smoothly as possible.
In a similar vein, Kirby's jumps are supported by a "fuzzy landing" system which makes jumping after landing more consistent. Because some high or top-down camera angles can obscure Kirby's distance from the ground, early Forgotten Land playtesters would occasionally end up jumping a little early as they descended, floating in mid-air instead of launching into a new jump as intended. This landing system was implemented to give jumps a bit of a grace period: if you press jump when you're close to the ground, the game will treat that jump as if Kirby's already fully landed.
they've also implemented "fuzzy landing" to ensure that Kirby will jump out of a landing if the button's pressed within a certain proximity to the ground—certain camera angles made it hard to visually judge & had people inadvertently floating instead of jumping, but not anymore pic.twitter.com/JzT7WhTNmBMarch 24, 2022
The invisible sticky platforms often used to make the ledges of 2D platformers feel more forgiving are a relatively close comparison here, but again, the three-dimensional implications of this tech are fascinating. As some Kirby fans have pointed out, tricks like these leave the door open for speedrun masterminds to go ham by using these systems to shave off precious seconds.
In the same interview, Kirby and the Forgotten Land's designers explained that they sometimes held back on the enemy quantity to protect "poor Kirby."
