Kirby and the Forgotten Land Featured a UI Designing First for the Series

In a new Kirby and the Forgotten Land Ask the Developer, HAL Lab General Director Shinya Kumazaki and Director Tatsuya Kamiyama talked about the game’s design and localization. In particular, it came up that this installment marks a first for the series. Rather than using Japanese when designing the game’s UI, they used English.

First, Kamiyama revealed English was the default. This was done to make sure the UI and menus looked more natural worldwide.

Here’s another first for this series – when we designed the user interfaces (7) for buttons and menus, we used English.
Using Japanese for the user interface would be more intuitive for us, but designing those spaces for Japanese characters left other languages with text that was squished and hard to read.
So we decided to design those sections in English rather than Japanese, which resulted in much longer text than we’re used to seeing.

After that, Kumazaki discussed how this resulted in a challenge when developing it.

That said, when I wrote the text, implemented it, and checked it in the game, it was…all in English. So it was very difficult for me. (Laughs)
We believe it’s important to make sure the text in those areas doesn’t slow the game down for anyone, so we tried to keep players from all over the world in mind. We put a lot of effort into that section of the game.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land will launch worldwide on March 25, 2022, and the demo is available in the Nintendo eShop.