Players complain about how Kirby still has to pay for the many services in Waddle Dee Town such as the Weapon Shop, Item Shop and Waddle Dee Cafe. However, it makes sense why they would require payment once thinking about it more. The Weapons Shop is tailored only for Kirby, and how expensive would it be to manufacture buzzsaws, black hole guns, and the Meta/Morpho Knight Swords? The Item Shop similarly likely uses rare ingredients to make the boosts. And the Café? Well, Kirby is notoriously known for a large appetite and his greatest challenge when working part-time at the café is not eating the food. Kirby getting free access to the Café foods would have bankrupted them!
Of note, the two services Kirby doesn’t need to pay for are the Waddle Dee Cinema and the Colosseum. Both of those can easily make revenue from the Waddle Dees who are shown to be audience members, and Kirby is exempt for his heroism.
King Dedede is somehow a servant to the Beast Pack while Meta Knight is unaffiliated with them. This makes sense, since Dedede is based on an actual animal (a penguin), much like the rest of the Beast Pack. Fecto Forgo did plan on brainwashing Meta Knight, but the latter's willpower won out. Meta Knight would likely have had the bat as his animal theme, considering his Cape Wings.
King Dedede is the boss of Winter Horns, a Slippy-Slidey Ice World. While it's fitting to make Dedede the boss of this area considering his resemblance to a penguin, it might also be a call-back to Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby's Epic Yarn, where Dedede was also the boss of an ice area (Iceberg in the former and Snow Land in the latter).
One of Meta Knight's figurine bios states that he fought Gorimondo 30 times and won all of them. Aside from being the much more skilled combatant, Meta Knight's fighting style hard-counters Gorimondo's — flight, fast movement, and staying out of range when needed allows MK to fly over Gorimondo's Shockwave Stomps, dodge the thrown rocks, and keep away from the grabs and the Tornado Move, so it's no surprise.
"Forgo" is a recurring phrase in the game. "To forgo" means to be without something. Forgo Dedede is Dedede fully brainwashed by the experiment's power, i.e. he is Dedede without his reason and morality. Fecto Forgo refers to the form of Fecto Elfilis without Elfilin. The Isolated Isles of Forgo Dreams is a reality separate from the main dimension. "Forgo" even facts into the game's title (with "Forgo" being a root word in "Forgotten") and lore, as the people who used to populate the land had left long ago, leaving their civilization lost in their absence.
The Beast Pack are a bunch of organized Intelligent Gerbils with humanoid forms and high intelligence, which is unusual for the Kirby series, which usually depicts either abstract creatures or simpler animals. The former inhabitants of the New World were known to experiment on Specimen ID-F86 and are implied to be responsible for his larval state. It could be that the Beast Pack are the result of experimentation themselves, which also explains why Leongar is so knowledgable about Lab Discovera.
Fecto Elfilis' spear resembles a caduceus, a symbol of commerce often misappropriated as a symbol of medicine. This ties in with Fecto Elfilis' backstory of being captured and studied by the scientists at Lab Discovera, who then used them as a tourist attraction.
Could be this or Fridge Horror, but one might think that by reuniting Elfilin (who is Fecto Elfilis's compassion and kindness given form) with Fecto Forgo (Elfilis's evil and cruelty), Fecto Elfilis could be a reasonable, balanced individual. But then look at how big Fecto Forgo is, compared to how small Elfilin is. Of course Fecto Elfilis is still evil after reuniting; they have next to no compassion in them anyway! After Kirby beats Chaos Elfilis, all that's left of them is a small spark that's far smaller than Elfilin, allowing him to be the one in charge when it recombines with him.
In Japanese, it's said that the part of Elfilis's heart that became Elfilin was "left behind" inside them. The word used here, nokosareta, is also used for Fecto Forgo being abandoned by the people of the New World. This wording implies that in the past, Fecto Elfilis had either ignored or actively suppressed its ability to feel compassion, all so it could keep on invading and assimilating planets.
It appears odd that Fecto Forgo didn't brainwash all of the Waddle Dees into marching off to Lab Discovera for slavery, instead having the Beast Pack capture them. However, not only is Forgo in a weakened state where they need to conserve energy, many Waddle Dees would be lost getting through the more treacherous terrains such as the Forbidden Lands. It could also mean that like Meta Knight, Waddle Dees also have a surprisingly strong will to resist the brainwashing.
Originull Wasteland was implied to be where life on this planet originated, with the first stage even being called "The Wastes Where Life Began". Dried corals and even the remains of a large ship can be found here, and the stage ends with Kirby climbing a diving platform that still has starfish attached to it, implying that this was actually an ocean before it dried up, and we all know that life began in the ocean. This also makes the appearance of a lost Squishy here more meaningful.
The vocal song of the game makes more sense when you learn that the inhabitants used Fecto Elfilis's warp powers to leave their world to pursue a "land of dreams." The song may have been part of an advertisement to encourage them all to leave.
Adding credence to this, the Dream Discoveries Tour voiceover in Lab Discovera is set to an instrumental remix of said song, suggesting that in-universe, the song was associated with the lab. This crosses into Fridge Horror, since it's possible that they knew that Fecto Forgo couldn't be contained forever and decided to encourage everyone to leave the planet, and the tour was used to educate the public of the dangers of ID-F86 in order to convince everyone to leave before it broke out again.
The Bling Blipper is a massive fish that's almost as big as Kirby's house... And it weighs only about 10 kg, since Kirby is only 20 cm tall. Or are they just really light?
It's strange how Kirby's Mouthful Mode can allow him to do things like drive cars or activate giant lightbulbs, despite the fact that these items happen to be ancient and decayed, and don't have anything to power them. But Kirby: Planet Robobot says that Kirby has "infinite power". He's using himself as the power source!
Throughout the modern Kirby games, mid-bosses and enemies had a habit of just teleporting into the battle arena with no explanation. However, in the new world, it can actually be explained. The Tour Guide in Lab Discovera mentions that the inhabitants of the new world developed planetary warp technology. It's possible they left some behind and that's why mid-bosses can just teleport into the arena. Doesn't explain the mid-bosses back on Popstar, though.
Morpho Knight Sword's Gotcha description explains that anybody who the butterfly casts judgement on becomes Morpho Knight except for Kirby. How often does the Butterfly land on Kirby in the cutscenes of recent games? Morpho Knight has been trying to take over Kirby for ages now, likely being drawn to the most powerful thing around, and it's never succeeded. In fact, the description notes that Kirby wielding Morpho's sword "is...a breeze" for him.
One of the HAL rooms has a sleeping Awoofy on the rightmost block forming the letter L, and inside that block is a Gotcha Capsule. It's likely based on HAL's logo of a sleeping dog incubating eggs.
A lot of differences between this game and previous ones can be chalked up to the new dimension's different and more realistic laws of physics:
Kirby's Mouthful Mode could be explained this way. Normally, Kirby could fully swallow entities as big as cars or vending machines without them getting stuck, even without Hypernova. This is also hinted at in the game's intro, where Kirby starts deforming into odd shapes as he's traveling to the New World's dimension, being forced to adhere to the new laws of physics.
Unlike almost every other Kirby game, there are no Solid Clouds at all, and series regular Kracko is a no-show. The dimension's more realistic laws of physics likely prevents solid or sentient cloud formations from occurring entirely.
Despite seemingly looking out of place compared to the Beast Pack, Fecto Forgo/Elfilis being the final boss and mastermind perfectly ties into the Pack's beast theme. After all, the most powerful and perfect beast of all would be the Ultimate Life Form!
Elfilin resembles a mouse and also has a clipped ear, making him a lab rat. We eventually learn that he did escape from a lab.
Dedede's new redesign here looks familiar, with the smaller mouth, cartoony eyes, and Club Penguin-esque body, it resembles how he looked in Crystal Shards, the first Kirby game to integrate 3D and 2D elements. And now it's made a return in Kirby's first fully 3D main-game.
This game's Japanese, Korean, and Chinese titles, Discovery, could refer to Kirby discovering the New World… or it could refer to its original inhabitants discovering Fecto Forgo.
There's a bit of this mixed with Fridge Black Comedy in how you beat the final boss. You've fought through hordes of animals the whole game, now you fight an alien animal. How do you beat it? Hit it with a truck. This just seems like Mundane Made Awesome until you realize you beat the ultimate animal by making it into roadkill.
This can be made even funnier — a truck is a memetically common method of "transit" for protagonists in the Isekai genre, typically via running said protagonist over and killing them. Kirby became "Truck-kun", then proceeded to send Elfilis to another world!
When exploring Lab Discovera, the tour audio states that the experiment that separated Fecto Elfilis into Fecto Forgo and Elfilin happened 30 years after Elfilis was first discovered. Kirby and the Forgotten Land was released just before Kirby's 30th anniversary!
Elfilin shows no signs of being able to do the things he does during the ending (powering up Kirby's Big Rig Mouth for the final blow, closing the rift between worlds, opening star portals) until after he's freed from Fecto Elfilis. Perhaps reuniting with Fecto Forgo unsealed his own powers.
In this game, Bottomless Pits and crushers don’t one-shot Kirby like in previous games. This could be a sign of Kirby’s growth, having learned and adapted to toughen up.
As mentioned below in Fridge Horror, the Japanese, Chinese and Korean versions of the game confirm (and the other versions imply) that Elfilin was trapped in Forgo Dreams when Fecto Forgo assimilated him before the final battle. Assuming Leon's soul was shattered immediately upon being assimilated himself, that could explain how Elfilin knows if Kirby has collected all of the soul pieces in a given area of a Forgo Dreams stage.
After using the Dome Mouth ability to force Chaos Elfilis's soul out, his body simply dissolves before turning into orbiting blood coloured orbs surrounding his new form. It makes sense that such a thing would happen because his original body no longer has a soul to sustain it due to the player sucking it out earlier. And after the fight ends with his orb form, Chaos Elfilis is reduced to a speck of light because the animal souls used to maintain his orb form have all passed on due to them no longer being bound to Chaos Elfilis's will.
Chaos Elfilis's colours aren't just a reference to Zero and Void, they're meant to imply that Elfilis has become a negative reincarnation of Void and there are several hints to this: the distorted white and rainbow background (Void's colours), Chaos Elfilis being red and white like both bosses, their battle theme having a similar structure to the theme played during Void Termina's final form, both bosses are associated with "chaos" and lack the "Soul" suffix of past "Soul" bosses and Chaos Elfilis's final form is an orb that uses the attacks of past "Soul" bosses which are coloured blood red like Zero's own attacks and changes the background colour like the fight with Void.
Most Waddle Dees are rescued singularly, but each stage ends with a trio — this is Kirby's first real "Three-Dee" game, after all!
According to the Japanese-onlyPerfect Support Guide for this game, Elfilin represents the part of Fecto Elfilis that "governs its intelligence, its reason, and its conscience". In other words, Elfilin is the higher-order thinking skills you would expect from a fully developed, adult brain. So it's no wonder that Fecto Forgo is so stubborn, un-empathetic, and prone to extreme displays of spite — what you're fighting is essentially a version of Fecto Elfilis who's missing that brain development. It has the mind of a child! Supporting this interpretation, the same Flavor Textnote フェクト・フォルガ (幼体):幼体のフェクト・フォルガは、知性や理性、良心を司るエフィリンと分離し、羽化する前の幼生に戻っている状態。エフィリンよりもはるかに大きいことがわかる。 (Fecto Forgo (Juvenile):Separated from Elfilin, who governs its intelligence, its reason, and its conscience, the juvenile Fecto Forgo has reverted to its larval state from before emergence. It is clearly far larger than Elfilin.) states that the split returned Elfilis to the body it had in childhood, too.
Fecto Forgo appears to be capable of brainwashing almost any beast or beastlike inhabitant of Planet Popstar as soon as they enter the New World. Dedede joins the Beast Pack rather quickly, and both Wild Frosty's and Wild Bonkers' bios state that they immediately joined the Beast Pack as soon as they ended up there. Imagine what would've happened to Kirby's animal friends or the Squeaks if they ended up in the New World...
We can make this worse. The Mage Sisters and Hyness. Marx. Magolor. Susie. Taranza. All particularly powerful individuals who would've made for fantastically nightmarish vessels had Fecto Forgo gotten its hands on them. And if the monster ever encountered Adeleine, it might see her has a perfect opportunity for Revenge by Proxy, making her the scapegoat for the sins of her (most likely) ancestors.
Leongar claims that the original inhabitants of the New World used Fecto Forgo's "miraculous power" to leave their planet behind for a "land of dreams". But consider the postgame, where Kirby visits a literalland of dreams created by Forgo, and the fact that Leon was brainwashed into believing Forgo's false promises. Given Forgo's Mind Control abilities, it's all too possible that they lured those people into Forgo Dreams as revenge for being experimented on, and did Void knows what with them.
Leongar's claim of everyone leaving for a "land of dreams" may also imply that the residents of the New World used Fecto Forgo's powers to go to Dream Land — as in, Kirby's home. This could both give the entire series quite the ugly origin story and explain why Fecto Elfilis specifically chose Planet Popstar to perform their Colony Drop desperation move with.
The Arrival Continent, despite being abandoned, is a lush land where nature has overtaken the ruins. Even the Wondaria amusement park is still active despite the lack of maintenance. Compare this to the Forbidden Lands; the ruins make it clear that it too was once a thriving land, now dried out or overflowing with lava. So what happened? Considering it is where Lab Discovera and thus Fecto Forgo reside, the Forbidden Lands may be a painful reminder of what the creature could do if he got his way, or maybe a stealth Green Aesop.
Leongar's body language during his boss fights implies that laser he's shooting out of his mouth is extremely painful. He hunches over and glowing fluid particles spill out of his mouth, but it looks more like vomit.
After the fight with Fecto Forgo, they turn into a blob and try to grab Kirby with some tentacles, which Kirby dodges. Since it's shown that Fecto Forgo uses those tentacles to assimilate things, what would've happened if one of those tentacles successfully grabbed Kirby?
Dedede's decision to stay back and hold off the incoming Beast Pack after saving the Waddle Dee actually saved his life. If he chose to leave the Waddle Dee behind and head up to Lab Discovera along with Kirby, he would likely have been assimilated alongside Leongar and the Beast Pack once Fecto Forgo awakened. Considering what happens to Fecto Forgo's assimilated victims, this would be far more difficult to recover from than simply being rushed by several Beast Pack members.
Why does Elfilin have a circular chunk missing from his ear? Because that’s one of the methods real laboratories use to identify their lab mice. It’s likely that Lab Discovera managed to tag Elfilin before he escaped and he’s been hiding from them ever since.
Sillydillo can do a One-Hit Kill on Kirby by trapping him in a cage and smashing it against the floor, a feat not even the Eldritch Abominations the latter fights and defeats on a regular basis are capable of. With that level of strength, it raises many questions about him and his strength, as well as how much power he's hiding behind that deranged, comical façade.
Based on previous bosses, it seems he's about as powerful as a very desperate Star Dream Soul OS. Even so, Star Dream Soul OS's Desperation Attack was not a One-Hit Kill (but would drop Kirby from full HP to nearly nothing), while Sillydillo is capable of one-shooting Kirby even if he has the Life Up item that raises his health to double.
A more horrifying reason why this is a One-Hit Kill could be because the cage smash is made to knock Kirby out while still keeping him contained… and allow Sillydillo to trap him forever in a sturdier cage, or take him to Leongar or Fecto Forgo. Either way, it's a bad ending for Kirby.
Considering that Fecto Forgo was able to conjure up dimensional portals and retreat into a realm of their own dreams, perhaps it could've fled to the Mirror World instead? If it had done so, that might've been enough for them to start their plans anew…
In the game files are boss data for the Eternal Capsule (and an EX variant), which could imply that the Eternal Capsule and Soul Forgo would've been actual bosses at some point. If that were the case, then perhaps Soul Forgo would've been quite powerful, enough so that Morpho Knight coming in is actually a blessing in disguise, or that Fecto Forgo would've been strong enough to attack from the safety of its capsule.
It's established that the Waddle Dees arrived in the New World, met Elfilin, and built the first version of Waddle Dee Town, then the town was destroyed and everyone was captured by the Beast Pack. That's a lot of things that happened in too short of a timespan, considering what the player sees at the start of the game. Could Kirby have been in the vortex and/or unconscious on the beach for weeks, months or even years?
The ending also contributes to the idea. On Popstar, after Elfilin’s sacrifice, it only seems to take a few seconds before Elfilin comes back. However, when talking to Elfilin in the New World, he says he used up all his power and blacked out, which sounds like something that would have taken a long time to recover from, far from the mere moments on Popstar that it took for Elfilin to come back.
Just how did Elfilin feel being forced to merge with Fecto Forgo to form Fecto Elfilis? Elfilin was clearly still inside Elfilis, given how Elfilin is released through Dome Mouth. Not only that, but it was the third time Elfilin got trapped. And this time, he is Forced to Watch Elfilis attack his new friend, the same friend that freed him both times.
Elfilin looked like he was sleeping or unconscious before Kirby extracted him from Fecto Elfilis, and seemed to be confused about where he was or what had happened (though he later states in Forgo Dreams that he remembers the feeling of Fecto Forgo's psychic energy from the merge). This suggests that Forgo completely absorbed Elfilin's consciousness in order to reform into Elfilis. Maybe Elfilin felt scared for a moment, and then felt nothing at all.
According to what Elfilin says in the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean versions, he was imprisoned in Forgo Dreams just like Leongar. Though, this has its own fridge horror — imagine being trapped in a dream world forever, unable to know what kind of havoc the monster who imprisoned you is unleashing on the rest of the universe.
Elfilin:This place... this feeling! It's just like the world I saw when I was taken by Fecto Elfilis!
Imagine how terrifying it had to be for the Waddle Dees imprisoned in Winter Horns, Originull Wasteland, and Redgar Forbidden Lands. The Waddle Dees in Winter Horns were likely hoping they wouldn't freeze to death before Kirby got to them. The Waddle Dees in the Originull Wasteland had to endure incredibly dry conditions, and who knows if those Clockers holding their cages were feeding them? Not to mention the occasional sandstorms. And then there's the Waddle Dees in the Forbidden Zone of Redgar who were in constant peril of falling lava meteors and the extreme heat from being in close proximity to lava. One Waddle Dee is even underneath the lava until a switch is activated!
There are parallels to Zero and Void within Chaos Elfilis's design and how Zero's attacks were all blood themed. With that in mind, notice how Chaos Elfilis's orb form is yellow and cyan with a blood red shell and how after being defeated, we see all the animal souls pulsing in and out before they die for good. In other words, Chaos Elfilis is surrounded by a shell made of animal blood.
If Soul Forgo absorbing Morpho Knight's DNA was all that was needed for him to become Chaos Elfilis, then it begs the question: how much more powerful would all the previous Soul bosses be if they also absorbed Morpho Knight's power?
In the Japanese version, it was mentioned that Fecto Elfilis was originally captured "for preventative purposes" after Lab Discovera's scientists saw what it did to the planet's native species and became worried about the threat it posed to themselves. After seeing what it's truly capable of in the climax… just what kind of carnage was Elfilis responsible for, if it managed to frighten the Ancients themselves?
According to the Japanese guidebook, the attack where Elfilis throws a huge pile of space debris at Kirby after it Turns Red is called "Fermi Paradox Answer". If this is taken literally, then that means Fecto Elfilis answered the Fermi Paradox in-universe by appearing out of nowhere and immediately striking the planet with a meteor. Small wonder Lab Discovera freaked out — they probably thought it was the end of the world, and, considering what Elfilis tries to do at the end of the story campaign, they weren't that far off either!
In Super Kirby Clash, it's established that "Parallel" versions of past antagonists exist. If that's the case, there could be a possibility that a Parallel Fecto Elfilis exists, and that they may be as every bit as malicious as the original.
as a symbol of medicine. This ties in with Fecto Elfilis' backstory of being captured and studied by the scientists at Lab Discovera, who then used them as a tourist attraction.