Does Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe have online multiplayer?

If you are someone who thinks fondly back to the days of single-screen multiplayer games, Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe is a good game for you to play with friends or family. This classic Wii game re-released on Nintendo Switch lets you and up to three friends play as Kirby, King Dedede, Meta Knight, and Bandana Dee. That being said, what if your friends aren’t in the same place as you? Can you play Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe online?

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Can you play Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe online with friends?

Unfortunately, there is no online multiplayer for Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe. While the game has online functionality and asks if you want to connect to their services, this does not allow you to play with your friends. Instead, this is merely to add a leaderboard function to Merry Magoland, where a bunch of mini-games have been added.

For Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe being a game so focused on playing with others, it is quite disappointing not to see it have any new online network play outside of the Merry Magoland stuff. We understand that the original Wii version of the game didn’t have it either, but we would think after over a decade of that game being out, Nintendo and HAL Laboratory would want to add that functionality, similar to how Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury did.

Sure, Nintendo is not known for having the best online experience out there, but it still would have been nice to play through this game built for cooperative play while online. Unfortunately, while Kirby gets a lot of experimental titles, the developers don’t seem to like to give him online multiplayer — that was the same case that happened with Kirby Star Allies, the first game in the series on Nintendo Switch.