Donkey Kong Country
Super Nintendo
Nostalgia Factor:
I’m going to start off with a somewhat controversial statement: I have NEVER been a fan of Donkey Kong Country. I can’t really pinpoint the reason why. Part of it may be a jealousy thing. Loyal readers of this blog should know by now that I grew up with a Sega Genesis rather than a Super Nintendo. When DKC originally hit store shelves, people ranted and raved about this game and how advanced its graphics were - how nothing like this game could EVER be done for the Genesis. It made me mad.
To add insult to injury, a few years later (in 1996) I remember being with my dad at the mall around the Christmas holiday. There was a store with two playable video game displays set up. One of them was a Sega Saturn with Bug Too! on display. The other was a Super Nintendo with Donkey Kong Country 3. All the kids my age were gathered around the Super Nintendo display, while I was the only one paying Bug Too! any attention. I was a proud Saturn owner at the time. It made me angry that my beloved system was already in its death throes only a year and a half after its release, while the Super Nintendo was still getting all kinds of love and attention.
Fucking Donkey Kong Country. You’re the reason Sega failed!!!!
All joking aside, I really was jealous of this game’s success. I didn’t even own a Super Nintendo so I could check out and enjoy this lauded series for myself. That changed later on in my life, I’d say when I was in my mid to late 20s. I got my hands on an SNES at a used game store and started building up a collection of games to play that I’d missed out on as a kid. The original Donkey Kong Country was one of those games. I popped it in, started playing it… and found that I didn’t like it.
It was too hard. I thought the gameplay was bland and uninspired. I just flat out did not have a good time with the game. I remember throwing a tantrum and pulling the game out the system and hurling it across my apartment, where the game knocked a chunk out of the wall. Oops. My girlfriend at the time arrived right at this exact moment when I was raging and was like “uh… should I leave?”
Surprisingly, the game still worked after all the abuse it had suffered. I ended up finishing it and trading it in to buy something else. I washed my hands of Donkey Kong Country and said never again would I play this game or any of its sequels.
Well, obviously that changed. I’d say about 13 or 14 years have passed since the infamous cartridge throwing incident. Would my thoughts on it be any different today? Read on and find out!
Story:
If you’re playing this game for its story, you’re playing it for all the wrong reasons. Its story is very, very basic and almost completely inconsequential to the game at hand. But I’ll explain anyway.
The Kremlings, a crocodile-like biped species, invade Donkey Kong Island and steal a shit ton of bananas. Playing as Donkey Kong (in tandem with his nephew Diddy), you fight back against the Kremlings and their henchmen, driving them off the island after defeating their leader King K Rool. The end.
Gameplay:
As alluded to before, you play as both Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy. This game is filled with one-hit deaths, so if you are playing as DK (for example) and you get hit, DK “dies” and you take control of Diddy. If you get hit as Diddy, you die and lose a life. So as long as you have at least one of your two characters alive, you’re good to go. Be aware that falling to your death in a bottomless pit will result in an automatic death, even if you have both Donkey and Diddy available to you. You can switch back and forth between these characters at any time. DK is strong and can kill some enemies that Diddy can’t. Diddy is weaker than DK, but much faster and more agile at the same time. So there’s a bit of a tradeoff here. Strategic players will switch back and forth between the two characters as needed. If you see a large gap in front of you, chances are that Diddy will be able to jump across it more easily. Likewise, if you see a big, hard-hatted enemy coming your way it is advised to switch to DK because if you jump on its head as Diddy, you’ll probably just bounce off him and end up getting yourself killed.
If you happen to lose your partner, don’t fret too much because there are barrels located pretty regularly around each stage that resurrect your partner. There are other barrels you can use to pick up and chuck at your enemies. Some of these barrels can be used to destroy walls which lead to secret areas that contain bananas, letters that spell K-O-N-G (which give you an extra life if you collect them all), 1 ups, or animal tokens. Collect three of the same animal token and you are taken to a bonus level where you ride said animal and collect bananas from a giant room full of bananas. Many regular levels contain these animals as well, such as a rhinoceros and an ostrich you can ride, in addition to a swordfish during the underwater stages.
While the game seems fun on the surface, it didn’t start to bother me until the difficulty level began to spike. That’s when all of its obvious flaws started to rise to the surface. First: the controls. This is not a fluid-controlling game like Mario or Mega Man. The controls are somewhat stiff and restrictive, particularly when you are playing as the less agile Donkey Kong. There are so many jumps that are insanely difficult to pull off successfully, even though on the surface they don’t look that hard. Enemies are positioned in such a way that you often have to jump over them at the same time you are jumping over a tough pit. This resulted in a lot of very frustrating deaths for yours truly. You so much as graze a pixel against your enemy and you are dead.
Attacking is also very iffy. Both characters have a roll attack, but I pretty much abandoned the roll attack because every time I would try to use it, my character would stop rolling a microsecond before hitting the enemy and I would get killed. The only other way to kill people (without the use of a barrel to throw) is to jump on their heads. While this is a tried and true video game concept, the timing comes across as very touchy in this game, and resulted in a handful of “WTF did I do wrong?” type deaths.
What really makes the game difficult, however, is the precise timing required to make your way through some of the game’s more difficult challenges. Everyone knows about the mine cart stages, but the ones I hated were the ones where you are on a moving ledge and the screen auto-scrolls with the ledge. You have to deal with enemies attacking you, often forcing you to temporarily jump off the moving ledge and make your way back onto it. Then there are the barrels that launch you through the stages. They rotate in every direction and you have to hit the launch button at the EXACT right moment or the barrel will shoot you somewhere you don’t want to go – which will likely result in your death. There are levels where you have to bounce off of tires past moving bee enemy obstacles. Touch the bee, you die. Miss a platform and fall, you die. There are stages which are completely dark and you have to activate light switches that temporarily allow you to see. If you don’t make it to the next light switch in time, you’re stuck trying to navigate through a dark screen and more likely than not you’ll find yourself dying.
That’s the theme of this game: death and dying and a lot of it.
While it seems like I’m complaining a lot and that I hated the game (like I did when I was younger), I actually had a somewhat enjoyable time with this game. If you’re patient, you’ll find the game quite rewarding as each stage is chock full of secrets and collectibles for you to locate. The structure of the game allows you to revisit old areas to find things you’ve missed. The game is also quite generous with extra lives, so even if you find yourself dying a lot you’re still going to be afforded lots of opportunities to learn from your mistakes and give it another go. Most importantly, this game allows you to save your progress. This is huge, because most games of this era make you start from the beginning of the game when you lose all of your lives. If that was the case with Donkey Kong Country, I might never have been able to complete this game.
Graphics:
Admittedly, this game looks pretty stunning. I didn’t appreciate it as a kid and I didn’t appreciate it as a raging cartridge-chucking dude in my late 20s. But I appreciate it now. Especially since I’ve been playing so many retro games lately. Donkey Kong Country is easily one of the best looking SNES games I’ve played to date, if not THE best looking SNES game. It’s not just the character design or the lush stages that do it for me. It’s the atmospheric effects. The rain, the lightning, the water effects. I was in awe the whole time I played this game. Donkey Kong Country creates such an unbelievable atmosphere for its players that is hard for even the biggest of haters to deny.
Sound:
This game sounds like a dream too, right from the introduction all the way to the end of the game. The various stage themes are instantly memorable. The music in between stages is memorable. The sound effects are fantastic as well.
As far as presentation goes, this is one of the most polished SNES games I’ve played. The graphics and music go hand-in-hand to really deliver a memorable and engrossing game environment to its players. Nothing but respect from me!
Overall:
I think after all these years I am finally able to give Donkey Kong Country the objective, unbiased look that it truly deserves. And I have mixed feelings.
The presentation of this game is an absolute A+. But I’ve ranted and raved about this game’s music and graphics enough. The real question is: is this game any fun to play?
Yes and no. I can see and appreciate what they were trying to do here. The ability to control two characters and switch back and forth between them was pretty intuitive for the time this game was released. The level design is fun. There is some nice variety in the stages and in the types of gameplay. I like that you can move along an overworld map and revisit stages you’ve already played. I like that you can save your game. There are tons of secret areas and hidden items galore, which gives this game a lot of replay value. DKC does a lot right. But dang its difficulty level nearly killed the fun for me at several points in this game.
I understand games being tough and offering a stiff challenge for its players. I’ve played things like Castlevania III and Contra: Hard Corps pretty recently, if you look back through my old reviews. And I had nothing but good things to say about both of those games, which are subjectively speaking a lot more difficult than this game. So why did this one bug me so much? I think it is because the game didn’t feel fair. If a game is challenging or if I die because of my own fault, I tend to not care as much. But this game just has SO many unfair deaths. Enemies that pop up at the edge of the screen before you have the chance to react. Areas with insanely difficult jumps where you have to dodge floating enemies as well as nail your landing. Frustrating combat mechanics. Barrel blasting segments that require pixel-perfect accuracy.
I’m trying to not let this tank my opinion of the game, however. This game does do a LOT right. On the whole I would say I had a good time with this game, despite the occasional frustration. And this game is so generous with its extra lives that dying became something that was little more than an inconvenience than anything else. The only time it ever became too horribly annoying is when I had to replay long segments of stages that I’d already played before – but luckily that doesn’t happen too much in this game.
I think I can safely say that I don’t hate Donkey Kong Country anymore. I’m definitely going to check out its sequels at some point in the near future. Am I going to revisit this game at any point in my life, however? Probably not.
Final Score:
C+
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