3.5/5 ★ – elkniodaphs's review of Donkey Kong Country.

Donkey Kong Country is my favorite of the SNES trilogy. The problem is, it's a flawed masterpiece. High school students might be able to capture the spirit of James Ensor's "The Intrigue," in paint if they were to attempt a copy, but those students could never recreate the most intricate details of the original. As is the case with James Ensor, Belgium's famous painter, and those high school students attempting mimicry, we see a Nintendo IP and Rare, a British studio, attempting to ape the tenets established by their Japanese senpai. Donkey Kong Country seems to suffer from a lack of direct influence from Nintendo - one feels as if Nintendo simply gave a languid thumbs up when presented with iterative builds of the game. "It looks fine," Nintendo would say, "We're busy making the Virtual Boy... let us concentrate." Don't get the wrong idea, I love this game, but I still recognize it as a flawed masterpiece. The most egregious example is with level design, particularly in the second half of the game. Players should be able to establish a platforming flow, a fluid traversal through obstacles. That's not to say that such a staggered course doesn't have its place, but object placement here seems designed to annoy rather than challenge. That is all very critical, but the parts of this game that work well shine brighter and more vividly than almost anything else on the platform. The pre-rendered 3D graphics are stunning, the color palette is impressive, and the music is phenomenal (Beanland). You'll notice that all of the positive points are for asset quality. What could Donkey Kong Country have been if it had been developed by Nintendo in-house, with graphics and sound contracted from Rare? Nonetheless, Donkey Kong Country is a true classic, one of my favorites, but that's why I want it to be better. I want the best for it because I love it so much. Few games on the SNES could do what DKC did in filling me with so much excitement and wonder as a child. The world of DKC is lush, gorgeous, and full of secret mysteries. I wrote in a recent Reddit comment that this was the height of Rare as a company, with DKC featured on the cover of Nintendo Power and a contest to win a Killer Instinct arcade cabinet in the same issue; this would have been a magazine that every kid would have picked up in November of 1994. You can look at Rare now, a studio which seems to bend over backward to try their best for other companies instead of themselves, and consider them a casualty of Microsoft. But like James Ensor, we can still show our appreciation by digging them up for a handshake.