5/5 ★ – isolate_connect's review of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest.

Donkey Kong Country took the gaming world by storm in 1994. Though it was the first entry in what would blossom into the best trilogy on the SNES, it was confident, unique, and stylish. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest improves on the gameplay of the original while shifting the theme of the game from jungle scapes to pirate ships and tropes. It works very well, and builds logically off the final boss fight of the first game. The gameplay is improved in a variety of ways. The hidden areas that were required for completing the game and offered bananas and extra lives galore now hold a new currency that can be collected to unlock challenging levels in a bonus world. There are also Banana coins to collect, which are basically irrelevant and are used for saving the game and moving from world to world via Funky’s Flights. This would be really annoying if the coins were difficult to collect, but they are everywhere which makes their inclusion trivial. No harm no foul, I guess. Outside of taking baby steps towards the collect-a-thon genre that would dominate Nintendo’s N64 games, DKC2 adds a a couple new animal buddies. A bouncy snake and a spider that can shoot webs. The frog and Ostrich from DKC got scrapped. The new animals provide for some decent gameplay shake ups and control tightly. Where DKC2 makes its strongest improvement is in the two characters that are playable. Diddy Kong was so much better than Donkey Kong in the first game they scrapped the titular character all together in part 2 and instead we play as Diddy and Dixie, who can use her ponytail as an iconic helicopter floating mechanic, as they try to save Donkey King from King K Rool. DKC2 is just a little bit better than DKC in almost every way. One area where both games are equal is the music. Both soundtracks are amazing. DKC2 is a top 5 game on the SNES in my opinion, and a must play for platformer fans.