2.5/5 ★ – jdraco's review of Donkey Kong 64.

Monkey Month (4) So, I kind of fucked up I meant to review this game back in November, back when it was actually Monkey Month But the game took way longer than I expected it would to beat, even though I knew it would take fucking weeks And then I got bored with it for a little bit and stopped playing it Then I finally sat down and beat it in probably mid-December, and then I’ve just been putting off this review because I’ve beaten a lot of other games over the course of December and wanted to review those first But now I’m finally here, ready to review this game after months And some of you (most likely none of you) have probably been anxiously waiting to know what I think about this game So, what I think about it is that… This game is complete ass But also pretty good sometimes Let me explain So this has always been a weird game for me, and I’ve had a very unique love-hate relationship with it When I first completed the game, I loved it and thought it was a pretty great and memorable adventure But then after I looked back on my experience, I realized that I had a lot of bad moments while playing the game So then after a little bit I completed the game again, and after that playthrough I thought that it was nowhere near as good as I did when I initially completed it and overall just thought pretty negatively of the game as a whole But now, after completing it again all these years later, I’m kind of somewhere in the middle, like I alluded to earlier Because you see, this game has a lot of good things in it. It’s very charming, the music is fantastic, and the levels can be incredibly imaginative But the core gameplay of Donkey Kong 64 is just bad in so many ways And one of the main aspects in which it’s bad, and it’s pretty much the main thing that everyone collectively agrees is bad, and that’s the backtracking The amount of backtracking in this game is fucking nuts, and let me break down why So in this game there are 5 different Kongs that you can switch between Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Lanky Kong, Tiny Kong, and Chunky Kong And all these Kongs each have their own collectibles They all have their own ammo, crystal coconuts, headphones, bananas, banana balloons, banana coins, banana medals, blueprints, and golden bananas (the main collectible) and probably a million more collectibles that I’m forgetting as well And these collectibles are (pretty much) all unique to every Kong So in order to swap between every Kong and get all these collectibles scattered throughout every one of these massive levels, you need to use a switch barrel, which allows you to swap between each Kong The only problem is, there are only a few of these godforsaken things in every level, and they’re only in a few specific areas And a lot of the time it will happen where you’ll be playing as a certain Kong and end up passing by a golden banana that can only be accessed by another Kong, but the switch barrel is nowhere near you, so you end up having to take a mental note of that golden banana, and oftentimes you’ll forget because you’ll probably run into 50 more golden bananas that you can’t access Or on other occasions, you’ll be in a sub-area with one Kong, get the golden banana in there with them, but then realize that another Kong has a golden banana or some other valuable collectible in there as well So then you have to go all the way to a switch barrel to switch your Kong, and then all the way back to that sub-area to finally get whatever the collectible is It’s absolutely insane How did the developers of this game ever think that this much backtracking would be a good idea It is just not fun when you have to go back to the switch barrel for the 8000th time because you’re a fucking idiot with OCD and want to collect everything in sight And it’s crazy too because this much backtracking literally shatters the entire idea of a collect-a-thon Because in a collect-a-thon, the whole point is to collect everything in sight So whenever you see a collectible, you naturally go, “Oh, I want that,” and then you obviously go get that collectible and keep moving forward But in this game, you see a collectible, go, “Oh, I want that,” and then realize it can only be collected by another Kong, so now you have to go 8 million miles west to go to the fucking switch barrel and then go all the way back to get that collectible Again, it’s fucking insane And one of the worst instances of the backtracking in this game comes from level 4, “Gloomy Galleon” Now in this level there’s a room that can only be opened by Chunky Kong, so then inside that room, there’s naturally one of Chunky Kong’s golden bananas But then also in that room, there are Tiny Kong bananas for some reason, even though she has no golden banana in that room But either way, naturally, if you want to collect everything, like me, you’d leave that room, go all the way to the switch barrel, and then go back to that room and collect the bananas But then, also in that room, there are Lanky Kong blueprints, which are a collectible that you use to get golden bananas So now, you have to go all the way to the switch barrel again and then all the way back to that room again in order to get the blueprints, and then finally you have everything in that room So let's break it down You access the room with Chunky Kong, get his golden banana, then go all the way to the switch barrel, switch to Tiny Kong, go all the way back to get her bananas, and then go all the way back to the switch barrel again, switch to Lanky Kong, and then finally go all the way back again to get his blueprints… What the fuck… That is, for the 3rd time, absolutely fucking insane Who would think to make a game like this What sick fuck would conjure this up and think that it’s a good and fun idea to make a game like this This game should genuinely be studied in every game design course in terms of what not to do when it comes to backtracking in video games Because this genuinely might take the cake for the worst backtracking in any game You just can’t have this much backtracking in a game like this that has 700 million different collectibles that all 5 Kongs need to collect That just can’t be allowed; that should be fucking illegal And what should also be illegal are the minigames within Donkey Kong 64 Because pretty much all of them make me want to commit a felony You see, in order to get some of the 7 trillion golden bananas that are in DK64, you have to beat a minigame before you unlock the golden banana And some of these minigames range from swatting flies to trying to win a slot machine to navigating a maze while trying not to get spotted, and a lot more than that as well And out of all 16 (I just looked up how many there were) of these minigames, 0 of them are fun Yeah, pretty much every single one of these is either serviceable or just bad And that’s not necessarily because the ideas for these minigames are that bad; some of these concepts could be fun It’s just that a lot of them are completely broken Like the fly swatter one that I mentioned All you have to do in this minigame is swat flies, except sometimes the hitbox for your fly swatter just completely has a mind of its own sometimes Like you’ll line up the shadow of the fly swatter over the top of the fly, time it perfectly to the movement of the fly, and the hit still won’t connect It’s stupid as hell and, again, just feels completely busted sometimes But then you have the most busted minigame of all time, as well as the absolute worst minigame of all time and maybe the worst thing of all time… Beaver… Bother This abomination of a minigame is one of the worst things that I’ve ever had the disprivilege of experiencing in my whole entire life I could be forced at gunpoint to watch my next-door neighbor get a flaming wiffle bat shoved up their ass for 2 hours straight, and it would still be a more pleasurable experience than playing Beaver Bother This minigame just defies all logic, defies all the standards, rules, and expectations of what a minigame should be The main objective of it is that you’re playing as this little crocodile, and you have to scare a bunch of beavers into a hole that's in the middle of the arena in order to rack up enough beavers killed in a certain amount of time However, the time limit is a fucking joke, considering the fact that the beavers can literally just pick and choose whether or not they want to fall in the hole Literally, 99.9% of the time, it feels like no matter what you do or what angle you come at the beaver from, it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, it’s fucking random whether or not the beaver will fall or whether it won’t It's complete fucking chaos Fuck Heath Ledger’s Joker, rest in peace of course, though, but every single one of these beavers within Beaver Bother, they’re the true agents of chaos So yeah, the minigames are the worst types of golden bananas to get in my opinion And what’s really funny as well is that one of your rewards for completing this game is that you unlock the ability to play any of these minigames at any time Which is just fucking comical because I don’t want to even glance at a single one of these minigames ever again, let alone play them again I will say, though, while these are the worst golden bananas in the game to get, getting a lot of the other golden bananas in the game can be pretty rewarding And I know it took me a long ass time to speak about something good about this game, but now I’m finally going to There are actually a good amount of golden bananas in this game that are pretty great, fun to get, and, again, feel genuinely rewarding to get Like the one in Fungi Forest, for example, where you have to kill a bunch of giant angry tomatoes to stop them from eating this worm, and then after you do that, you move the worm to a sunny area, and then you finally get your golden banana Or another one where you have to explore Gloomy Galleon to find a lost pearl for a mermaid with giant tits And this is off topic, but speaking of giant tits for a second, it's clear that Rareware was really fucking horny when they were making this game I mean, one of the Kongs in this game, “Candy Kong,” who's an ape, by the way, also has giant tits, and in the final boss fight of the game, King K. Rool gets distracted by her giant tits, and that's actually how you end up beating him I don’t know; it’s just weird to me how horny the developers of this game were But back to the golden bananas, though, I really do like how involved a lot of these golden bananas are to get A lot of them aren’t just straightforward ones that you can just find in plain sight; a lot of them you have to do multiple different things for in order to get them, and I really like that It makes it feel way more rewarding when you actually do get them, and on top of that, the animation and song that plays when you get a golden banana are fantastic as well And this perfectly ties back into something that I actually really like about this game, which is its charm This game is just absolutely brimming with charm from the literal first “okay” sound effect that you hear when you see the Nintendo logo And then immediately after it launches you into DK Rap, which is just a masterpiece Anyone that’s played this game for the first time, you can’t look me in the eye with a straight face and tell me that you didn’t watch the whole entire thing It’s so damn good And they drop the word “hell” in the song too This song just has everything, and it perfectly establishes the tone of the entire game It shows that this is going to be a very light-hearted, funny, and charming adventure And it absolutely is The story is that King K. Rool steals all your golden bananas and locks up all of the Kongs, so Donkey Kong’s goal, with the help of the other Kongs, is to beat multiple bosses in order to free this gigantic crocodile, who you need in order for him to beat the shit out of King K. Rool It’s a masterpiece And I love how every time that you get a boss key to help unlock his cage, he does this little joyful dance that always causes something in DK Isle (the hub world) to be rearranged, and that’s how you unlock new levels And there are just multiple more funny and charming things like this as well I really like Cranky Kong in this game and how in every interaction with him, he’s roasting every character in sight Obviously, again, I like the song and dance that goes off whenever you get a golden banana I like the “okay” sound effect that plays when you hit the save button, as well as pretty much every other sound effect in the game for that matter; they’re amazing And I also really like all the names for the Cranky Kong upgrades that you get Like, for example, one of Chunky Kong's moves that you unlock is a punching move called “Sandwichium Knucklus” Which is great, and every upgrade that you get from Cranky Kong also retains this same exact naming scheme, and they’re all great as well And speaking of the upgrades from Cranky Kong, they’re all pretty good and do genuinely give this game a solid feeling of progression Basically, in every new level, you can find “Cranky’s Lab,” and inside you can get an upgrade for almost every Kong to unlock an ability that you probably need for that certain level in order to get golden bananas And, again, this is pretty nice progression, and the fact that you get these abilities in each stage means that in almost every level, once you get all the Kongs, you can beat them and get every collectible in one playthrough Which is always appreciated in collect-a-thons, even in one’s like this And shifting back to the upgrades for a second as well, you don’t just upgrade the Kongs abilities in this game; you can also upgrade their health/music meters as well as their weapons/ammo intake Yeah, the Kongs in this game are all decked out with their own instruments, which can be used to screen wipe enemies or be used to perform some kind of action on an instrument-specific pad As well as their own weapons (guns), which are used to attack enemies, hit switches, and targets, and then probably other shit as well that I can't think of at the moment, but you get the point And these are definitely a decent addition to the game, and it is definitely better with them, but it can get really annoying to upgrade all of these in every single level Yeah, all the good things I said about the progression were leaving out the annoying fact that you have to find all three different houses of Funky, Candy, and Cranky Kong in almost every level in the game in order to upgrade each specific thing Which can be pretty annoying Not that annoying, that all being said, because, I mean, if you’re trying to collect everything in a level, then you’re going to explore the whole thing and come across each house regardless But still, trying to find all 3 of these in order to progress and get these upgrades, again, can be pretty annoying, and they really should’ve just made it so there's 1 house that just has all 3 of them in it That would’ve made everything so much simpler, and then if they did that, they probably could’ve shrunk down some of these massive levels as well And speaking of the levels, now I want to talk about this game’s level design, and not just the backtracking, but pretty much everything that the levels have to offer And yeah, so overall the levels in this game are just pretty okay Now some of them do have really cool themes and some cool sub-areas and golden bananas within them But still, a lot of them just feel poorly executed in the design front Obviously, the backtracking, which I stated earlier, is pretty atrocious in some of these levels; that’s a given But the way some of these levels lay out these collectibles is weird as hell too Like, for example, there’ll be a path that’ll have a bunch of green bananas, which are Chunky Kongs, and then randomly those bananas will switch to blue bananas, which are Lanky Kongs Which makes absolutely no sense, and it’ll completely halt your progress, especially if you want to collect everything immediately because you’re then forced to go back to that path in order to get those bananas But I touched on that backtracking shit earlier, and I don’t want to retread too much old water, so another thing that I’ll say isn’t great about the levels is the multiple moments of platforming Which is pretty insane, because this is a 3D platformer at the end of the day, and to get multiple golden bananas in the game, you have to make a series of jumps and overcome multiple platforming challenges So it truly does pain me that the platforming in this game is not that good Something about it just feels off; it feels too sensitive, too imprecise; movement in general just feels imprecise Pretty much anytime that you’re forced in this game to walk on a narrow platform, you’re fucked And you’re forced to do it multiple times I remember specifically being forced to do it 2 times with Diddy Kong in order to get some of his golden bananas And in this game, you should never be required to precisely move around and make tight jumps because it just doesn’t work in this game Nothing about the movement really ever feels fluid This game 100% would’ve benefited from having more development time and honestly maybe even being delayed to being released on the GameCube Because first of all, this game is already so big that you need a fucking expansion pack to even play the damn thing, and second of all, because this game is just completely lacking polish that it really needed to tighten the whole experience up And the lack of polish and overall bad platforming is made even worse in this game by the shitty camera This thing gets stuck on walls, it’s slow, it’s never quite where you need it to be The camera is pretty much just like another fucking enemy in this game that you constantly have to fight, and I hate it Tying this back to the levels, though, every flaw about the level design that I mentioned is brought to the extreme in the level Crystal Caves, especially the platforming For the simple fact that in this level there is a constant loop of rocks falling every 30 seconds or so, and these rocks will pretty much always catch you off guard and always hit you And the only way to make it stop is to kill the enemy that’s causing the rocks to fall, except this enemy is in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and for the life of me, I can never remember how to get to him every single time that I replay this game So in turn, every time I play this level and try to platform and make any jump at all, usually there’ll end up being a falling rock that’ll fuck everything up for me Which is just hell because the platforming is already bad enough, so adding falling rocks on top of it is like pouring 12 liters of salt into a fresh stab wound So yeah, I really don’t like Crystal Caves at all That being said, though, it actually isn’t the worst level in the game No, that honor goes to the final level, Hideout Helm This level is just an absolute disgrace It’s an affront to God that a level like this even exists It’s so bad that it genuinely makes me want to cry, because every time I think about this level, all I can think about is how humanity is doomed if there are people on earth capable of making something like this But let me break down why it’s so bad, though So for starters, the time limit Yes, this level has a time limit, and this time limit is dictated by the amount of blueprints that you gave to one of the characters in this game So if you ended up giving this character a minimal amount of blueprints, then the amount of time that you have to beat this level could be absolute dogshit, like 10 minutes, for example, which I believe is the lowest time you can get Which, if you were to have only 10 minutes to beat this level, then that would just be an absolute death sentence, because in this level, you need every single second that you can get Because you will be constantly backtracking, trying to figure out where you need to go, constantly switching between Kongs, and the most fucked-up part of this all is that for the time limit, the countdown never stops Not when you’re in the switch barrel, not when there’s a cutscene, nothing; it never fucking stops Which is absolutely insane And what's even more fucked up is the main objective of the level, which is to power down King K. Rool’s machine by destroying 5 different components with each separate Kong And in order to do this, you have to punch open every single gate that blocks off these areas with Chunky Kong specifically, then go all the way back to the switch barrel, switch to whatever Kong you need, then go back to their respective area, open the door to that area with your instrument, and then you have to play two minigames in order to finally shut down that component, and then you can finally move on to the next one Just why would they do this? And fuck the backtracking that takes place in order to get into the room; fuck the minigames, which are bad but aren’t the worst thing about this; the absolute worst thing about doing this is that after every minigame that you beat, you get an animation of whatever Kong you're playing doing a celebratory dance, and then after you beat both minigames and shut down the component, there’s an unskippable cutscene that plays as well And throughout all of this, all of these unskippable animations and cutscenes… the countdown never stops… It’s just evil; it’s pure evil I can’t even imagine how stressed every single kid who played this game must’ve felt when they got to this level It’s probably an amount of stress and anger that still gives them nightmares to this day I had 40 minutes to beat this level, and it still stressed me out Why would they ever design a level like this with this much backtracking, this much bullshit, and then have the countdown never stop That is just beyond comprehension And that whole sentiment basically sums up this entire game So many design choices, so many moments, so many things in this game are just truly beyond comprehension to me Now, I wouldn’t say that this is a terrible game, because it’s not; it does have things in it that I truly do like and admire Like the music, which I haven’t even talked about yet, which Grant Kirkhope absolutely knocked out of the park, with every single track bringing each level and each area to life And, again, this game does have a lot of charm as well as a lot of memorable funny moments But then it pains me, because for every good memorable moment, there’s a bad memorable moment as well And those bad memories always just stick with me more and oftentimes sour my experience with any game My sentiment about this game at the beginning really was the perfect description of this game to me “It’s complete ass, but also pretty good sometimes” And because of this, my rating of this game has fluctuated a lot since I completed it I’ve shifted between 3.5 to 3 to 2.5, and I truly don’t know which one of these scores this game deserves Definitely not a 3.5 anymore, but I’m genuinely torn between a 3 and a 2.5 as I write this And it’s weird because the version of the game that I played definitely was a 3 Because I actually played through a modded version of the game that allows you to swap between every single Kong with the d-pad Which is absolutely amazing, by the way, and it fixes pretty much every backtracking issue with the game, so if you’re going to play Donkey Kong 64, then definitely play this modded version That plug for the mod aside, though, again, if I were to review just this modded version of the game, then I would give it a 3, but then the actual Donkey Kong 64 I’d give it a 2.5 So if I meet in the middle, then it would be 2.75, which doesn’t work on this fucking app, so I’m just gonna bite the bullet and give this game a 2.5/5 Props to you if you stayed and read through my whole internal struggle But yeah, I just have to give it a 2.5 It just has too many shitty things in it that I wish I could ignore, but I just can’t at the end of the day But I truly do hope that at some point Nintendo is able to go back and remaster this game Because I really do think that if this game was just more polished, more refined, and the backtracking was completely removed to give you a tight, fluid experience, Then it would be amazing and would easily be one of the best collect-a-thons that we’ve gotten in years Because this game does genuinely have some great things it But it makes me sad, because they’re just buried in a sea of shit