Considering my love of 3D platformers and collectathons, it was inevitable that I would check Donkey Kong 64 out at some point. While Donkey Kong Bananza is set for release next month for the Switch 2, I felt now would be a good time to finally check out Nintendo’s previous 3D outing for our favorite simian. I have just completed the game at time of writing, which I note because I’ve recently fallen into the habit waiting too long after I play games to write my review of them. With this game, I want to make sure I remember every minute detail, because Donkey Kong 64 is a game that demonstrates how much the little things can add up, and not in a good way.

This will likely be a confusing review for me, because I actually had a lot of fun with with Donkey Kong 64, but I also experienced a lot of frustration. And just to be clear, I DID complete this game 100%, albeit played on an emulator with saved states. I make a point of using save states to only to cut down on repetition and for convenience sake, and not to bypass any sort of challenge factor (I do not consider restarting 7 minute long boss fights from the beginning to be challenging, I consider it padding, for instance). I had to utilize them SO many times during my playthrough of Donkey Kong 64, and you would have to pay me replay this game on actual hardware, even more so if it’s 100%.

At the same time, however, I think this game has an endearing charm to it, and I had a lot of fun exploring each world and making new discoveries. The most amusing observation that I’ve had about Donkey Kong 64 is that it’s 3D platformer where the platforming sucks. Movement is very stiff and slow, and it’s something that will take some getting used. The reason for this is because gameplay is divided between five characters who you frequently switch between, which means you need to divide a single character’s movement options by five in order to make sure non are overpowered.

This is compounded by the sheer amount of thin cross ways or paths that you have to walk across with a camera that’s always tilted about 45 degrees off from whatever you need to walk across. This means you either slowly inch your way across, or you repeatedly fall and have to climb back up to where you were. Add this to the number of vertical tower levels where you risk falling all the way down and having to climb back up, or into a bottomless pit and getting sent to the start of the world. There are thankfully teleporting pads that allow for a form of fast travel, and they are a God send.

Difficulties with movement are ever further compounded by how often getting hit by enemies will send your careening of edges, assuming you don’t fall off because your standard attack causes you to jolt forward. And this isn’t even going into the atrocious controls for Diddy’s jet pack, which has two missions where you have to fly through rings. Problem is, the rings are represented by 2D sprites, which look the same from every angle, which means you can’t tell if you’re flying into them from the right side. Did I mention that the fucking camera is awful during these sections.

It’s a testament to Donkey Kong 64’s good qualities that I still had fun with a good portion of the game. Namely, I enjoyed the exploration elements and the satisfaction of collecting every new item. One of the core criticisms of this game is that there’s “too much stuff to collect,” but I feel this complaint is misguided. The problem is not with the collecting itself, but what needs to be done to collect everything. Sure, the amount of content present in this game can sometimes feel overwhelming, but the same can also be applied to Super Mario Odyssey. It needs to be stated that a significant portion of this game still has the same sense of satisfaction present in Rare’s other titles like Banjo-Kazooie.

Part of this reason is because the presentation is top notch, which is to be expected from a Rareware title. The sound effects are all perfectly placed and contribute heavily to the sense of satisfaction that occurs whenever a you pick up any item. The “ooh banana” and “Dong Dong Donkey Kong” soundbites are iconic in their silliness and charm. And then there’s Grant Kirkhope’s iconic soundtrack. The DK Rap is iconic in its absolute corniness and has been memed to death, and the rest of the soundtrack is easily of the caliber of Kirkhope’s other work.

Kirkhope managed to take David Wise’s original composition for Jungle Japes, and expand upon it in a way that is equally iconic as the original. There are a number of additional noteworthy compositions, such as the ominous yet peaceful Gloomy Galleon theme, the serene Crystal Caves music, and the dark and foreboding Creepy Castle theme, that also includes the motif from the original Donkey Kong arcade game. You have a ton of tracks that only play in one brief area, and this contributes heavily to the sense of atmosphere that makes every world feel unique.

They also go so hard on the fucking boss music. While a lot of them do follow the pattern of “level area remixed to sound menacing a dire,” it’s highly effective and makes each boss feel like an overwhelming force. The best examples I can think of are the Army Dillo and Dogadon rematch themes. The former sounds like you’re trying to take down a fucking tank, and gets more and intensifies the further you go on. The latter, however, bucks the trend, and is slow paced, and signifies a dangerous situation. It then speeds up partway through as the platform begins to descend into lava, and you have to punch the living daylights out of the Dogadon before the platform dissipates.

I don’t really know what to say about the visuals since I played this using Project 64, and it didn’t include an option for replicating scan lines, which is what the game was made with in mind, so I’ll just say everything worked well at conveying their intended meaning, except for the aforementioned 2D rings.

So we have some amazing presentation, but sluggish character movement and controls. At this point, I honestly don’t know what my overall opinion is. One second, I’ll be singing its praises, and the next, I’ll be ranting and raving about all of the bugs and horrible design choices. This makes things difficult because reviews are supposed to follow a specific structure and lay out a point, but if someone demanded a yes or no answer as to whether Donkey Kong 64 is a good game, I’d say “flip a coin.”

Because of this, I’ve decided that I’m going to go through this game world by world, and talk about how the hold up, and each of their highs and lows. I’ll start with the first two worlds, Jungle Japes and Angry Aztec. If you’re wondering why I’m grouping them together, it’s because you need to unlock the other four Kongs that you frequently swap between. As opposed to designing a single world around unlocking each Kong, and using that as an overall tutorial, they are spread out across the first three worlds. One is unlocked in the first world, Jungle Japes, two are unlocked in the second world, Angry Aztec, and one is unlocked in the third world, Frantic Factory. You have the full party by Frantic Factory, so I will go over it separately.

I’m not sure how to feel about 60% of Jungle Japes being locked off at the start of the game, and needing to advance to other areas to start it. I think that there is some merit given that you are introduced to obstacles you can’t pass as DK or Diddy, so that you are taught that each Kong can explore unique terrain, but It would have been possible to do this within the span of a single world if designed right.

Jungle Japes is one of my favorite areas in the game. Running around a lush jungle collecting shit is probably the exact picture that people have in their mind when they think of Donkey Kong 64, and it’s also where it’s at its most pure fun. Most of the major issues with Donkey Kong 64 are not present in its first world, meaning that you get to see it at its best before it’s at its worst. Similarly, it lacks the sense of bloat that a lot of the weaker levels have, and none of the mini games are particularly frustrating. The worst it had was crossing that bridge inside the mountain, since it’s this game’s shitty movement and camera coming into play, but otherwise Jungle Japes was solid.

Angry Aztec was also solid, but it’s here that the feeling of bloat starts to come into effect. You have a large world, four Kongs to switch between, and a bunch of structures that all look the same. You also start having more difficult platforming sections. That being said, it’s less that this stage is bad, more so that the cracks start to appear, as there isn’t isn’t any Golden Banana that’s especially frustrating aside from racing that fucking beetle (you can attack him and slow him down, you’ll thank me later).

Frantic Factory is when you start getting introduced to the real bullshit. I could just end things with “this world has Beaver Bother AND the Arcade Machine” and call it a day, but I feel I need to go more in depth than that. As shocking as it may be, I actually didn’t mind Beaver Bother once I learned the trick to it, and I don’t find it even close to the worst mini game in Donkey Kong 64. Don’t get me wrong, when I first started it, I thought it was horrible and broken, but then I found out the specific set of movements that you need to do, and I’ve been able to replicate that to reasonable success each time. Unfortunately, it’s difficulty to describe movements made in milliseconds, which makes it difficult to really help anyone with it. I’ll just suggest watching this video, which was removed by its creator for some reason, but is still available via the wayback machine.

That arcade machine, on the other hand, I have to agree with the consensus. It’s not just a matter of them making you complete the original Donkey King twice with only one life when the original arcade game gave you three lives, but the fact that you get a 45 second cutscene after each loss makes this maddeningly frustrating. What’s even worse is that completing this Arcade game is necessary to fight the final boss, which means that the “you can just skip this one” alibi doesn’t even apply here. This is a major reason why I can’t recommend this game without using emulation. And yes, I know there are some issues that occurs as a result of playing this game via emulation, and I’ll get to them. Having save states outweighs any down side that might arise though.

Frantic Factory also introduces another one of the most frustrating mini-games, Batty Barrel Bandit. This mini game is literally just a slot machine where you have to match 4 bananas in a row, three times, within a time limit. This is simple enough on original hardware, where there’s a ton of lag that this game was designed with in mind (this is another reason I think emulation is better, the game moves slow enough as it is), but without that lag, the timing required for your button presses is overly strict. This same bug also renders later variations of the unfortunately named Krazy Kong Klamor game borderline unplayable, but only in its harder variants, so Frantic Factory isn’t to blame for this one.

And then there’s the boss fight against Mad Jack, which has a drastic spike in difficulty from the last two bosses. The best way to describe Mad Jack is to think of the boss fight against Tiny Tiger from Crash Bandicoot 2, only with Donkey Kong 64’s sluggish movement, with a much wider arena and block size, and a camera that doesn’t even let you see the whole arena. Oh, and the boss shoots lasers and turns invisible in the last phase. This fight’s difficulty comes entirely from Donkey Kong’s 64’s sluggish movement and it’s godawful camera, and it’s a fight that can take up to five minutes if you don’t fall off the arena, which will happen numerous times. Thank God it does not kill or damage you, but it restarts the current phase, which wastes even more time. And if you die, you start from the beginning.

Add this shit, to some enormously frustrating platforming segments around a vertical tower that you fall to the bottom of each time you miss a jump or get hit by an enemy, and you start to see why this game has a lot of neigh-sayers. Unfortunately, the next level, Gloomy Galleon, is much worse. To start with, it’s a water level, and the swimming controls can get really awkward in this level. This wouldn’t be a problem if this level wasn’t 70% swimming. Oh, and you also have puzzles based around raising and lowering the water level, because that worked out so well in Ocarina of Time. Actually, I’m gonna be real, I’d rather play through Ocarina of Time’s water temple six times than go through Gloomy Galleon again, this level is so slow!

I want to be clear, this level isn’t entirely terrible, there were even some parts that were good, such as Chunky making it onto the Kremling ship, and getting seasick after you collect the Golden bananas (which reverses your controls, but only until you leave the room), or seeing the inside of the sunken ships adorned with pictures of K Rool from the Donkey Kong Country 2. As I already stated, the music in this stage is absolutely fantastic, and I do love the atmosphere of it. Unfortunately, there’s a ton of tedium to drag this level down.

First of all, there’s that fucking mechanical fish. I could go over it myself, but Cybershell did an entire video about this one special Golden Banana, and I think that should sum it up. Short version is, you have to do a lot of busy work just to get to the fish, you have to do a bunch of backtracking if you want to redo it, and there’s a glitch that makes its unbeatable if you have the sniper scope equipped due to lag.

Gloomy Galleon also has that fucking cannonball mini game. You know, the one where you have to hit three moving targets within a time limit using a cannon, and where the cannon shoots at an arc AND is delayed by like ten seconds, and also where the targets move in increasingly difficult patterns, so the only way to beat this is via trial and error. It also has you collecting five pearls to return to a mermaid, but all five pearls are in the same room. I don’t know why they didn’t just require one pearl, because choosing five pearls in the same small room only increases the risk that someone misses one of the pearls, swims all the way to the mermaid only for you to need to swim back to go get them. Yes, this happened to me.

Oh, I also got knocked off the pile of gold three times while trying to collect DK’s blueprint, which can only be accessed via teleported, and if I didn’t use save states, I would have had to find the teleporter again, which is a significant distance away. And then there’s the boss fight, which changes the controls and makes you use a jet ski, and you have to run through rings to activate a switch that electrocutes him. Problem is, the rings get smaller each time, and the time limit decreases… yes there’s always a fucking time limit with this game. Like with the previous boss, it’s so much harder than the first two bosses, and it’s a lot longer and more tedious.

And I almost forgot the Splish Splash Salvage mini game. Why is there a timed mini-game based around this game’s janky fucking swimming controls? It wasn’t as bad in Jungle Japes, but it’s so frustrating here. You basically have to collect a bunch of coins within a time limit, most of which will be spent battling the aforementioned janky controls. By the way, there’s so many janky mini games that I only remembered this one while writing the segment for a different level. God this level sucks, but not as much as the next one.

Fungi Forest was by far, the worst level in the game. I feel the energy getting sucked out of me just from thinking about this world. One of the key criticisms of this game is the frequent switching between Kongs, and all the backtracking that comes with finding collectables that can only be obtained by a specific Kong. I actually didn’t mind this, since I play a lot of RPGs that are based around switching equipment and menu action, and finding the tag barrels was quite easy by comparison. In fact, I actually quite enjoyed collecting each Kong’s bananas, and feel they were dispersed in ways that allowed a higher level of engagement with the level design than what 3D platformers typically require. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why this would turn a lot of people off, but I enjoyed it. And yes, I did collect all 100 of each Kong’s bananas in every world.

That being said, I could have certainly done without needing to switch back and forth between day and night to access certain areas, and needing to backtrack to the central hub each time. Unlike the tag barrels, which are usually fairly easy to access, there’s only one area where you can switch between day and night, on top of the usual backtracking from switching between Kongs. This pads out the length of the level by an enormous amount, which makes things even more frustrating considering everything else wrong with the level.

For instance, there’s a section where you have to use Diddy’s jetpack to play through rings, and as I previously mentioned, Diddy’s jet pack controls horribly, and the rings look the same no matter which angle you are facing. While there was a similar section in Angry Aztec, it was nowhere near as frustrating as the one in Fungi Forest. As if the frustrating controls aren’t enough, some rings are placed near tree branches, which will cause you to disengage your jet pack if you touch them, which means you need to wake the owl up to start the mission again. This is yet another reason I’m glad I emulated it and had save states.

And speaking of frustrating race sequences, there’s a part where you have to race a rabbit, and if you beat him, he says he wasn’t really trying, and that you have to beat him again. The second time, he’s impossible unless you are using a move that you don’t get until the next world. Note that aside from Jungle Japes and Angry Aztec, this is the only point in the game where you can’t obtain a collectable upon entering the world. As if that wasn’t enough, this is another sequence that becomes impossible on emulated versions unless the rabbit gets stuck behind an enemy, because you need to use a bonus barrel mid race, which allows him to gain too much distance. By the way, when I say emulated versions, this includes the Wii U virtual console release.

It’s also around this point in the game where the bonus mini games start getting really frustrating, so I’m going to talk about them here even if they were introduced elsewhere. The aforementioned Krazy Kong Klamour and Batty Barrel Bandit start getting enormously frustrating around here, and so does Minecart Mayhem (though it’s admittedly worse in Creepy Castle). Basically, this mini-game is entirely trial and error based and it involves no skill other than memorization.

As with Gloomy Galleon, this world was not completely devoid of fun, but my God did it drag the pace of the game to a halt. That being said, this world had what was easily the best boss fight in the game, which was the previously mentioned second Dogadon fight. Chances are, if you quit this game, it was in one of the last two worlds. The plus side is, the game picks up from here.

Writing about Crystal Caves makes me realize how much harder it is to say good things about a level then bad things. The past few worlds prompted multi-paragraph tirades about frustrating segments, but the most I can must for Crystal Caves is that it’s good. it doesn’t feel overly bloated, it had amazing music, and there’s nothing here that gave me any problems, aside from that one jet pack segment, and that was only until I figured out you can throw oranges from the center platform. And yes, I know there’s the second Beetle race, but this one didn’t give me nearly as many problems as the first one. I guess it was kinda dumb that the music kept getting interrupted because of that giant kosha, but it wasn’t a serious problem or anything.

Reaching this point in the game felt like a major weight was lifted off my shoulder, because the game started to have decent pacing again. And this trend continued with Creepy Castle, which was the best world in the game. Yes, the world with two Beaver Bothers is the best in the game, that’s fucking insane.

This world is so great because it doesn’t just have the solid collectathon gameplay with maybe two annoying moments parts instead of sixty, but also that fucking atmosphere. I already talked about the main theme, but that fucking Tomb track is more unnerving than shit I’ve heard in horror games. They did not need to go so fucking hard!I also love that the boss of this stage is a giant cardboard cutout of K. Rool, as if to suggest that the final key was handed off to some grunts who had to improvise on the spot because they ran out of actual bosses to fight.

In spite of the final two levels being genuinely good, I felt drained by the time I was done with Donkey Kong 64, and was glad to be done with it. It’s clear that the intent with this game was to cram as much content as possible without regard to whether or not it’s good content. You had multiple points where your reward for completing a mini-game, was another mini-game. And I haven’t even talked about the final boss… and I’m not going to because I’m already tired of writing about this game.

Most games have at least one dreaded segment that disrupts the flow of the entire experience, and that people dread on repeat playthroughs. In Donkey Kong 64, that segment is about 40% of the game. Yes, I know, a lot of this stuff is skippable, but a lot of it also isn’t. Being a big fan of Rare’s other games of the era, I wanted to like this one more than I did, and I still did have fun with most of the game. Unfortunately, Donkey Kong 64 ends up getting compared to games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie that have aged significantly better than it, and are still beloved even to this day.

I can only recommend this game to the most diehard fans of collectathons and Rareware titles.

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