Throughout the recent years, I've noticed an odd trend of bashing the Donkey Kong Country games to no ends. The series was one of my favorites as a kid, so I thought I'd take a trip back and see if maybe there was a bad game in there that I just didn't see as a kid.
The first game tends to get the most hatred spewed towards it and is naturally the one that's a little rough around the gills. Most of the stages feel pretty shallow and insubstantial, but there are some genuinely good ideas interspersed here and there. There's several moments such as the first Mine cart stage or the stop-go stage or the stage with oil drums that take a concept and see how hard they can push it, but for the most part, the stages are just stretches of baddies and barrels. Out of all the games, the first feels the most traditional in its design. That special part of me would go so far as to say it cribs Super Mario World a bit more than Miyamoto was probably comfortable with.
The second one is clearly the strongest of the bunch and probably Rare's defining work as a game developer. If I had condense the game down to one word, I'd probably go with "fresh". Donkey Kong Country 2 took the foundation that the first game laid out and added idea after idea to it to see exactly how far they could push the game. With the exception of two or three stages, each level has one unique thing going on that's only seen in that stage. From parrot races to haunted roller coasters windswept arenas full of casyms. The biggest addition to the game is probably the three new animal friends that add new versatility to your transportation. Rattler the rattlesnake can jump to exciting heights, Squitter the Spider creates his own footing and shoots webs and Squawks the Parrot can freaking fly. Come to think of it, the addition of Dixie Kong adds a layer of strategy that was only toyed with in the first game. Helicopter hair adds wiggleroom to dangerous falls or perilous boss fights and makes for bigger risk/reward type scenarios. Diddy Kong keeps his ability from the first game of having the rolling double-jump, so he isn't nerfed by this new character.
Donkey Kong Country 3 has the same "freshness" going for itself, but it lacks the polish and the character that made the second game as good as it was. This game prides itself just as much as the previous games when it comes to new ideas for each stage. We've got rocket barrels, pull switches, scared elephants, low gravity reversed directions and more. The problem with these additions is simply that I don't think they play tested the game as much as they did with the first two games. DKC3 is flat out balls hard in some spots and you've got nothing on your side except patience. The other games were hard, but you always had a secondary option when things got too tough. The example that I like to point out is in the barrel section of World 4 in the first game. Here we have a section that simply takes a great degree of both patience and timing to get through and simply makes me want to yank my hair out trying to get through it. Rare obviously saw that this was a difficult section and added a secret barrel that shoots you bellow all the irritation and even rewards you with bananas and a Kong letter. While a player might get frustrated with it, they're bound to find this secret area on their third or fourth try. Donkey Kong Country 3 simply doesn't have any of this at all. It's just flat out hard for the sake of being hard and that irks me to no end.
One of the biggest cornerstones of the retroactive hate this series gets is its graphics. Pre-rendered graphics made their debut with this series (as far as I know anyways, I'm probably wrong here) and they were seen as the future. The problem is that they haven't aged nearly as well as traditional sprites. I can't claim to know a whole lot about aesthetics, but I guess I'll be trite here and just say that the "I don't know art, but I know what I like" saying stands true for me. There's something endearing to me about the pre-rendered look that takes me back to world before the Nintendo 64 when we were getting a (false) glimpse into what the future would look like. I won't lie and say that I prefer the look to hand drawn sprites, because I don't, but I can't imagine this particular series with regular sprites.
So while I figured out that the first game served as a great foundation to the series and that the third game simply isn't as enjoyable as its predecessors, the series has fantastic music all around. David Wise presents a great showing of videogame music in tracks such as:
Jungle Groove
Fear Factory
Gang-Plank Galleon
Token Tango
Boss Bossanova
Haunted Chase
Jangle Bells
Nuts and Bolts
Just flat out good game music all around. Even stronger are the atmospheric songs. With the exception of one of the songs I'm going to show, I flat out didn't have any appreciation for any of these songs as a kid. If you had given me the option of listening to these songs or any music in something like Mario game, I would have always chosen Mario. With a little bit of age and a greater appreciation for minimalism and flavor strokes, I have to say that some of these are my favorite pieces of music in the 16-bit era. Here are just some of them:
Aquatic Ambiance
Life in the Mines
Bayou Boogie
Forest Interlude
Stickerbrush Symphony
Mining Melancholy
Mama Bird
Treetop Tumble
Frankly, reading all the hate that this series gets is really beyond me. I mean, they were never the be all, end all of the SNES, but the series as a whole had a lot of damn fine moments (including about 95% of DKC2 and about 35% of 1& 3). Hopefully, this will get some people to give the series an honest look again, because while they may not be platinum hits, they're far from fools gold.
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