Donkey Kong Jr. (NES)

Mario. Nintendo’s golden boy. No video game character is more iconic than this happy-go-lucky plumber, and over the years, he’s found himself in all kinds of games and roles. He’s been a doctor, an athlete, a construction worker, a referee… but perhaps his strangest role of all was the time a whip-cracking Mario sent animals after a baby gorilla in his role as a villain.

Following the breakaway success of the original Donkey Kong arcade game, Nintendo decided to carry on the story by flipping the script. Originally, Mario was rescuing his girlfriend from the giant ape, but in Donkey Kong Jr., Mario has now captured Donkey Kong as payback, the big gorilla’s son scurrying to his rescue but finding that Mario is prepared for him. Across four unique stages, Mario will unleash different enemies down at the onesie-wearing ape, Junior unable to so much as touch any of these foes or else he’ll end up losing one of his lives.

Donkey Kong Jr. is very much in the mold of the earliest platform games, the level only as big as what can fit on screen and Junior’s abilities rather limited. The little gorilla’s jump moves only as far as the built up momentum will allow, meaning that a jump from a standstill only really moves upward and a jump too early will get less distance than a proper running start. Jumping is definitely a key part of Donkey Kong Jr., every stage having some area where you need to hop over drops to your doom or get over ground-bound enemies like the Snapjaw crocodiles, but DK Jr.’s claim to fame is his vine climbing. While some levels will reskin the vines as chains or cables to match the current area’s aesthetic, much of Junior’s navigation involves leaping up and grabbing onto these long hanging lines and clambering up them to get about the vertically-focused levels. Enemies may be on the vines or fly across them to make this more difficult, but Junior can knock down fruits to hit enemies who are below him, which really mostly helps with score and only sometimes eliminates the kind of pesky foe who would actually still be a threat after it’s below you.

Climbing the vines is as easy as pressing up or down, but DK Jr. can speed up his ascent if he has two nearby vines to grab onto. Sliding down in a hurry though requires only grasping onto a single vine, so when something like the Nitpicker birds comes flying towards you, you often have to decide if scurrying up is the better option or sliding down is safer despite putting you farther from your goal. Donkey Kong is always waiting at the top of the level near the key that can free him, but Mario periodically releases enemies out into the level to harass you, meaning much of the game is about you pacing your ascent to gain ground while avoiding whatever Mario is throwing at you that level. Besides the vine-climbing and wall-crawling Snapjaws and the egg-dropping Nitpickers though, the only other enemy to worry about are the Sparks unique to stage three, little electrical enemies who travel in circuits on their platforms or drop from them if they are the blue variant.

Donkey Kong Jr. does derive most of its challenge from dodging these enemies, but it also has an approach to stage design that almost seems aimed to trick an unfamiliar player into taking the wrong paths. In Donkey Kong Jr., a fall from a certain height will kill Junior, meaning that dropping off the wrong vine above a platform can turn out to be lethal. On top of this, even the first stage has a few vines that are pretty much at best distractions for Snapjaws to crawl around on, the player having little use for them if they survey the area and realize the single safe route to take. The levels do seem to get more straightforward in stage 2 though, because save trying to get fancy with the spring near the start of that stage to land on a moving platform, the path forward is pretty much laid out and obvious, the player only needing to time things to avoid the Nitpickers and their eggs as well as grabbing onto the honey-like drooping areas of the long line in the middle. Stage 3 is definitely the odd stage out, where the vine clinging is mostly just a means of getting to the next long horizontal run as you need to dodge the Sparks in a now very technological setting versus the jungle worlds of before, but the game’s fourth and final level does shift up your goal and the level design without abandoning the focus on vine-climbing. In fact, the final level is strictly about clambering up chains to push keys into their locks to free DK once and for all, the abundance of Nitpickers and Snapjaws asking the player to find windows of opportunity in moving keys around rather than focusing on forward movement through a stage.

After the fourth stage the game will loop around and let the player keep playing until they run out of lives, the option to shoot for a high score being this game’s effort to make itself replayable. There are two difficulty options, Game A and Game B being pretty similar save for things like more or faster enemies, but both will get harder once you loop around for additional runs to save your dad. The difficulty option doesn’t really enhance the play at all and if anything can slow it down, the player’s role in victory being the dodging of enemies mainly and the increase in their speed and numbers meaning you spend a bit more time waiting on enemy movements rather than facing any fresh challenges. Really, Donkey Kong Jr. mostly just takes getting used to to complete, as once you’ve got a good feel for DK Jr.’s jump and the vine-climbing, from there you aren’t going to face anything that challenges you too much as a player.

The basic design of the four stages does at least keep you moving and involved even without considering the timer that kills Junior if it runs out. The need to outpace Snapjaw movement as they climb around vines themselves or dodge the Nitpickers as they fly towards you means you are playing a pretty kinetic action game even with the moments where the best option proves to be waiting on the vines for your opening. It’s certainly more enjoyable than the original Donkey Kong thanks to its greater flexibility in movement, but it still has that level of stiffness where it’s easy to make momentum errors and miss a jump or just walk right off a platform to your doom since you tried to delay the jump as long as possible to try and avoid those momentum errors. Essentially, the game manages to balance out its stiffer moments with those instances where you are able to just barely climb out of a Nitpickers way or hop over one Spark while just barely dodging the one on the bottom of the platform above you. A few more stages or greater shake-ups to what becomes a quickly familiar experience could help, but the need for reactive movement keeps Donkey Kong Jr. from being dull on a first run through the four stages. It’s just hard to justify running what amounts to barely changed obstacle courses on additional runs.

THE VERDICT: Undoubtedly superior to the original Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. still carries on some of the arcade awkwardness in the form of its strict, stiff jumping. Most of the game does at least favor the vine climbing mechanic though, meaning that the focus on quick action to avoid enemies and finding your openings for progress allows Donkey Kong Jr. to be enjoyable despite the pretty simple overall design. Four stages does mean it’s pretty easy to push through the entire game despite its decent difficulty, but small things like planning your approach in Stage 4 and the different speeds of vine-climbing mean that even though it’s mostly straightforward and a little clunky at times, Donkey Kong Jr. can still entertain for its short duration.

And so, I give Donkey Kong Jr. for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

An OKAY rating. If viewed for the reflexive action needed to get around quick and deadly enemies, Donkey Kong Jr. has that sort of speedy arcade action needed for a fun time. However, the platforming between the vine-climbing isn’t quite up to snuff because of how roughly jumping was handled in many early video games. A clear beginning and end for the experience across the four levels does give a good cut off point though despite it being able to infinitely loop until you perish or the game forces a conclusion, so players looking for a quick completion or a longer high score challenge have something to shoot for, Donkey Kong Jr. supporting both angles well enough. The need for fast reactions sustains the game despite the issues like the straightforward design and the rigidity when the gorilla hits the ground. It won’t really wow anyone nowadays, but it’s certainly held up over time better than other platformers born from the arcade because the game has a serviceable structure and more of your time is spent with the solid climbing instead of the flawed jumping.

While Mario being the antagonist is definitely the most interesting aspect of Donkey Kong Jr., it’s thankfully not the only thing to like about this old game. It still can’t really hold a candle to the games that came after it, but even for such a brief experience, it still has enough right about it to overcome some of its more dated elements.