Donkey Kong Country (SNES)
The Donkey Kong series, prior to 1994, was in an odd spot. The first game, Donkey Kong, was the big breakthrough title for Nintendo in the arcades, but the headlining character was a villain. The heroic Mario had already moved onto mostly fighting the giant turtle Bowser instead, the damsel capturing gorilla defined by his role as an adversary still despite small appearances running a prize booth in NES Open Tournament Golf and finding himself the victim of a kidnapping himself in Donkey Kong Jr.. If Nintendo wanted to make use of one of the most recognizable names in their catalogue, something new would have to be done with the brand, and everything ended up clicking into place when they sought out the talents of the developer Rare. Initially impressed by Rare’s use of high end hardware that would allow them to turn 3D models into 2D sprites suitable for the Super Nintendo, Nintendo granting them the Donkey Kong license ended up producing the side-scrolling platformer Donkey Kong Country, a thrilling new way the series could continue forward without dispensing with its legacy.
The big ape we got to know throwing barrels down girders in the original arcade game has now aged into the bitter old coot Cranky Kong, but a descendant now carries on his name as the protector of an island that also bears that moniker too. Donkey Kong Island’s younger protector is a more relaxed and athletic sort than the big burly ape Mario faced back in the arcade, but this Donkey Kong also seems mostly heroic despite being content to lounge about and accumulate a banana hoard. One dark and stormy night though, a gang of crocodiles known as the Kremlings pilfer the Hoard, and what’s more, they capture DK’s monkey pal Diddy Kong who had been trying to prove himself as a hero in training. Luckily for Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong was just stuffed in a barrel not too far from his home, but Donkey Kong still sets out to try and get his bananas back by crossing an island curiously shaped like his own head, the enemy leader King K. Rool awaiting him at the end of this adventure.
While the setup of getting DK’s bananas back is a very simple one, Donkey Kong Country has an interesting mix of irreverent attitude and down to earth naturalism. One of the most memorable elements relates to Cranky Kong, the retired old ape available for visit in his huts across the island nominally for little tips but only after he’s dished out a rant. Cranky is unafraid to directly reference the fact Donkey Kong Country is a video game and that he came from the old 1981 arcade hit. He’ll grumpily assert games were better in his time and even insult new features found in this platformer. He even pops up in the game manual to outright lie and say the game can’t possibly include some of the listed elements, this bitter old gorilla adding some spunk to the adventure alongside other characters like a surfer gorilla named Funky who provide flights around the island in a plane made out of a barrel.
Despite these sometimes silly and self-aware elements to the world though, Donkey Kong Country also tries to be very atmospheric and does away with some video game elements to root your mind more in the natural environments you explore. There are no high scores to be earned, your extra lives only display on screen when you die, and while the floating bananas that help guide you through levels are a bit unrealistic, the counter that helps you track how many you collect only appears when you grab one. Donkey Kong Country wants the world to fill your screen, and not just to show the impressive Silicon Graphics images that give even the 2D sprites more texture than typical pixel art. Backgrounds across Donkey Kong Island can be lush and gorgeous, from the jungle foliage to the stalactite filled caverns and even underwater. Some things can look a little plastic like the palm trees, but then the music comes in and provides an exceptional accompaniment that pushes it to the next level. The underwater theme Aquatic Ambience is an absolutely beautiful piece that adds a sense of serene mystery to the location, so even if you’re trying to outswim a pursuing Croctopus or weaving around some speedy piranhas, these water stages have a gentle calmness that is an appropriate accompaniment to the sometimes slow approach that serves you well there. DK Island Swing might get you pumped for adventure while Mine Cart Madness feels frantic to match some of the game’s harder moments, but Cave Dweller Concert leans heavily into ambient noises. Each song works wonderfully to set an appropriate mood for the pace of the action or the degree of peril ahead.
Donkey Kong Country can construct tracks that include memorable melodies in-between the more atmospheric sounds, but it also has an interesting progression for its stage themes. When you begin you can expect a lot of untouched natural spaces, running through jungles and caves, but as you push closer towards your goal, you’ll see more of what the Kremlings have done to the island. You’ll move from mines to outright factories, and while you spot some places that seemed to exist in tandem with nature like old ruins and wooden houses built in the treetops, you’ll eventually find areas like the aptly named Poison Pond that show the Kremlings don’t coexist with nature, they pave over and exploit it. DK may be here mostly to get his bananas back, but he’s shoving out the foreign industrial takeover as well.
Donkey Kong Country does get more difficult the deeper into enemy territory you head, but that doesn’t mean the early stages hold back either. Donkey Kong, joined by his pal Diddy, both can only take one hit, but as long as you smash open a DK Barrel, you can get back the missing primate. Diddy and Donkey do have differences in how they play, Donkey Kong able to easily bash foes Diddy can’t even harm like the corpulent Kremling soldier Klump and he can defeat the rolling armadillos in one hit where Diddy requires two. Diddy though isn’t just faster than his big pal, but he holds barrels in a way that better suits their purpose. DK and Diddy mostly leap onto or roll through enemies, but if you want to beat the spiky Zinger wasps or break open a rock wall to find a hidden bonus room, you’ll probably prefer Diddy carrying the barrel in front of him over DK who holds it overhead. You can tag them in and out when you have both though so they can play to their strengths, but you also can find in many levels some animal buddies. Hop aboard Expresso the Ostrich and you can flap your wings to glide across gaps, or climb onto Enguarde the Swordfish and you can move more freely underwater and easily take out most hostile wildlife with his pointed bill. Animal buddies are never required for success but can serve as enjoyable power-ups that are a delight to find whether they’re hidden or out in the open, even the humble Winky the Frog able to help you leap higher than usual still giving you one extra hit in a game that isn’t afraid to play rough.
Across your adventure you might see nice little touches like a storm rolling in over the course of a stage, but when it comes to level-defining gimmicks, they aren’t always extravagant. A new enemy like the barrel rolling Manky Kong orangutans will give you a new foe that commands the nearby space well, or there might be something like mining elevators you need to time your jumps across well to succeed. Levels do normally try to look somewhat natural even if they have far more shear drops to your doom than a regular environment, but that doesn’t stop some stranger level concepts like slippery ropes that can cause to slide off or even slide upwards in the ice cave level they’re featured in. The two mine cart stages offer some tense twitch jumping challenges as any collision means a lost Kong and a failed jump is an immediate death, but barrel cannons can be even more brutal. Hop into a barrel cannon and you’ll often be asked to time a button press right to launch yourself to another one, sometimes long chains of cannons set up with rapidly spinning barrels or Zingers in between to make those windows for success even tighter. Save points are placed between certain select stages that can make it a bit of a sprint to solidify progress, although life earning opportunities aren’t too rare and some tough levels even place one in an accessible enough spot to give you chances to try and try again safely. To handle even regular stages you’ll need to get skilled at well placed jumps and responding to specific enemy types like the tiny chomping Klaptrap alligators to survive, there plenty of more straightforward but still challenging stages between the more gimmicky ones. Only a few of the late game levels really strain things, mostly because of their reliance on darkness that isn’t that fun to engage with, and besides the final confrontation with K. Rool, most of the boss battles before then are pretty basic and forgettable, but these feel more like roadbumps rather than mires that bring down the Donkey Kong Country experience.
The box does straight up lie and say there are over 100 stages when there are truly more around 40, but that might be a deliberate misconstruing of the fact the game features many bonus areas to uncover along the journey. Extra lives can normally be earned by grabbing 100 bananas or finding the K-O-N-G letters around a stage, but bonus areas can provide both of those as well as straight up extra lives if you can overcome their often simple challenges like a brief platforming test or some low stakes barrel cannon play. The bonuses do mostly feel present as a way to earn extra resources rather than something really entertaining on their own merits, but where they end up feeling a little strange is how they relate to the game’s completion. Your file will provide a percentage completion metric that accounts for all the bonus levels, and with most stages having anywhere from 1 to 3, you’ll need to be on the lookout for suspicious spots to try and find them. However, some spots are more obscure than others, the clues not always that great or requiring you to sometimes take little leaps of faith or go off a vague hint. One bonus room is particularly egregious as it requires you to do very specific actions that are never hinted at in any way while inside another bonus room, the player needing to act out of the ordinary in a way that feels impossible to discover naturally and that may be why the game considers it the final percentage needed to reach 101%. Luckily, besides seeing that completion metric and getting some praise from Cranky, the percentage is unimportant, the player able to enjoy the game well enough even if they were to only go for the bonuses they could find easily.
THE VERDICT: More than just a reinvention, Donkey Kong Country explodes onto the scene with tight challenging gameplay and a game world filled with delightful elements. Phenomenal music that mixes ambience and melody alongside the well realized backgrounds pulls you into the natural world even though Cranky’s humorous gripes remind you it’s all a game, but it’s the levels that push you to improve your ability that truly make this an exceptional platformer. The bonus stage placement is a bit rough and bosses are often pretty basic, but your journey across Donkey Kong Island is a perilous one yet you can always see victory within grasp if you can just get the barrel cannon timing right next time or leap over those Klaptraps properly on your next attempt.
And so, I give Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
A GREAT rating. Rare came out swinging with this generation of Donkey Kong platformers. The world and music are realized amazingly to immerse you in this natural world being tainted by the Kremling invasion, but still when it comes time to hop and bop across those locations, you find the foes placed intelligently to be difficult but not aggravating. Something like the vulture Necky flying towards you doesn’t sound like a very elaborate obstacle, but sometimes leaping off its back also puts you over some precarious rocky outcroppings, the player able to move quickly but also needing to identify how to react just as swiftly to avoid a tumble to your doom or a crash into a Kremling Krew member. Little breaks from the norm do well to diversify the action, times spent with animal buddies, underwater, or in mine carts able to add something new, and even simple ideas like swinging from vines or hanging from a moving rope can be made perilous in ways that require sharp reaction times despite the task not being too complicated on paper. It’s really the areas outside of the regular stage design that need to be improved, the bonus areas unfortunately placed with the old fashioned ethos of being the kind of secrets you aren’t expected to find despite the percentage tracker trying to motivate you to do so. The bosses are also somewhat tame conclusions to each world, many of them just bigger versions of familiar baddies and two are even reused essentially. When you do get a better considered boss like K. Rool though you can see the potential for expansion that also fits within the game’s pretty smart balance of difficult simplicity. You’re often dealing with one reliable element at a time, the player knowing what an enemy does or what the timing on a mine cart jump should be, they just need to actually get the execution down, and when it becomes second nature, you can start to speed through those dangers and find yourself prepared when they reemerge later.
Donkey Kong Country successfully rebranded the big ape as a video game hero, even if that required the original Donkey Kong to essentially retire from action. It still leads to some confusion today and the new DK sometimes ends up imitating his ancestor in series like Mario vs. Donkey Kong, but what makes this shift for the series more impressive is how it barely feels beholden to the past. We’re surely seeing barrels as often as we are thanks to the original arcade game, but otherwise Donkey Kong Country has a unique identity from its predecessors, defined by its stupendous music, challenging platforming, and an interesting mix of detailed environments despite its characters sometimes being a bit goofy. Donkey Kong Country may technically be a continuation of an existing franchise but it does so with so many new concepts that it feels more like its own thing, a path forward that would go on to lead to many more of the best platforming adventures ever made.