Donkey Kong Land 2 (Game Boy)

With the first Donkey Kong Land we got a nice little romp to accompany the first Donkey Kong Country, it carrying on the gameplay basics but integrating new and unique level concepts to make it a similar but distinct adventure. After Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest improved upon the already excellent foundations of the previous games, Donkey Kong Land 2 sounds like it should have been another chance to take the basics of the console game and create another brand new Game Boy adventure. Unfortunately, far less thought was put into this follow-up, this platformer following the blueprints of Donkey Kong Country 2 rather closely and often defined more by where it couldn’t execute the same ideas rather than the moments it created new ones. However, Donkey Kong Land 2 is technically different enough from the SNES adventure that it would feel dishonest to call it a direct port, although that’s partially because the Game Boy had little hope of adapting that game’s excellence because of all the compromises inherent in the system’s design.

 

Donkey Kong Land 2 makes no effort to differentiate its plot from Donkey Kong Country 2, the big ape Donkey Kong captured by the villainous pirate crocodile Kaptain K. Rool same as before and held ransom. Diddy Kong and his girlfriend Dixie step up to save the day by heading over to the homeland of the Kremlings, the imposing Crocodile Isle perhaps even lonelier this time around as they find far fewer helpers in the Game Boy twist on this story. The surfer gorilla Funky Kong will help you travel between previously visited worlds and the kindly old ape Wrinkly will let you save if you can reach her schoolhouse in each world, but the out of touch complaints of her husband Cranky are entirely absent since he makes no appearance whatsoever. Even Klubba, the guardsman blocking the way to the Lost World, has been relegated to a singular encounter with less character, Donkey Kong Land 2 feeling like it can’t afford to squeeze much personality into the game cartridge or the manual. Without the context of the game it’s trying to adapt it wouldn’t feel so empty, most elements serviceable and likely sacrificed to give more time to work on the actual stages.

Donkey Kong Land 2 provides around 40 side-scrolling stages, Diddy and Dixie each able to take a singular hit but any time you find a marked DK barrel you can break it open to have the other member of the monkey couple waiting in the wings to replace them should the other fall. The two monkeys are mostly similar, both fairly quick and able to take out most baddies either by hopping on their heads or rolling through them, but Dixie Kong is clearly the superior character with her ponytail twirl allowing her to glide gently across gaps. There’s not much to complain about with how Diddy moves though, Dixie more a nice way to give yourself some wiggle room during tougher moments or provide an easier way to search for secrets without having to commit to dangerous jumps as much. Much of this likely sounds similar to how the pair are handled in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong’s Quest, but Dixie does earn a few extra bonus points in terms of being the better character here purely because of Donkey Kong Land 2’s handling of level design, the Game Boy screen crunch an even greater issue than it was in Donkey Kong Land.

 

While Donkey Kong Land 2 has better found out how to make the general visuals clearer than the previous Game Boy adventure, it has made an unfortunate sacrifice when it comes to clarity elsewhere. Despite often sharing level names with stages in Donkey Kong Country 2, Donkey Kong Land 2 often creates unique designs that are inspired by what was seen there, but at times it does stubbornly cling to certain setpieces or stage ideas to its detriment. This mostly manifests as jumps that see you leaping into the unknown now, the game at least trying not to make these fully leaps of faith but with little room on screen it can sometimes lean on weak hints on where to land like having to trust that bouncing off an enemy and holding right will lead to you landing on solid ground. Diddy and Dixie will need to jump down from the high ground at points with little clue if there’s an enemy waiting down below, and sometimes even when there’s solid ground, it might be a small platform where being a little off will lead to a death. It is indeed frustrating to have to hope the game will be kind to you, and it does at least put in an effort to indicate travel paths a bit with things like the floating bananas usually collected to earn extra lives. At other times, the floating bananas may look like they mark a secret path only for it to be a deceptive collectable placed above a bunch of lethal thorns. Dixie’s little helicopter flight ends up being a way to check ahead a bit, but it does lead to unfortunate moments where Donkey Kong Land 2 wasn’t willing to make the compromises to its design to make it play more smoothly.

 

While the moments it slips up certainly stand out, that isn’t to say Donkey Kong Land 2 totally fails in creating some decent levels for an adventure on the Game Boy. It can’t get as creative as the console game it’s aping, but you do see some carried over ideas done well enough like riding little hot balloons that are suspended by the heat of lava or hopping across ghostly ropes that periodically disappear. Crocodile Isle has a good mix of locations to visit like the dangerous roller coasters where you will need to hop over gaps in the track or the pirate ship stages where you’ll need to climb the rigging in fairly tall vertical levels. Some enemies can feel a little more dangerous than usual, the Klomps who use their peg legs like pogo sticks more dangerous when they’re hopping towards you with little time to react to them appearing on screen. The Klinger who climbs the same ropes as you even has a bit of leniency programmed in where you can sometimes take him out by climbing into him from the side, this much nicer than how the bramble levels seem to improperly depict how close you can be before getting pricked. While the giant hornet King Zing can be a rather tough fight with how quick he gets and how often he flies off screen, most of the bosses do better find a way to challenge you while being fair. Krow the pirate vulture does command a bit of his battle on the crow’s nest with his relative size, but he only uses that advantage at specific points where reacting to it is a reasonable skill test.

Admittedly, you can feel some levels are a bit aimless when stripped of elements that couldn’t be brought over from the SNES counterpart. The Lost World in particular is particularly weak, this areas serving as a challenging finale to the original game but here few ideas could be accurately reproduced so instead new concepts were toyed with. Funnily enough, these lead to some solid levels if ones lacking in distinct designs, but they would have worked well as stages in the middle of the adventure instead of part of the grand finale. You will only get to the Lost World and find the game’s true ending though if you search the levels of Donkey Kong Land 2 for bonus rooms, and again things feel like they work well enough but often have apparent compromises and a few flubs. Most of the time, bonuses are found by looking in conspicuous spaces in levels, a nice test of ability usage that than leads to into a short challenge like grabbing all the stars in a dangerous space, exploring a dedicated area for a token, or defeating all the enemies before time runs out. The actual bonuses themselves here are tailor made areas for their task and they do their job well, but the bonus barrels leading to them can be hidden in a few unfortunate spots. While this game carries on Donkey Kong Country 2’s unfortunate idea of deciding the sunken ship levels should have you rubbing against every wall in hopes one will not be solid and lead to a bonus, Donkey Kong Land 2 also has invisible barrels hidden in spots like a regular alcove that will then make you feel like you need to check every corner you encounter. The Video Game Hero Coins are similarly well handled save a few outliers, this collectible found in every level and asking you to similarly find secret spots using a sharp eye and overcoming some little obstacle to reach them.

 

Sadly, even the animal buddies in Donkey Kong Land 2 are something that should have just been good but instead come with caveats. Along your adventure, some levels offer barrels you can hop into to transform into different animals, some of these just helping overcome a level’s dangers while others are absolutely required to traverse the stage. Rambi and Enguarde do their jobs well, the rhino and swordfish making it easier to take out enemies when they appear in a stage. The flight of Squawks the parrot can be a little unwieldy, but it’s Rattly the rattlesnake and Squitter the spider who can have some actual control issues. Usually, an animal buddy is a nice way to add a bit of varied play to a stage, but when Rattly and Squitter have to use their dedicated skills, they run into the Game Boy’s button problem. The A and B buttons are caught up on running and jumping, so if you want Rattly to do his incredibly high spring jump, you need to press select. Squitter the spider’s web shot, a tool for making platforms wherever you like them, also leans on the select button, but with the added danger of the previous platform you made disappearing rather quickly after you make a new one. Both animal buddies often need to move quickly after using their special skills, meaning you can find yourself struggling a bit to move your thumb from select to the directional pad in time to keep up the pace. Once again this is the kind of issue you encounter in just a specific stage or two, but we’re starting to form an unfortunate sum as we do have a good batch of fun enough stages but others with some complicating element that makes the overall adventure less enjoyable.

 

Donkey Kong Land 2 does at least stick to the series’s efforts to keep natural looking platforming front and center even when it leads to those jumps into the unknown but with some minimalistic backgrounds to avoid things blending together, and the music, arranged by future Rare legend Grant Kirkhope, does a solid job in adapting familiar tunes from Donkey Kong Country 2. Admittedly, the game does overuse the ominous track Lockjaw’s Saga, not only appearing in far too many levels but sometimes reappearing in multiple stages in a row, but it as least a well executed track on the Game Boy hardware. You won’t get the full beauty of something like Stickerbush Symphony here, but it is still a relaxing and gentle tune for some of the tougher stages. A lot of the general direction from Donkey Kong Country 2 does carry over, the game aiming to be challenge without being obnoxious, the player at first wise to move with some trepidation but able to find more freeing moments where you can zip ahead thanks to solid enemy and platform placement or the knowledge you gained from your previous life. However, sometimes Donkey Kong Land 2 will try to introduce a brand new area design in a level that tends to lean towards something maze-like, a level like Dungeon Danger technically smart in that it’s easier to display cramped spaces on the Game Boy but it’s not as interesting to have to poke around such a space compared to facing the quick tests of skillful movement that make up the better moments of this adventure.

THE VERDICT: Donkey Kong Land 2 is mostly a subtractive adaptation of Donkey Kong Country 2, and while it has unique level layouts quite often, it’s usually because it couldn’t incorporate the ideas that made the SNES game so interesting and enjoyable. This Game Boy adventure has a weak eye for what needs changing, leading to the occasional leap into the unknown or unwieldy element like using Select for certain animal buddy skills. Still, while there are annoyances that slow this journey down, this game is still aping excellence, leading to a game that controls well and often enough places the enemies and platforms smartly to make up for its sometimes egregious stumbling points.

 

And so, I give Donkey Kong Land 2 for Game Boy…

An OKAY rating. A remarkable step down from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest despite almost serving as an adaptation of it at times, Donkey Kong Land 2 feels like it is in a funny spot since almost all of its issues stem from the fact it is on Game Boy. If you had the wider screen of a console game you could see beyond those occasional blind jumps and land them fine. If you had more buttons, you wouldn’t have those little struggles with Squitter and Rattly. If the hardware was more powerful, the game could include more distinct gimmicks and make a boss like King Zing a fairer fight. But as we continue to say how it could improve, we just find ourselves describing Donkey Kong Country 2, which already exists. This game exists on Game Boy, and when that is taken into account, you can get some platforming and baddie bashing that provides some decent fun. It misses out on chances to excel because it feels like it’s afraid to deviate too much from the blueprints it is copying, instead providing some plainer stretches where it can’t directly copy things and only rarely stretching its creative legs with unique designs. Were this a fan-made project it would be a charming attempt to demake Donkey Kong Country 2, but as it is, we get a game that thankfully didn’t erode too much of what works from the SNES game, but it still can’t chart its own course so it often brushes past bits it can’t do well and hopes the better handled stages will sustain your interest.

 

Funnily enough, Donkey Kong Land 2 may have harmed my estimation for Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest for quite a while. I mentioned in that game’s review I didn’t seem to recall it being as excellent as many people say, and part of that may have been some residual influence from having played Donkey Kong Land 2 more recently in my life. I had my interest fall off in Krem Cauldron last time I played it, that early lava world again starting to make me feel a little underwhelmed as I played it here for review. Donkey Kong Land 2 is not a tight package, most levels fine enough even when they have an annoying design touch, and some levels are quite enjoyable when they have a clearer direction to inspire some interesting platforming. However, while its successes are present enough to acknowledge it’s not a bad game, it feels hard to even recommend this to someone aching for more Donkey Kong Country 2. Donkey Kong Land 2 is like the diet soda version of the SNES adventure: it doesn’t really taste the same, but it has a bit of the familiar flavor in there and if it is the only one you’re being offered, it’s better than something you outright wouldn’t like.