21st March 2024, 1:41 AM
Yar and all that! Only a year after the first game's release, Rare already had the sequel lined up and ready to go. The team learned many lessons from shortcomings they noticed in the previous game and took those lessons into hardening the overall design of the sequel. Thematically, where the last game was a "wild island giving way to industrialization", this one's a grand pirate adventure through the Kremling's own home base.
A number of changes were made to basic design. Hit detection is more accurate, although it can still at times be difficult to gauge from the artwork where the end of a platform is. Donkey's been captured, an attempt by Rare's employees to distance themselves a bit from Miyamoto's characters after what he'd apparently said about the original DKC. The result was introducing a female character, Dixie Kong, who has a hovering helicopter hair thing she can do. Pay no attention to how weird it is for Dixie to have two different kinds of hair, the helicopter ponytail is very cool and very effective. In fact, almost TWO effective. The sheer navigational capability it allows makes Dixie the best choice for most exploration in the game. Diddy does still have more of a horizontal distance with his roll not losing height off the edges of platforms, but it's very niche. There is no longer a "heavy weight" in this game, so the big burly kremlings now require throwing something at them to defeat them. That leads to a new mechanic, partner carrying. You can pick up your partner and either toss them to out of reach places you can't reach alone, or just chuck them at enemies that aren't dangerous to touch and defeat them outright. New pirate themed items litter the game as well. Treasure chests have unique items hidden inside but require smacking them against an enemy to break open. Cannons often lead to bonus levels but require finding a cannon ball and successfully carrying it to the cannon. Replacing the swinging vines of the last game, fixed "rope rigging" can be found in many places, allowing navigating the ropes up and down, left and right, very much like the controls in Donkey Kong Jr. There's far more verticality, whole levels designed with scaling in mind. Along with this come some deadly levels with something rising from the floor to kill you, requiring speed to stay ahead. And, at the very end of each level there is now a clear "marker" to pass, a target to hit which raises a barrel to win a rotating prize. Hit from high enough a height and the prize is your's.
This game added something special to the bonus stages. Now, not only do bonus stages have proper presentation with intro screens and clear objectives, you actually have to win each one for full completion. All of the bonus levels now reward special coins. One set is Krem coins, which are pirate treasure to be handed to this gigantic mountain of a croc with a giant spiked club on a draw bridge. Try to fight him and Monkey D. Kong gets utterly destroyed in one swing, but you can bribe him and win him over. Every 15 coins unlock a brand new hidden world full of very difficult levels. This is borrowing from Super Mario World's Star Road and Special Zone worlds. Further, there are Hero Coins. These special tokens are the main completion goal of the game. Getting them all will require finding every other secret, and Cranky Kong now "ranks" your "hero rating" based on how many you get. Apparently, Diddy's competing with Link, Yoshi, and Mario, and a couple "no hopers" who appear to be Sonic and Earthworm Jim. Notably, this does restrict the variety of bonus stage objectives, but they've also adjusted bonus level design to tie the bonus levels more tightly with whatever the level's gimics are. Now, at max a level will have three bonus levels, minimum one. The "Hero Coins" are (mostly) found inside the main level and each one is put out in clever locations that often require very tricky methods to reach.
Visually, the game still uses prerenders, but doesn't recycle the renders from the last game. All the characters have been rerendered using new techniques, most notably in the fur rendering. The previous renders made it look more like Donkey and the other furred animals were wearing suits made out of their own fur, somehow shaved off, glued into a suit, and stuck back on them. This "fur rendering" would be something Rare became rather well known for right up through the amazing "fur and grass rendering" in Star Fox Adventures (And Conker Live & Reloaded). Generally, the art style was also shifted to be more "cartoony" than the previous game as well. Rambi has larger eyes, the KONG letters are now bigger and rotate, and many of the enemies now have a more exaggerated look. This is especially true of bosses, who are now all unique entities rather than just super sized versions of regular enemies. Well, alright there's a LITTLE recycling, but not in the normal sense. The pirate crow (which you fight in the crow's nest of the first world which mainly takes place on K.Rool's pirate ship), later comes back as a GHOOOST pirate crow in the haunted woods world. Since you can't really fight Klubba, you instead get to fight a sort of twin brother as a boss in the swamp world. In fact, only one world is missing a boss completely (something I'll bring up again when it comes time to review the GBA port). Further, every part of this game is designed with the pirate aesthetic in mind. From enemies now sporting peg legs and hook hands and eyepatches and the like to the fancy "age of sail" font used in many areas to often using a "treasure map" backdrop for menus, they lean hard into the pirate theme. Even the locations fit the idea of going on a grand pirate adventure through the island, from the starting large pirate ship (and it's underwater stages taking place inside sunken ships full of treasure chests and the like) to ghost woods and some frankly bizarre mixups like the amusement park beehive world. (Yes you heard that right, BRISBY LAND is real!) All the same, they do manage to make a lot of the pirate kremlings look somewhat intimidating, especially the giant skeletal croco-ghost with a giant sword for a lower half that stalks you through a roller coaster library (like I said, truly creative mixups here).
The music is once again composed by David Wise and it's absolutely outstanding. The whole soundtrack is frankly some of the best music in all of platforming and manages to outmonkeyshine all but the very best music from the first DKC. Once again the piratic themes ring strong with things like accordion instrumentation and a few riffs from well known sea shanties used as leitmotifs, with every track building up and up and up to rising complexity throughout a stage. The boss music is suitably bombastic as well. Of course, it's hard not to mention what may be the most famous track from the whole game, Stickerbrush Symphony. Of note is that this song wasn't originally intended for the "sticker brush" levels, but in a crunch near the end of development it was decided to simply use it as a placeholder and then simply kept. It's now hard to imagine those stages without this music which has an odd combination of both soaring and tranquil. The music may not be as "tense" as a level that takes place in a field of deadly spikes hovering over an abyss would suggest, but the juxtaposition still somehow "fits" and also helps to keep the player calm and daring enough to keep trying. Every single level (or I should say every single unique level music track) also now has unique death tracks, and Diddy and Dixie also each have unique victory fanfares at the end of each stage. Sound effects are similarly excellently done. Most enemies have unique sounds to indicate their presence and the "death" sounds on taking them out are usually appropriately amusing. The "impact" sounds from barrel impacts or loading and using cannons are also appropriately punchy really bringing the player into this world.
Then there's the new way the Kong family works. They all got bit by a desire for pirate treasure it seems, because this is the one game in the trilogy where every family member are charging for services. They all got in on it. In most cases, it's a one time fee. For example, pay Funky once up front and you can use his plane rental service in that world whenever needed. Cranky Kong's hint system is dramatically improved. In the first game, he gave three hints entirely at random, making them fairly unreliable unless one had quite a bit of patience. This time, they can be selected from a menu, but they are no longer free. New Kong family are introduced here too. Swanky is a consummate hustler who runs a game show. It's a trivia game which costs coins to try and rewards extra lives. While most of his questions are things you should know either by paying close attention up to that point in the game, a few require checking the manual, and at least one requires some knowledge of the first game. Wrinkly replaces Candy as the game's save system. She also serves as a basic "manual", with new "tips" offered in each world. Considering the game already came with a manual, it's hard to say if this was redundant or an early attempt to make sure players didn't need manuals. But, since you have to pay for that stuff, it's better to just use the manual. Also, the first save is free, but every following save costs two coins. This is one of the biggest issues with this game's design, unfortunately. A platformer shouldn't really have save restrictions like it's a survival horror game, but if it's going to, this is compounded by other issues. Like many Nintendo platformers at the time, the save system doesn't record your total lives, but further it also fails to record how many banana coins you have (the other two coin types, being key to completion, are saved fortunately). So, by restarting your save, you can't even save again until you play some level and get two coins to rub together. This mainly hurts people who take breaks while someone who plays the game in one sitting will pretty much never have an issue. Either allow us to save for free like in the previous game, or remember the number of coins I have so I can stock up, but the compounded decisions hurt anyone who plays a few levels at a time. I found the best tactic I could manage was taking a plane back to the first underwater level, quickly collecting a few easy coins, and then taking a plane back to wherever I could save.
The game's pirate theme holds very strong and the overall world map does clearly illustrate roughly what you can expect to find before you enter each world, but I found the wholistic "storytelling" lacking compared to DKC1. In the first game, there's an overall progression from familiar jungle to more dangerous distances on the island and simultaneously a steady progression in what the Kremlings are doing to DK's island, from open wilds to a more or less natural environment now riddled with dug out mines to factories and horrible pollution and damage to a military base and finally concluding with K.Rool himself aboard his ship, which itself naturally hints that secretly this "king" is actually a pirate lord and sets up the sequel. That said, the "storytelling" within each world is now magnified as a result, so it's more of a tradeoff. The first world, for example, takes place all over different sections of a pirate ship, which at first involves simply charging aboard, then climbing the rigging, failing to reach the main mast and having to escape back down into the sea, sneaking back aboard through a section underwater, which floods the ship, and the next one from there the ship's sinking and you're outrunning the water, and finally bringing the crow's nest down to you with a VERY angry crow boss ready to claw you to bits. This is frankly some amazing linking between individual levels in a very dynamic "living" way. But, there's a small flaw, and that's the lost world. Don't misunderstand, the Lost World itself is amazing, but absolutely none of it's levels really "tie together". It's a large chunk of very different sections that don't tell a cohesive story, because they're encountered as difficulty spiking "one offs" throughout the adventure. In fact, there's no way to just walk from one level to the next. Each one has to be reached through the appropriate bridge from one of the main worlds. It's still a great set of secrets, but it could have been approached a little better.
The first "ending" involves taking down K.Rool in his new flying battleship. After dodging countless complicated trick shots from his pirate blunderbuss (which also has a suction mode, though by drawing everything in this pirate king also takes more damage, so use that to your advantage), eventually you give Donkey the chance to break free and he delivers the final blow knocking K.Rool into a bunch of sharks in the water below. He manages to survive and awaits in the Lost World. Apparently there's some power source there that's the "source" of all Kremlings or something.... the lore's weird and a bit unclear, also it's monkeys fighting crocodiles so I guess it doesn't matter. After finding every single bonus coin in the game and finally taking down each level in the lost world, the final boss fight is a rematch, and defeating him here blows up this kroc kore which causes the whole island to self destruct. You win! K.Rool sails off from his sinking island laughing wildly, so that sets up room for a sequel. Maybe Donkey Kong Land 2? Yes, I'll review that at some point probably.
All in all, I'd say the level design and the movement mechanics were perfected in this game. While there are a handful of design decisions that hold the game back from perfection, I'd still say this is my favorite game in the trilogy and one of my favorite platformers of all time. I took quite a bit of childhood pride in finding every last secret the game had to offer (after several weeks of hunting) all by myself without resorting to a player's guide or help online.
This game comes HIGHLY recommended.
A number of changes were made to basic design. Hit detection is more accurate, although it can still at times be difficult to gauge from the artwork where the end of a platform is. Donkey's been captured, an attempt by Rare's employees to distance themselves a bit from Miyamoto's characters after what he'd apparently said about the original DKC. The result was introducing a female character, Dixie Kong, who has a hovering helicopter hair thing she can do. Pay no attention to how weird it is for Dixie to have two different kinds of hair, the helicopter ponytail is very cool and very effective. In fact, almost TWO effective. The sheer navigational capability it allows makes Dixie the best choice for most exploration in the game. Diddy does still have more of a horizontal distance with his roll not losing height off the edges of platforms, but it's very niche. There is no longer a "heavy weight" in this game, so the big burly kremlings now require throwing something at them to defeat them. That leads to a new mechanic, partner carrying. You can pick up your partner and either toss them to out of reach places you can't reach alone, or just chuck them at enemies that aren't dangerous to touch and defeat them outright. New pirate themed items litter the game as well. Treasure chests have unique items hidden inside but require smacking them against an enemy to break open. Cannons often lead to bonus levels but require finding a cannon ball and successfully carrying it to the cannon. Replacing the swinging vines of the last game, fixed "rope rigging" can be found in many places, allowing navigating the ropes up and down, left and right, very much like the controls in Donkey Kong Jr. There's far more verticality, whole levels designed with scaling in mind. Along with this come some deadly levels with something rising from the floor to kill you, requiring speed to stay ahead. And, at the very end of each level there is now a clear "marker" to pass, a target to hit which raises a barrel to win a rotating prize. Hit from high enough a height and the prize is your's.
This game added something special to the bonus stages. Now, not only do bonus stages have proper presentation with intro screens and clear objectives, you actually have to win each one for full completion. All of the bonus levels now reward special coins. One set is Krem coins, which are pirate treasure to be handed to this gigantic mountain of a croc with a giant spiked club on a draw bridge. Try to fight him and Monkey D. Kong gets utterly destroyed in one swing, but you can bribe him and win him over. Every 15 coins unlock a brand new hidden world full of very difficult levels. This is borrowing from Super Mario World's Star Road and Special Zone worlds. Further, there are Hero Coins. These special tokens are the main completion goal of the game. Getting them all will require finding every other secret, and Cranky Kong now "ranks" your "hero rating" based on how many you get. Apparently, Diddy's competing with Link, Yoshi, and Mario, and a couple "no hopers" who appear to be Sonic and Earthworm Jim. Notably, this does restrict the variety of bonus stage objectives, but they've also adjusted bonus level design to tie the bonus levels more tightly with whatever the level's gimics are. Now, at max a level will have three bonus levels, minimum one. The "Hero Coins" are (mostly) found inside the main level and each one is put out in clever locations that often require very tricky methods to reach.
Visually, the game still uses prerenders, but doesn't recycle the renders from the last game. All the characters have been rerendered using new techniques, most notably in the fur rendering. The previous renders made it look more like Donkey and the other furred animals were wearing suits made out of their own fur, somehow shaved off, glued into a suit, and stuck back on them. This "fur rendering" would be something Rare became rather well known for right up through the amazing "fur and grass rendering" in Star Fox Adventures (And Conker Live & Reloaded). Generally, the art style was also shifted to be more "cartoony" than the previous game as well. Rambi has larger eyes, the KONG letters are now bigger and rotate, and many of the enemies now have a more exaggerated look. This is especially true of bosses, who are now all unique entities rather than just super sized versions of regular enemies. Well, alright there's a LITTLE recycling, but not in the normal sense. The pirate crow (which you fight in the crow's nest of the first world which mainly takes place on K.Rool's pirate ship), later comes back as a GHOOOST pirate crow in the haunted woods world. Since you can't really fight Klubba, you instead get to fight a sort of twin brother as a boss in the swamp world. In fact, only one world is missing a boss completely (something I'll bring up again when it comes time to review the GBA port). Further, every part of this game is designed with the pirate aesthetic in mind. From enemies now sporting peg legs and hook hands and eyepatches and the like to the fancy "age of sail" font used in many areas to often using a "treasure map" backdrop for menus, they lean hard into the pirate theme. Even the locations fit the idea of going on a grand pirate adventure through the island, from the starting large pirate ship (and it's underwater stages taking place inside sunken ships full of treasure chests and the like) to ghost woods and some frankly bizarre mixups like the amusement park beehive world. (Yes you heard that right, BRISBY LAND is real!) All the same, they do manage to make a lot of the pirate kremlings look somewhat intimidating, especially the giant skeletal croco-ghost with a giant sword for a lower half that stalks you through a roller coaster library (like I said, truly creative mixups here).
The music is once again composed by David Wise and it's absolutely outstanding. The whole soundtrack is frankly some of the best music in all of platforming and manages to outmonkeyshine all but the very best music from the first DKC. Once again the piratic themes ring strong with things like accordion instrumentation and a few riffs from well known sea shanties used as leitmotifs, with every track building up and up and up to rising complexity throughout a stage. The boss music is suitably bombastic as well. Of course, it's hard not to mention what may be the most famous track from the whole game, Stickerbrush Symphony. Of note is that this song wasn't originally intended for the "sticker brush" levels, but in a crunch near the end of development it was decided to simply use it as a placeholder and then simply kept. It's now hard to imagine those stages without this music which has an odd combination of both soaring and tranquil. The music may not be as "tense" as a level that takes place in a field of deadly spikes hovering over an abyss would suggest, but the juxtaposition still somehow "fits" and also helps to keep the player calm and daring enough to keep trying. Every single level (or I should say every single unique level music track) also now has unique death tracks, and Diddy and Dixie also each have unique victory fanfares at the end of each stage. Sound effects are similarly excellently done. Most enemies have unique sounds to indicate their presence and the "death" sounds on taking them out are usually appropriately amusing. The "impact" sounds from barrel impacts or loading and using cannons are also appropriately punchy really bringing the player into this world.
Then there's the new way the Kong family works. They all got bit by a desire for pirate treasure it seems, because this is the one game in the trilogy where every family member are charging for services. They all got in on it. In most cases, it's a one time fee. For example, pay Funky once up front and you can use his plane rental service in that world whenever needed. Cranky Kong's hint system is dramatically improved. In the first game, he gave three hints entirely at random, making them fairly unreliable unless one had quite a bit of patience. This time, they can be selected from a menu, but they are no longer free. New Kong family are introduced here too. Swanky is a consummate hustler who runs a game show. It's a trivia game which costs coins to try and rewards extra lives. While most of his questions are things you should know either by paying close attention up to that point in the game, a few require checking the manual, and at least one requires some knowledge of the first game. Wrinkly replaces Candy as the game's save system. She also serves as a basic "manual", with new "tips" offered in each world. Considering the game already came with a manual, it's hard to say if this was redundant or an early attempt to make sure players didn't need manuals. But, since you have to pay for that stuff, it's better to just use the manual. Also, the first save is free, but every following save costs two coins. This is one of the biggest issues with this game's design, unfortunately. A platformer shouldn't really have save restrictions like it's a survival horror game, but if it's going to, this is compounded by other issues. Like many Nintendo platformers at the time, the save system doesn't record your total lives, but further it also fails to record how many banana coins you have (the other two coin types, being key to completion, are saved fortunately). So, by restarting your save, you can't even save again until you play some level and get two coins to rub together. This mainly hurts people who take breaks while someone who plays the game in one sitting will pretty much never have an issue. Either allow us to save for free like in the previous game, or remember the number of coins I have so I can stock up, but the compounded decisions hurt anyone who plays a few levels at a time. I found the best tactic I could manage was taking a plane back to the first underwater level, quickly collecting a few easy coins, and then taking a plane back to wherever I could save.
The game's pirate theme holds very strong and the overall world map does clearly illustrate roughly what you can expect to find before you enter each world, but I found the wholistic "storytelling" lacking compared to DKC1. In the first game, there's an overall progression from familiar jungle to more dangerous distances on the island and simultaneously a steady progression in what the Kremlings are doing to DK's island, from open wilds to a more or less natural environment now riddled with dug out mines to factories and horrible pollution and damage to a military base and finally concluding with K.Rool himself aboard his ship, which itself naturally hints that secretly this "king" is actually a pirate lord and sets up the sequel. That said, the "storytelling" within each world is now magnified as a result, so it's more of a tradeoff. The first world, for example, takes place all over different sections of a pirate ship, which at first involves simply charging aboard, then climbing the rigging, failing to reach the main mast and having to escape back down into the sea, sneaking back aboard through a section underwater, which floods the ship, and the next one from there the ship's sinking and you're outrunning the water, and finally bringing the crow's nest down to you with a VERY angry crow boss ready to claw you to bits. This is frankly some amazing linking between individual levels in a very dynamic "living" way. But, there's a small flaw, and that's the lost world. Don't misunderstand, the Lost World itself is amazing, but absolutely none of it's levels really "tie together". It's a large chunk of very different sections that don't tell a cohesive story, because they're encountered as difficulty spiking "one offs" throughout the adventure. In fact, there's no way to just walk from one level to the next. Each one has to be reached through the appropriate bridge from one of the main worlds. It's still a great set of secrets, but it could have been approached a little better.
The first "ending" involves taking down K.Rool in his new flying battleship. After dodging countless complicated trick shots from his pirate blunderbuss (which also has a suction mode, though by drawing everything in this pirate king also takes more damage, so use that to your advantage), eventually you give Donkey the chance to break free and he delivers the final blow knocking K.Rool into a bunch of sharks in the water below. He manages to survive and awaits in the Lost World. Apparently there's some power source there that's the "source" of all Kremlings or something.... the lore's weird and a bit unclear, also it's monkeys fighting crocodiles so I guess it doesn't matter. After finding every single bonus coin in the game and finally taking down each level in the lost world, the final boss fight is a rematch, and defeating him here blows up this kroc kore which causes the whole island to self destruct. You win! K.Rool sails off from his sinking island laughing wildly, so that sets up room for a sequel. Maybe Donkey Kong Land 2? Yes, I'll review that at some point probably.
All in all, I'd say the level design and the movement mechanics were perfected in this game. While there are a handful of design decisions that hold the game back from perfection, I'd still say this is my favorite game in the trilogy and one of my favorite platformers of all time. I took quite a bit of childhood pride in finding every last secret the game had to offer (after several weeks of hunting) all by myself without resorting to a player's guide or help online.
This game comes HIGHLY recommended.