Can I confess a particularly spicy opinion for a website about lil Nintendo cartridges? I’ve never been the biggest fan of Rare’s take on Donkey Kong.
That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed the Country titles (they’re mostly fun! we appreciate solid level design!), I specifically don’t care for their aesthetic interpretation of the island and its denizens. On a technical level they managed to make the SNES do things that are frankly incredible, but I find the whole thing grimy and unpleasant to look at. The actual animals are fine? I guess? Klaptraps are funny little guys. Everything else looks like it could be responsible for The Bite of ’87, and that’s just not my scene.
Regardless, my opinion is obviously the minority there. The games were wildly successful to the point where Nintendo effectively handed the ape over to the British. Even after Rare was acquired, the Countrification had fully set in and all games featuring the ape maintained Rare’s general design. DK Country changed how the character was handled for about 3 decades! He was doing the weird duck lip thing that entire time! And when you have a game succeed to this extent, obviously you make spinoffs. For other platforms. Specifically, other platforms that absolutely cannot achieve the visual fidelity of the original. Boy, I was not excited for this one!
I didn’t particularly enjoy GB Battletoads, but one of its strongest points was its spritework, making oversized goobers in action sequences clearly legible when many other games of the era didn’t. That was four years prior to DK Land 1 and absolutely none of those principles were put into practice here. Look, I get it, the whole point was replicating Country’s look, but the Game Boy just couldn’t do that! This ardent refusal to sufficiently adapt to the platform affects everything for the worse. Add in the lag time of needing to interpret these fuzzy sprites plus any potential GB ghosting, and you’ve got a game that actually looks as bad as most people think games on the system did.
You’d reasonably think playing this on modern displays or on services like Nintendo Switch Online would alleviate some of this misery, but if anything it makes its other flaws even more pronounced! Sure you have a likely-larger backlit screen, that’s always helpful, but frankly the game still just kinda plays like crap! You have a heap of lives to lose because levels here are a mess, constantly presenting borderline unreactable landings and threats on account of not being able to see more than an inch in front of your monkey on a tiny display. If you try to play this like DKC, rolling, leaping, and building momentum, you will be constantly punished until you’ve sufficiently memorized the upcoming hazards. It’s just a mess from start to finish, even when it’s not threatening a migraine.
Can I tell you what disappointed me the most? Unlike Country, Land’s last world sends you to a city. As in a brick and mortar one. Presumably a human one! Contemporary Ninty would probably say this is New Donk City, but that’s not the point – this is a wildly different setting! You could do so much with that! They don’t! They never, ever do! Even the K Rool fight is just him running to each side of the screen, throwing his crown around sometimes. So much wasted potential.
Normally when you go into a game with low expectations it’s easier to forgive potential issues. You’re primed for disappointment, so any positives stand out even more, you know? Not this time. The more I played DKL the more I resented it. Moreso than any other Rare game I’ve played, this felt like a cynical punt for dough. The nicest thing I can say about this whole affair is that the cart really is a nice shade of banana yellow. Yuck.
Wack Game Boy Zone 