Reviews from

in the past


NOT THAT BAD. just because chunky won't eat purple bananas doesn't make it any less of a purposefully well-designed collect-a-thon. gloomy galleon notwithstanding.

I have been playing this since it’s release. It is fun, but the backtracking between characters and levels does get annoying. I swear I will finish it one day!

Once again, the strongest emotion evoked by playing games from my childhood is not nostalgia, but a sense of amazement at how I ever beat them without reading ANYTHING EVER. ALL of the dialogue is always so unfamiliar, I can distinctly remember even skipping over it all the time, too. Props to babby me for having the patience to just brute force his way through games X3

This is the first time I've played this game in quiiite a few years, and this time I was, at the outset, going for 100%. I quickly realized I didn't have the patience to do that, though, and just went for "as much as I can stand" x3. I ended up around 16.5 hours and 185 golden bananas, and all but one fairy, crown, and medal (and an assortment of a little over 100 bananas). I have no idea how the average time on HLTB is over 30 hours. That's a bit insane to be given that you only need 100 bananas to beat the game. Maybe it's people just having a hard time finding things like the Rare or N64 coins?

This is definitely the 2nd worst of the Rare platformers (with Conker of course taking the bottom spot, Banjo 2-E at first and Banjo 1-E at 2nd). The design philosophy around switching kongs REALLY extenuates the "theme park" approach to level design, and makes the levels feel much less alive and more planned out than something like Banjo, especially 2-E. This game definitely has some mechanical problems as well.

Compared to something like Banjo or Mario 64, the kongs do control a little slippery (a complaint I have heard about the game before, but only now have really come to realize). It's not game breaking by any extent, but it can be aggravating and off-putting at first with how much momentum the kongs seem to carry. It definitely takes a little getting used to. A LOT of the bonus games too are fuckin' shit and I hate 'em. Some, some are just annoying, like the ones that rely on reaction time to shoot the banana when the lights go on and off, but the beaver-herding one especially just does not fucking work. The beavers always run into the side of the hole, as if it weren't a hole but a wall, and given that there are not one but TWO instance of the hardest version of that game, I just said fuck it after a half an hour of trying.

The framerate is really inconsistent as well. They were clearly really pushing the hardware in terms of how many objects could be on screen at once, because some areas in particular (World 7 boss, llama temple, a couple others) just had the framerate dipping aaaall the time. Again, it wasn't anything game breaking, but it was still very noticeable.

The game still has such good style though. It's not quite as funny as Banjo 2-E or as memorable as Conker's, but it's still good. The music fantastic of course, and the kongs really all feel like they have their own personalities, even though they never talk. Their idle animations especially would always make me chuckle X3

Verdict: Recommended. If you like collectathon 3D platformers, you'll probably enjoy DK64. It's not the best on the system by any means, but it's still a good game. Kong switching isn't the most fluid or well implemented thing in the world, but DK64 certainly flows and feels better than a really tedious cluster-fuck like Earthworm Jim 3D.

God I tried but this thing is utterly punishing to play. Every single room you enter is like the game giving you another swift middle finger.

The rating being as high as it is is solely on the DK Rap and 'OOO BANANA' bit.


Being an ape has never been less interesting.

One must imagine the Kongs happy.

The most over bloated collectathon there will ever be.

Why did I review this before Banjo-Tooie. I need to tell you the story of DK64 and how Rare didn't listen to the criticisms and thus kept making the same mistake over and over leading all the way to Playtonic's(the former Rare team that made all the classic collections)Yooka-Laylee.

I have a lot of nostalgia for this game. But it's not a good game. It's a test of your will. It's a test of your patience. It's the definition of tedious.

There is too much going in this game. At first, it's manageable. But it quickly becomes a tedious experience. I love collectathon, but this game pushes it too far.

Five characters all with their own things to collect. All with their own moves to get. All with their own areas they can access. Here's the thing though. You gotta switch characters constantly.

"Hey look, a trail of red bananas for Diddy leads to this gate and beyond. Wait...I need Chunky to open it. Sigh, let me go switch. (Opens it with Chunky.) Sigh, let me go back to get Diddy." This is the typical DK64 experience. Sometimes you have to get a move in a different stage all together to access something and it adds to the tedium even more.

The game runs at a solid 15 fps. A lot of things make it hit a good 5 fps. It's an ugly game. It doesn't control well. It's way too big for its own good. Some challenges are infuriating. On the official Wii U version some things are literally impossible with pause buffering. It controls worse on Wii U as well.

It is a charming game, don't get me wrong. I still love it. But it is a turd of a game. Especially the back half. The levels get larger and more obtuse. The character swapping gets even more tedious. The levels are uninteresting and bland. I will say the bosses are mostly fun.

This is not a game you want to 101%. It's such a chores. Back in the day it was fun because we didn't realize what a crime against nature the entire game was. You didn't realize the FPS was so terrible. You didn't realize how bad it controlled. Except for the obviously terribly flying mechanics. Even as a kid I found the constant character swapping tedious.

For the time it was amazing because how big it was. But that isn't really a good thing looking back on it. I know, I've done a lot of trashing on this game. It still is a fun experience. It is just very overwhelming to this day.

It's charming. The cutscenes are funny. The music is good. The first level is super fun and not too big. It's constantly giving you variety. Each character play uniquely different. None of them are so terrible that you don't want to play as them. You are constantly earning new moves or unlocking a new character. You get excited when you realize, "OMG, I can do this now!" The final boss, a bit infuriating at times, but still a very unique experience.

It's worth a play for collectathon fans. But you will lose your mind if you try getting 101%. I do not suggest doing it.

What do people say about this game? It's too big. It's too tedious. Too much collecting for a collectathon. This leads us into 1 year later to the release of Banjo-Tooie.

Absolutely horrid. Worst 100% experience in a game probably ever.

OOOOOO BANANA. kinda a lame repetitive game but its alright

should've kept this one in the drafts

Oooh, Banana. I love this silly ass game. Even if there’s an insane amount of collectibles, even if there’s loads of backtracking, I don’t care. I love me some 3D DK and I want MORE.

fuck this evil, stupid, miserable behemoth of a game. seems fun and kid-friendly until you realize playing this shit is like reading ulysses. it never ends.

I want to start by defending Donkey Kong 64 against one accusation that is completly ridicoulous imo.

It is not responsible for the death of the 3D platform genre. 3D platformers were in a very good place during the PS2 era. If you're talking about the specific Collectathon subgenre, then again, this isn't DK64's fault. Collecthathons were designed how they were because the early 3D platforms couldnt allow for huge worlds, so creating small worlds dense with collectibles was the solution to that problem, once that problem went away, there was no need to continue that trend, as this was never really the ideal scenario. Beyond that, for DK64 to have actually influenced the industry in such a negative way, it would have had to have been poorly received, and unlike what it might seem today, DK64 was one of Nintendo's biggest hit of that generation, comercially and critically.

All that being said, Donkey Kong 64 is a good game that had very noble aspirations, that being becoming the biggest, most content rich 3D platformer on the 64. As such, it did what was thought best, and it filled its world with an absurd amount of collectibles. This was the best they could have done at the time, but this means DK64 has very poorly aged.

The 5 different characters are a great idea in theory, they allow you to see the world with a different moveset and therefore, find new and interesting stuff to do. Some say that the problem is backtracking, but I disagree that a game of this style with multiple characters is wrong to have backtracking. No the actual problem is that the characters are almost the same. Their movesets dont feel different enough beyond one traversal option and barred codes. This coupled with the fact that most of the time, backtracking isnt done in a way to interact with more of the world, but rather just to pick up what you couldnt otherwise with the appropriate Kong. You're not exploring, you're doing busywork.

I want to make clear, I think there's something unfair about how reviewers always seem to 100% this game specifically when they wouldnt do so otherwise. Every game, including the best ones, are a chore to 100%. But thats the thing. My playthrough was a minimalist one, I got 102 Golden Bananas, only got as much colored bananas as I needded. I got 4 battle arenas. And yet I am still exhausted and I dont want to go back to this game.

So what is good about the game? Well......the game itself? Like under all of that, you still got a pretty damn good exploration-platformer. But.....it's not as good as Banjo Kazooie. Like, even beyond the absolutely shitty way it handles its content. Banjo Kazooie is a more tightly designed game, with more memorable levels, better humour, better soundtrack etc. So it will unfortunately live in its shadow.

So.....good game, yeah.....but it has a lot going against it, despite me understanding why the game is how it is and respecting the dev's aspiration, I can't pretend its super compelling to play today.

The internet said this game was bad after one video on it

La Oveja Negra de la saga de DK

Though I have beaten this game before, I've never done a 101% run like this. HbomberGuy's marathon charity stream of a 101% run last week inspired me to pick the game back up (once again) and try (once again) to do a full completion after giving up on it a couple years ago. I ended up clocking in a 16 hours and 37 minutes (which would actually put me at #62 out of 65 speedruns of 101% if I were to submit it to Speedrun.com somehow XD). For some reason the resale shop in my hometown had a CIB copy of the Japanese version for just two bucks more than a loose American copy, so I picked that one up, but it's functionally identical save for some bug fixes (making it technically the best version to play on a mechanical level, though only slightly). This was really one of the last unfinished projects of a game from my youth, so I'm really happy that I was finally able to plow through those last few horrible golden bananas and do this XD

Granted, I did get 201 golden bananas, but you only actually need 100 to beat the game. The game is well known to be a collectathon to end all collectathons, and it succeeds (for better or worse). DK64 usually has its Tag Barrels and the constant swapping between kongs to backtrack through areas for more collectables cited as one of its greatest issues with pacing and design, but I would say another big part of that is how inconsistent the difficulty is. The beetle races are some of the hardest bananas in the game to get, and there's one in world 2 (out of 8 ), and mini-games like Beaver Bother are almost comically broken and difficult compared to others like Teetering Turtle Trouble which you'd have to nearly try to lose at.

That said, you only actually need every other golden banana in the game, which is a far lower ratio than in Mario 64 or in Banjo (though not by that much, admittedly), so you can really pick and choose which ones you wanna go for and which ones you can't be bothered with. A bit like Xenoblade Chronicles, trying to complete the entire game is something that doesn't really offer much reward compared to just completing it normally, and will disrupt the pacing to the point where you're really going to hamper your enjoyment of the game compared to just going for a normal playthrough to see the credits roll.

That said, I do still really like this game. It has a lot of nostalgia for me, from the characters' designs and their characters displayed through tiny, silent interactions with the environment (like how Chunky will turn around in the minecart stages to wave hello at you) to how fucking EXCELLENT the music is. I was surprised at the time at just how long it took to hit me that this game has some really damn good music in.

Verdict: Recommended. If you like N64 platformers, this is definitely one to give a go if you're hungering for more after the Banjo games and Mario 64. It has far too many problems with its pacing, difficulty curve, and framerate (and good god does this game have some framerate difficulties) for me to ever say that it's better than either Banjo game or Mario 64, but it's still a good enough game to stand far above the worst members of its genre whom it also shares a console with.

Want to know how much I've hated timed video game levels my entire life? Look no further than my childhood experience with Dk64.
I had 100%'d everything up to that point in the game. Literally collected everything. 9-year-old me gets to the final level in the game, sees the timer, and says "Nah" and never plays Donkey Kong 64 ever again.

Si dejamos de lado que es muy repetitivo con eso de ir al mismo lugar 5 veces, así como que no recomiendo nada terminarlo al 100%, es bastante bueno.

If I had to describe this game in any way, it's "collectathon hell." So many things to collect, many of them mandatory. You have to beat the original Donkey Kong twice to beat this game. Beaver Bother is an abysmal minigame to play. Diddy's Rocketbarrel is by far the single worst thing to control in the entire game, and they love to force you to use it.

Now, I don't have all but dislike for this game. The soundtrack is very good, for one thing. I liked how each Kong had their own sets of moves that only they could use. Sure, Lanky and Chunky are going to be borderline wiped from existence after this game, but it was nice to use them while they existed.

However, there's a reason it only took me about 14 hours to beat this game, and that's because I had the benefit of quality of life options thanks to using the DK64 Randomizer, like allowing you to switch Kongs without a Tag Barrel. If I played this game totally vanilla, my playtime probably would've doubled. Backtracking is insane in this game, and without the quality of life stuff and occasional save states, it would be even worse. I already had to revisit Japes and Aztec multiple times, so I don't want to imagine how much worse it could've gotten.

On top of that, control in this game is generally very jank. There were times I did long jumps when I wanted to do high jumps, just because of a misclick since Z is used for so much in this game. The previously mentioned Rocketbarrel is by far the worst offender of jank control in this game. Movement in water was also not fun, but this game predates Majora's Mask, which had amazing control in water as Zora.

Like, here's the thing. I don't want to hate this game. I liked the different areas, the music was great, but the jank control, somewhat frustrating minigames, a final area on a time limit, and a 5 part final boss that put a lot of those jank things (and K Rool's hitbox) just don't do it for me. It's not a bad game, and if you like collectathons, you may love it, but the bad outweighs the good for me in this one. At the very least, I'm glad I finally got the chance to play and finish it myself.

this game ain't nearly as bad as some people will try and tell you it is, i get the impression someone just said "yeah this game is endless and bloated" and people took that at face value without actually playing the game for themselves - sure it's got quite a lot of fat and even the developers of the game have said if they could go back they'd do things slightly differently, but that's ok, that doesn't mean the game is unplayable today, far from it.

donkey kong 64 is actually a pretty fun 3D platformer and it certainly didn't "kill the collecathon" genre, those existed on 6th generation consoles too lol. gaming simply shifted away from those and this so happens to be one of the later games in that genre.

so, should you play it if you haven't before? well, it's not as good as any of the original DKC games in my opinion but it slightly takes the edge on DKCR. if you don't care about DKC games, then let me compare it to another game that is very similar to DK64, banjo-kazooie. that game is basically the same game but with a smaller scope, with only 1 playable character, banjo-kazooie is definitely more digestible but i actually found myself way more burned out by the end of banjo-kazooie than i did with DK64. DK64 in my opinion, has waaaay more fun and memorable levels, whilst being designed almost identically to banjo-kazooie in structure and layout, the atmosphere of DK64 is unmatched, it is potentially my favorite atmosphere captured on the N64, supported by the fact the game famously uses vertex/dynamic lighting which really provides a pretty look for a game on one of the ugliest systems ever. (sorry)

despite the praise, the collectables ARE overwhelming, even if you're not going for 101%. i didn't go for 101% and ended my playthrough with 129 bananas, 25 hours, and 61% overall completion, that's quite a lot just to beat the game, and the requirement of the nintendo coin and the rareware coin was just pushing it man, i don't wanna have to beat 2 arcade games, 1 of them twice, just to beat the main game i'm tryna play, that ain't fun; but yeah, the bananas are placed poorly, everyone knows that, and it's not exactly fun to backtrack and stuff, even if people do greatly over-exaggerate just how much backtracking is required - i mean, seriously, there are tag barrels around every corner - the collectables still aren't excusable and underneath all of those collectables is a way better game.

the level-designs/themes are by far the strongest part of this game for me, and the characters and whatnot are all really fun too, lanky being my favorite. if i were to rank the levels from most favorite to least favorite, i'd do:

-frantic factory (such a fun concept)
-crystal caves
-jungle japes
-creepy castle
-fungi forest
-angry aztec (i just hate desert themes, dude)
-gloomy galleon (only thing worse than deserts is water...)

i guess DK isles and hideout helm count as their own levels, but i just wanted to count the main levels with collectables. DK isles and hideout helm are good in their own right though, i guess (although DK isles is probably my least favorite hub world in any N64 game).

overall, a pretty good with some big flaws, but still nowhere near as large as people like to make them out to be. play DK64 if you enjoy 3D-platformers. also the music's phenomenal, grant killed it once again. :)

I love the playable characters, atmosphere, and music.. but there were a lot of annoying minigames and the movement feels slow and stiff. the "too many collectables" argument only goes for 100% completion, which I would NOT recommend. very over hated game but still not without it's flaws.

OK
Eu ainda falo isso de vez em quando, no mesmo tom do DK

Eu sinto uma pequena tristeza de não ter vivenciado de perto o hype do Nintendo 64, por vários motivos. Eu era muito novo, não entendia quase nada à minha volta e meus pais não se importavam com isso, me deixando apenas com um NES pirata...
Eu via esse jogo em revistas apenas, e lá faziam questão de fazer parecer que era algo mágico demais pra ser real. Então, 15 anos depois, com essa facilidade que temos de adquirir certas coisas, fui ver do que se tratava esse jogo esse tempo todo.

Começamos com uma intro imortalizada que... eu parei pra ouvir uma vez, mas o ritmo se perde com a repetição, então é, não está no meu Spotify, eu garanto isso.
Logo de cara no jogo, posso dizer que os cenários 3D e a música da ilha do DK ganharam meu coração. Eu não sei porque sinto nostalgia por algo que eu nunca tinha visto de perto antes, mas algo ali era familiar. Então eu achei a primeira fase e é isso, aventura!

Bom, é aí que a diversão acaba mesmo. Eu ouvia falar que esse jogo era um collect-a-ton gigantesco, mas o quão gigante podia ser? Bom, do tipo de ter que explorar todas as fases com todos os 5 kongs pra pegar mais de 100 itens de cada vez de formas diferentes. Eu acabei notando que as fases eram labirintos enormes com coisas demais para fazer, e eu sentindo aquele medo de não querer fazer tudo de novo com outro personagem depois. Eu decidi parar após chegar no deserto... Simplesmente eu não me senti na paciência pra aquilo tudo.

É tipo se em Minecraft, você tivesse que explorar cada canto e caverna num raio de 500 blocos pra achar uns 5 diamantes... E DEPOIS VOLTAR E FAZER TUDO DE NOVO COM MAIS 4 PERSONAGENS!!

Eu me contentei em ficar andando pelo hub world da ilha do DK, ouvindo aquela música maravilhosa mesmo...

Não, esse jogo é lindo, e entendo perfeitamente todo mundo que ama ele, mas por mim, eu deixaria só enquadrado mesmo.

This review contains spoilers

During the final boss fight against K Rool when you play as tiny, you use her powerup to get super small and you're like...what the...how does being small help me HERE!!! but then you see a small hole in K Rool's shoe and you're like OHHH!!! and THEN you gotta dodge his toes! and they make a silly sound when they move!!!! what a cool game...


Went to first level. Had 40 bananas. Saw that there is 3500 bananas total.

Nah.