Bet you never thought you'd see this game in your life again, huh? I'll be honest, I bought this wayyy back in 2017 or so mainly just as a collectors piece, that and it was absurdly cheap for being a Nintendo game starring one of their biggest franchises.

For context on just how a game like this ended up being so utterly buried, simply put, its because Nintendo really had no clue what direction to veer Donkey Kong in at this time. When the previous developer was lost, people who had spent half a decade defining this franchise...how exactly do you as a publisher keep the ball rolling when you had so little involvement in the series to begin with? For Nintendo, it meant doing a little bit of everything. We got the Donkey Konga trio of rhythm games, the experimental Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, the strange redo of a racing formula with Donkey Kong Barrel Blast...and among Game Boy Advance ports of the original 3 games, a whole new Game Boy Advance game by a whole different studio, about...swinging on pegboards.

Needless to say King of Swing is a kind of cheap-feeling, weird little experiment of a game, mostly just kind of made to try to give the series SOME kind of new footing that didn't feel like a spinoff. Nintendo probably thought, hey, if Rare could do it, so could Paon! And honestly? The most mind-blowing thing about Jungle Climber is both that it exists, and that it manages to be such an unbelievable step up from the original in basically every way. King of Swing feels cheap in so many ways, while Jungle Climber is varied at every turn. Of course its a little silly to compare a GBA game to a DS game, but I think you can really tell that Paon wanted to really take advantage of this second chance they'd been given. King of Swing was recieved lukewarmly yet Nintendo had faith in the developer's ability to shine.

This is a lot of fluff for a game I haven't really begun talking about yet, and at the end of the day its about what you'd expect from the backstory given. Its King of Swing, except it doesnt feel cheap anymore. All levels now dont just reuse the same pegboard tileset for one, but beyond that the game employs a very "in-house Nintendo" sense of mechanical variety to its levels. Even with a mechanical basis as odd as swinging around from handle to handle to move around, the game does almost every conceivable thing possible with that foundation. You'll have handles on a rotating plate, handles spewing out like a stream of water, handles that crumble when grabbed, projectiles that can be grabbed just like handles and thrown either as weapons or into slots to then be used as handles, cogs that move when grabbed...One of my favorite stand-out moments was in the near finale of the game, where the screen auto-scrolls forward as your only way of staying alive is using a hanging rectangular plate that rotates based on DKs applied weight to it.

And make no mistake: This game gets HARD, but almost never to the degree of making the mechanics seem frustrating or working against the player. Grabbing things with individually controlled hands seems like a simple, gimmicky mechanic enough to drive a laid-back experience--something akin to say, Super Princess Peach, something completely average but unique enough to hold your attention. Yet everything around this simple mechanic, from the super low falling speed, to the angles you can hurl yourself at, allow for some genuinely fun movement here.

Its just one of those games where, at first you're kind of just breezing by with the bare minimum, but at some point the game WILL expect more of you, and its up to you to learn the mechanics of the game well enough to get over that. Of course Paon arent some secret game design masters or anything, dont get me wrong. Theres a lot of moments here still that feel predictable, mundane, confusing, and not every level is great. I'm mainly just writing this out of amazement at just how...pretty good this game is. Even if you arent engaged by just getting to the goal, which is honestly kind of pathetically easy in the start, theres a super cleanly set up collectible system in place that makes a casual 100% run a completely viable option for a playthru. + it unlocks extra levels and cheats!

So while in summary a lot of parts in this game are surprisingly good and leaves this game as an interesting case study in pushing a unique core mechanic to its absolute limit, there's one big thing that realllly brings it down for me. Its a weird one too, but hear me out.

The music in this game isnt...bad. It really isnt, its catchy enough tunes. I just don't think they were a good fit for this kind of game at all. I feel like there's a reason the Country games and games like Celeste have soundtracks as serene as they do: It not only helps build a kind of mood for the world, but puts the player in a great mindset for the tough-as-nails game they're playing. "Be careful, miss one jump and its all over". Intense music like in Devil May Cry or Mega Man can do the same thing but make the player pumped. What I'm getting at here is, Jungle Climber's soundtrack consists mostly of...hyperactive tropical music. I read an old review that compared it to town music in older JRPGs, and I think that's a decent way to describe it: It sounds juvenile, quirky, and shrill. Its a damn shame, because combine a better soundtrack with a restuctured level order/world map and I definitely believe that this game could have competed with the Country games as a worthwhile alternative. The foundation is more out there but the brutal heart still beats. One half of Donkey Kong Country, the hard-as-nails, frail, precise, yet oh-so-satisfying to weave through and master half of the game, is still here. Its just that other half, the world and the mood the games were able to put you in, that feels like it isnt here at all.

Because of that, there really arent many people I can recommend this game to beyond the ones curious about unique game mechanics. The talent in the development house is clear yet their faults combined with the lack of cohesion, sadly means the game can't go far beyond "weird spinoff" territory.

A few more points:
-The endgame is absolutely insane, the game has like 4 levels that could each be the Final Level and three final bosses
-The underwater level music is the one track I still love in it
-I enjoy the respect this game shows for the Country series, with a lot of Country iconography and mechanics that even the Returns games would ignore or rework still working in here (KONG-letters just give you a 1UP for instance)
-Bosses are pretty fun
-No grounded attack???

This is a game that had every right to just be a low-effort brand-capitalizing game, and while in terms of story and cohesion it kind of is, the pick-up-and-play "game" part of the game are of surprising high quality. It may not be a sparkling gem on the DS, but its like...a coin in a currency foreign to you. Looks odd, weird, yet still shines like it should, and you probably won't mind picking it up just for the sake of it.

I initially wasn't planning on playing Jungle Climber after I had a middling experience with King of Swing, but I said "screw it" and caved in. This is a MUUUUCH better game.

Not only does it bring in more elements from the Country series (Diddy, Kong Letters, Banana Coins, DK Coins), Jungle Climber ditches the floatiness in favor of speed and action akin to the Country games. Leaping and swinging off pegboards felt satisfying as hell. The music is really nice too! The visuals aren't super great but I grown to like them alot as I played and the backgrounds are very nice.

Jungle Climber is a fairly gimmicky game, but it makes up for it with all the challenge, improvements, unlockables, etc. I was wrong for judging this game for how it looked and what I thought of King of Swing, it's a fun time!