Where Banjo Kazooie is Rare putting together a collectathon you just want to get everything in, Donkey Kong 64 is a game where they force you to collect things you don't want anything to do with, in levels nobody likes or remembers, and it also requires you buy a memory adapter for your system (which frankly is not worth it).

I would not recommend this game unless you really just want to find bananas in a kind of bland Donkey Kong world, but I typically just stop once I unlock Donkey Kong within the game, as it is more engaging than the platforming in this game, and certainly more fun than the shooting.

In general, collectathons are not my preferred form of platformer. So the fact that Donkey Kong 64 has multiple characters that it requires you to switch between to get different collectables, even though those collectables are easy reachable with any character, makes the bulk of this game not very enjoyable to me. However, I do have very fond memories of playing the third person shooter multiplayer in this as a kid! It's a very weird inclusion, giving all the Kongs various nut and fruit shooting guns, but it turned out to be tons of fun and the saving grace of this game for me!

The greatest misstep of this game wasn't that it was too big; it was that it forgot to make the objectives fun. Want me to collect 100 bananas for every kong per level? Fine, that just consists of me running around and exploring the level. But then the game throws in golden bananas to the mix and it already starts to fall apart. It really sucks that so many of these golden bananas boil down to standing on pads and pressing a button combination to get The Thing, or some insanely annoying challenge that ends up with the gamer doing the gamer rage. No, I am NOT projecting, thank you very much.

Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie both realized that you can throw a ton of stuff at the players to collect as long as every one of those things is fun to collect. Often they would just throw in one or two jiggies somewhere in the level for the player to just come across, as to reward exploration, and that worked out just fine. The rest would be collected via minigames or interacting with the level in unique ways with your moveset. Say what you want about Tooie but that game NEVER forgot that your moveset was massive and made sure you got proper use out of it, even if it was biased towards your newer moves. This one seems to have forgotten what to do with its golden bananas, either letting the player off the hook too easily with the before-mentioned face pads or going full on monkey CBT.

Also can we talk about the level design? What the hell are these levels? They look nice and all but they're all tunnels linked to hub areas, and then you're given teleport pads to quickly get around. Very reminiscent of a molecule in terms of structure (idk why I made this connection, but I feel like a genius rn ngl), it ends up making every level feel very cramped and confusing to explore. In Tooie the levels were massive, sure, but getting lost is difficult when you can enter first person view and suddenly see the other end of the level, if you're high up that is. I'm guessing the molecule-esque map design was because of pushing the hardware enough as is, but it really hampered the game.

Weird thing to throw in here at the end but anyone else feel like this is one of Grant Kirkhope's best works? It sounds like he's channeling David Wise's style from the DKC games here, creating something more ambient rather than groovy. Listen to the textures of tracks like Frantic Factory or Crystal Caves for instance - absolutely gorgeous tracks that communicate so much with so little, at least in comparison to his past work. It's very restrained, in the best way possible, esp considering this is a game about monkeys collecting bananas and shooting innocent animals.

this is the first game i've ever played, and upon replaying it so many years later i...really don't understand why it gets so much shit

it's larger in scale than banjo-kazooie and also slightly worse than it, but despite the size of the levels and the amount of collectables, it's very easy to find everything you need to just by looking for the golden bananas, which are also pretty easy to find because of how they're split up by kong

if you want an actually mediocre rare game on the N64 play banjo-tooie instead, because DK64 is perfectly serviceable