I want to love DK64 more than I do, but it's just so bloated and frustrating at parts.

The DK rap is great, the new characters are great, the music is great, the final boss is fun (even if it does go on a little long), and the glitches are really fun to mess around with.

I don't mind collecting a lot of things, but DK 64 is a step down from Banjo Kazooie in that regard.

The backtracking is not as egregious as something like Tooie, once you get a kong you can get pretty much all of their collectibles on your first visit to a level and the levels are not as bloated as Tooie's.

The minigames and some of the golden bananas are where things kind of start to fall apart. There are a few mini games that just don't work (beavers....) and a few golden bananas are just obnoxious and made even harder with the fixed framerate of the wii u port.

Still fun at times, but it's a little intimidating to go back to.

Lanky and Chunky Kong are excellent editions to the DK lore though and Tiny Kong kind of breaks the DK timeline in weird ways in future games.

Still waiting for Nintendo to release a game explaining the time shenanigans that led to Tiny Kong growing faster than Dixie

Infamous for allegedly "killing the collectathon genre", Donkey Kong 64 is an Xtra-Large gorilla sized 3D adventure to burn lots of hours into.

It does use a lot of the bells and whistles that could only be offered with the 8MB RAM upgrade such as more advanced lighting effects among other rendering gimmicks, if you see it with the historical context, this was an obnoxiously ambitious project to push the N64 into new frontiers.

Nevertheless, plenty of features get old quickly over time, admittedly plenty of the cartoony SFX could go chill out more often for the sake of our ears.

Now if you're looking for something beyond Super Mario 64 or the two Banjo games to sink a lot of your time into, this one will be what the doctor ordered.

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 isn't a video game, this is a work of abstract art that looks at the conventions of game design and disagrees. The layouts of the worlds are designed to evoke the works of M.C. Escher. Hallways lined with collectibles for one character lead to a room that can be only completed by another, with a few bananas that can only be collected by yet another character tucked away in a corner for good measure. The camera does what it wants and you just have to live with it. The soundtrack is the same 9-note tune repeated forever in different styles. Truly, a subversive masterpiece for the ages.

Pros: The graphics are excellent, expansion pak requirements allowed them to pull off some pretty fancy shmancy lighting effects on considerably high poly models for the N64. They knew graphics were what put DKC on the map, so they couldn't cheap out for the N64 successor. Animations are also pretty vibrant, characters are full of plenty personality and movement, with, maybe even a little too much toony squash and stretch. But one thing's for sure, everyone looks full of life. And they control great, the base mechanics for movement and gameplay, actually feel solid. And these characters are all pretty fun, Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong are joined by newcomers Tiny, Lanky, and Chunky, in a grand open sandbox 3D platforming adventure game, like Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie. It's huge, and being huge means it comes with the good and the bad. The good, the worlds are all vibrant and offer plenty of variety, colorful areas with boppy fun music, and some nice bonuses, like the entire arcade DK and even Rare's first game, Jetpac, fully playable.

Cons: The bad... the game forces backtracking by making you switch characters at specific areas, to then travel through areas to grab collectibles that only that specific Kong can collect, and often, these are areas you've been to before with other Kongs, artificially making the game feel bigger, when really it's just bloat. And it's not fun bloat either, not that bloat ever really is. They say it's the journey, not the destination, but if the journey is the same journey I've done three or four times before, and the destination is a purple banana, it's not much of a journey, or much a destination. So what's the point? They shoulda gotten rid of all that, just make it so any collectible can be grabbed by any Kong, and the abilities of the Kongs themselves are what allow you to gain access to new areas and challenges. That's all... I mean, that's a big fundamental change, but it would've saved the game. Oh well.

And for some personal annoyances, as a DK fan. Why Tiny and Chunky when Dixie and Kiddy are right there??? Also, I love Grant Kirkhope, his compositions in the Banjo-Kazooie series are perfection. But... His style doesn't really fit Donkey Kong, you know? Not everyone can be David Wise, sure, but Evelyne Novakovic and Kenji Yamamoto still nailed the style of DKC, which is more atmospheric and ambient. Whereas Grant's music is oompah-pah boppy bop xylophone goofaround. Not bad music, but not what I've come to expect from Donkey Kong... Also yeah, the over abundance of squash and stretch is a bit too toony for DK too. Look, I just really dug the "fractured realism" of the original DKC series, and this game doesn't really follow the same look and feel as them.

What it means to me: There was no game I was anticipating more when the N64 was revealed, than the future Donkey Kong 64. I would skip to the end of every issue of Nintendo Power I got in the mail, to see if it was listed in the "future release" section, and for years, nothing. Then out of the blue in 1999, it SHOWED UP!! I was, yeah, hyped. But, I had certain ideas for what a DK64 should be in my head, after years of hoping and dreaming. And those ideas didn't quite line up... Yes, I wanted a big 3D adventure game like Super Mario 64 and B-K, got that, but the rest? I imagined DK, Diddy, Dixie, and Kiddy, the four playable Kongs from the DKC trilogy, now all together for the four-player featured N64 system, like that was a marketable feature of the system! That and more animal buddies (we ended up getting Rambi and Enguarde in this, they're alright, but barely used, and you don't even ride them, eh) And of course, David Wise, the more naturalistic art style, etc etc. Instead we got a Banjo-Kazooie tryhard, and it feels kind of wrong comparing one of the worst 3D platformers to one of the best, but you can tell, this Rare team looked towards Banjo-Kazooie for direction, but dropped the ball hard... It was all something that was really hard for me, a huge DK fan, to come to grips with. It's not without its qualities, but it's mostly a disappointment.