There are so many good reasons why this game is controversial, and I can easily get behind both the lovers and haters of the game.
Donkey Kong 64 was supposed to be the technical masterpiece of the console, and in that regard, it certainly succeeds. Indeed, its large open spaces give a sense of freedom unlike a vast majority of other games on the N64. The DK Isles feel as immense and dense as Delfino Plaza in Super Mario Sunshine, a game from the next generation of consoles. In some regards, the size of the map and the amount of things to do in each corner you go to is reminiscent of the Zelda series, and especially in the woody areas of the game, I sometimes felt like I was playing an unintended sequel to Ocarina of Time.
The sheer size of the map is accompanied with pure beauty, too. It is an incredibly cinematic game by all means, from its hilarious cutscenes to its colourful levels. If anything, it's worth playing through the entire game 101% just to get to watch all the cutscenes, including the special ending cutscene you get after getting everything.
Its music is great, too. It has one of the most iconic theme songs in all of gaming history and the actual game's soundtrack has some beautiful moments, with Jungle Japes, DK Isles and Hideout Helm being personal favourites of mine. It makes me wish Grant Kirkhope had composed soundtracks for some non-Rareware games, as he is definitely up there with Koji Kondo.
The dialogue and character design is also phenomenal. The strong but insecure Chunky as well as the goofy but reliable Lanky are beautiful new characters that I hope get some more love in future DK games. The existing characters' personalities are amplified: DK is stupid but determined, Diddy thinks and moves quick, and Tiny is a very smart logical thinker that brings a bit of logic to the family. Not to mention Cranky Kong which is as much of a grinch as he has ever been, Funky Kong who is an absolute gun maniac, Candy's weirdly flirty dialogue and King K. Rool who is the perfect evil antagonist who will keep you on your toes for the entirety of the game. Everything is charming and wonderfully written.
The cinematic, musical and theatrical aspects of the game makes it one of the most entertaining games to watch someone else play. This is indeed why in the prime of its speedrunning scene, streamers such as Connor75 managed to be very successful and why its 101% category makes it into so many marathons, such as the Rareware 301% marathon and the 1545 relay race. Having been introduced to this game in that form of gameplay, it made me very excited to play it and made me have high hopes for it.
Unfortunately, my hopes were likely too high.
This game basically has four different 'types' of challenges: collectibles, platforming, minigames and fighting.
The collectibles here have been talked about to death. Most people complain about the sheer amount of collectibles there are, especially regular bananas. It is however not what bothers me; the real problem with the collectibles in DK64 is the fragmentation and the character barrels, which were one of Rare's worst design mistakes ever. In order to change your character, you need to enter a character barrel, and there are only a handful in each stage. For instance, in Fungi Forest, there is a tunnel that you must go through, but there are two doors preventing you from going through it. In order to open these doors, you must shoot tags with two different characters, one for each door. There is also a banana for a third character in the room that this tunnel leads to. I don't remember what characters exactly, but you get the point, and the problem is that the barrel is relatively far away from the tunnel, so you waste minutes going back and forth over and over again just to get through this tiny section. The collectibles being so deeply linked with each character (you can only collect the bananas, coins and golden bananas that are assigned to the very character you're playing), and needing certain characters to unlock parts of the level leads to so much backtracking that you'll be spending more time walking in places you already know instead of discovering new places. This makes the game's length feel artificial, annoying and disingenuous. If the collectibles were actually arranged in a way that prevented excessive backtracking, then I would have much less problems with it, but when you consider that most bananas don't require you to do anything or require you to play a bad minigame (I'll get back to this later), I find the same problems in here that I did in Super Mario Odyssey's excessive ground pound moons and repetitive minigames. Very little of the game feels like you're actually playing something exciting, since maybe 95% of all of it is just getting tedious collectibles. Even for somebody who loves Rareware-style collect-o-thons, there is just too much backtracking for it to be enjoyable.
The platforming sections feel very weird and slippery, especially with the bigger characters. Donkey moves too much with the slight touch of the joystick, Chunky just doesn't move well in platforming sections, Lanky is way too slippery to control well, and Diddy is just hard to control especially in narrow places (that one bridge inside the temple in Angry Aztec...damn it). At least, Tiny is has a decent control scheme that makes her preferable for all the platforming she has to do in the game, which is really not enough. The characters' shadows are hard to make out, which really messes up the depth perception of platforming sections. The weird controls are often credited to this being still an era where 3D platformers were new and devs didn't know exactly what to do yet, but come on, this came 3 years after SM64 and a year after Banjo-Kazooie. Both of those games have great controls and their platforming is tight and skill-based. DK64's platforming sections feel more luck-based than anything. Tedious.
The mini-games, especially the God-forsaken barrel games, have been talked about to death. They're some of the most broken, glitchy, tedious and repetitive things I've ever seen in gaming and made 101% feel like more of a chore than a game. Some of those mini-games you have to beat up to five times without any difference except maybe how fast the characters move. It is pure hell, and these sections were some of the most infuriating experiences I've had in gaming. Rarely have I screamed out of pure anger into a pillow because of a video game, but damn, Beaver Bother did that to me and many other gamers. Comes directly from Hell. Two video game testing companies are credited in this game, yet it feels like the game, especially those sections, were never play tested at all. Were they that short on time that they had to fill the game with these abominations?
Happily, the bosses in the game are creative and have a lot of character, which makes the fighting sections (except for the battle crowns which were an absolute waste of time) really enjoyable. Each boss got better than the last, and the final boss fight is the ultimate test of everything you have learned in your journey.
I must also stress that the very last level is some some of the most tense I have felt while playing a video game and it is truly an incredible experience (except for the weird Lanky shooting minigame, but whatever). The beginning and the ending of the game is bliss, the rest is tedious.
Is it worth playing Donkey Kong 64 nowadays? If you like great cutscenes, love mindlessly moving around collecting items, and care more about the aesthetics of a game than the gameplay, then it is likely the game for you. If not, just watch a 101% playthrough on YouTube and save yourself the stress. I'm glad I played it, but I doubt I will be revisiting.
Donkey Kong 64 was supposed to be the technical masterpiece of the console, and in that regard, it certainly succeeds. Indeed, its large open spaces give a sense of freedom unlike a vast majority of other games on the N64. The DK Isles feel as immense and dense as Delfino Plaza in Super Mario Sunshine, a game from the next generation of consoles. In some regards, the size of the map and the amount of things to do in each corner you go to is reminiscent of the Zelda series, and especially in the woody areas of the game, I sometimes felt like I was playing an unintended sequel to Ocarina of Time.
The sheer size of the map is accompanied with pure beauty, too. It is an incredibly cinematic game by all means, from its hilarious cutscenes to its colourful levels. If anything, it's worth playing through the entire game 101% just to get to watch all the cutscenes, including the special ending cutscene you get after getting everything.
Its music is great, too. It has one of the most iconic theme songs in all of gaming history and the actual game's soundtrack has some beautiful moments, with Jungle Japes, DK Isles and Hideout Helm being personal favourites of mine. It makes me wish Grant Kirkhope had composed soundtracks for some non-Rareware games, as he is definitely up there with Koji Kondo.
The dialogue and character design is also phenomenal. The strong but insecure Chunky as well as the goofy but reliable Lanky are beautiful new characters that I hope get some more love in future DK games. The existing characters' personalities are amplified: DK is stupid but determined, Diddy thinks and moves quick, and Tiny is a very smart logical thinker that brings a bit of logic to the family. Not to mention Cranky Kong which is as much of a grinch as he has ever been, Funky Kong who is an absolute gun maniac, Candy's weirdly flirty dialogue and King K. Rool who is the perfect evil antagonist who will keep you on your toes for the entirety of the game. Everything is charming and wonderfully written.
The cinematic, musical and theatrical aspects of the game makes it one of the most entertaining games to watch someone else play. This is indeed why in the prime of its speedrunning scene, streamers such as Connor75 managed to be very successful and why its 101% category makes it into so many marathons, such as the Rareware 301% marathon and the 1545 relay race. Having been introduced to this game in that form of gameplay, it made me very excited to play it and made me have high hopes for it.
Unfortunately, my hopes were likely too high.
This game basically has four different 'types' of challenges: collectibles, platforming, minigames and fighting.
The collectibles here have been talked about to death. Most people complain about the sheer amount of collectibles there are, especially regular bananas. It is however not what bothers me; the real problem with the collectibles in DK64 is the fragmentation and the character barrels, which were one of Rare's worst design mistakes ever. In order to change your character, you need to enter a character barrel, and there are only a handful in each stage. For instance, in Fungi Forest, there is a tunnel that you must go through, but there are two doors preventing you from going through it. In order to open these doors, you must shoot tags with two different characters, one for each door. There is also a banana for a third character in the room that this tunnel leads to. I don't remember what characters exactly, but you get the point, and the problem is that the barrel is relatively far away from the tunnel, so you waste minutes going back and forth over and over again just to get through this tiny section. The collectibles being so deeply linked with each character (you can only collect the bananas, coins and golden bananas that are assigned to the very character you're playing), and needing certain characters to unlock parts of the level leads to so much backtracking that you'll be spending more time walking in places you already know instead of discovering new places. This makes the game's length feel artificial, annoying and disingenuous. If the collectibles were actually arranged in a way that prevented excessive backtracking, then I would have much less problems with it, but when you consider that most bananas don't require you to do anything or require you to play a bad minigame (I'll get back to this later), I find the same problems in here that I did in Super Mario Odyssey's excessive ground pound moons and repetitive minigames. Very little of the game feels like you're actually playing something exciting, since maybe 95% of all of it is just getting tedious collectibles. Even for somebody who loves Rareware-style collect-o-thons, there is just too much backtracking for it to be enjoyable.
The platforming sections feel very weird and slippery, especially with the bigger characters. Donkey moves too much with the slight touch of the joystick, Chunky just doesn't move well in platforming sections, Lanky is way too slippery to control well, and Diddy is just hard to control especially in narrow places (that one bridge inside the temple in Angry Aztec...damn it). At least, Tiny is has a decent control scheme that makes her preferable for all the platforming she has to do in the game, which is really not enough. The characters' shadows are hard to make out, which really messes up the depth perception of platforming sections. The weird controls are often credited to this being still an era where 3D platformers were new and devs didn't know exactly what to do yet, but come on, this came 3 years after SM64 and a year after Banjo-Kazooie. Both of those games have great controls and their platforming is tight and skill-based. DK64's platforming sections feel more luck-based than anything. Tedious.
The mini-games, especially the God-forsaken barrel games, have been talked about to death. They're some of the most broken, glitchy, tedious and repetitive things I've ever seen in gaming and made 101% feel like more of a chore than a game. Some of those mini-games you have to beat up to five times without any difference except maybe how fast the characters move. It is pure hell, and these sections were some of the most infuriating experiences I've had in gaming. Rarely have I screamed out of pure anger into a pillow because of a video game, but damn, Beaver Bother did that to me and many other gamers. Comes directly from Hell. Two video game testing companies are credited in this game, yet it feels like the game, especially those sections, were never play tested at all. Were they that short on time that they had to fill the game with these abominations?
Happily, the bosses in the game are creative and have a lot of character, which makes the fighting sections (except for the battle crowns which were an absolute waste of time) really enjoyable. Each boss got better than the last, and the final boss fight is the ultimate test of everything you have learned in your journey.
I must also stress that the very last level is some some of the most tense I have felt while playing a video game and it is truly an incredible experience (except for the weird Lanky shooting minigame, but whatever). The beginning and the ending of the game is bliss, the rest is tedious.
Is it worth playing Donkey Kong 64 nowadays? If you like great cutscenes, love mindlessly moving around collecting items, and care more about the aesthetics of a game than the gameplay, then it is likely the game for you. If not, just watch a 101% playthrough on YouTube and save yourself the stress. I'm glad I played it, but I doubt I will be revisiting.