RE: We chat about videogab]mes and videogame accessories.
04-12-2014, 10:58 AM
After having poked at it for a bit I feel like ranting at length about DK 64 and rare ware's obsession during the n64 era with 'gotta collect a bunch of meaningless trinkets' style platformers, because that there is a game that want's to be about five different games with constant backtracking through the same areas as different kongs.
To wit, on the intermarry of random bullshit for you to waste time picking up you have:
Golden Bananas (ostensibly the most important, but they have zero use outside of 100% completion and arbitrary milestone numbers as one final requirement for access to the next area.) Also each Kong has five bananas to pick up per level/world because of course they do. The other four can't pick up the character specific golden bananas because of uh... reasons. (mostly because their face/fruit ammo of choice is not plastered all over the trigger for that particular golden banana.)
Blueprints (Because golden bananas weren't mandatory enough, we have these little fucks that come in FIVE DELIGHTFUL MOTHER FUCKING COLORS, one for each of the playable characters. So you know, instead of just walking up, beating the piss out of the mook holding them and taking them back to the random jerk you trade them in for the pointless-outside-of-arbitrary-milestone golden bananas, you have to do it as that specific character, which leads us into....
Normal Bananas, also available in five colors which can only be picked up by the character of the matching color, and there's 100 of the fucks scattered about every stage for each character, and you need an arbitrary amount of them to trigger any given level's boss fight by force feeding a hippo until he's extra fat and that'll somehow unlock the boss door. This makes banana's important for game progression because you need to defeat every boss in order to get access to the next level...
Keys - because each boss has one of these keys to a cage with a big giant fuck off crocodile that will happily spaz dance until the next area opens up as long as you keep bringin' in the keys.
Banana Medals - Something you need to get because REASONS (those reasons being the jetpack coin), and you need to collect 75 bananas of a color in each level, so there's one for each playable character per level too.
Jetpack/Donkey Kong Coins - Because there wasn't quite enough junk to get ahold of. You can only access Jetpack if you have like a set number of banana medals, and then you have to get good enough at the game for like a specific high score. In the case of Donkey Kong you have to be able to beat the second loop of the original arcade game, which i guess isn't that bad but man come onnnn. And yes BOTH of these are mandatory.
Banana Fairies - which you can only collect by photographing which will unlock extras n' cheats for you. They literally have no in game use apart from giving you one last super secret golden banana if you catch all the giggling little fucks.
Coins - come in five colors which makes them character specific pick ups, which is kind of needlessly bullshit when you factor in you need to pay coins for new abilities and upgrades for each of the kong's (arbitrary and specific) guns n' instruments. (because of COURSE they need guns (for sub par third person/first person fixed perspective shooter action) and instruments (because character specific switches were not enough.)
So at the end of the day you have what is a bit of a mess - a good portion of the game is designed just so you end up spending a lot of time fucking about changing characters to comb over areas you have already been or to just solve one puzzle that involves two separate characters for no other reason than because you can instead of focusing on a tightly built game with one central character where the game could challenge the skills you've built up over the game instead of tacking new shit on every level. Like I guess Banjo Kazooie and Super Mario 64 did the same thing but they both did it *better* (to a degree, SM64's only bit of backtracking was basically just collecting the caps and then you could do whatever. Yeah there were red coins and 100 coin challenges but those were both level specific and only served in getting more stars, and Banjo Kazooie made both Notes and Jiggies actually matter.)
instead they throw a bunch of shiny shit at you and hope that distracts you from the pointlessness of it all.
not getting into some of the games character problems, it's kind of crap enough on it's own merits.
To wit, on the intermarry of random bullshit for you to waste time picking up you have:
Golden Bananas (ostensibly the most important, but they have zero use outside of 100% completion and arbitrary milestone numbers as one final requirement for access to the next area.) Also each Kong has five bananas to pick up per level/world because of course they do. The other four can't pick up the character specific golden bananas because of uh... reasons. (mostly because their face/fruit ammo of choice is not plastered all over the trigger for that particular golden banana.)
Blueprints (Because golden bananas weren't mandatory enough, we have these little fucks that come in FIVE DELIGHTFUL MOTHER FUCKING COLORS, one for each of the playable characters. So you know, instead of just walking up, beating the piss out of the mook holding them and taking them back to the random jerk you trade them in for the pointless-outside-of-arbitrary-milestone golden bananas, you have to do it as that specific character, which leads us into....
Normal Bananas, also available in five colors which can only be picked up by the character of the matching color, and there's 100 of the fucks scattered about every stage for each character, and you need an arbitrary amount of them to trigger any given level's boss fight by force feeding a hippo until he's extra fat and that'll somehow unlock the boss door. This makes banana's important for game progression because you need to defeat every boss in order to get access to the next level...
Keys - because each boss has one of these keys to a cage with a big giant fuck off crocodile that will happily spaz dance until the next area opens up as long as you keep bringin' in the keys.
Banana Medals - Something you need to get because REASONS (those reasons being the jetpack coin), and you need to collect 75 bananas of a color in each level, so there's one for each playable character per level too.
Jetpack/Donkey Kong Coins - Because there wasn't quite enough junk to get ahold of. You can only access Jetpack if you have like a set number of banana medals, and then you have to get good enough at the game for like a specific high score. In the case of Donkey Kong you have to be able to beat the second loop of the original arcade game, which i guess isn't that bad but man come onnnn. And yes BOTH of these are mandatory.
Banana Fairies - which you can only collect by photographing which will unlock extras n' cheats for you. They literally have no in game use apart from giving you one last super secret golden banana if you catch all the giggling little fucks.
Coins - come in five colors which makes them character specific pick ups, which is kind of needlessly bullshit when you factor in you need to pay coins for new abilities and upgrades for each of the kong's (arbitrary and specific) guns n' instruments. (because of COURSE they need guns (for sub par third person/first person fixed perspective shooter action) and instruments (because character specific switches were not enough.)
So at the end of the day you have what is a bit of a mess - a good portion of the game is designed just so you end up spending a lot of time fucking about changing characters to comb over areas you have already been or to just solve one puzzle that involves two separate characters for no other reason than because you can instead of focusing on a tightly built game with one central character where the game could challenge the skills you've built up over the game instead of tacking new shit on every level. Like I guess Banjo Kazooie and Super Mario 64 did the same thing but they both did it *better* (to a degree, SM64's only bit of backtracking was basically just collecting the caps and then you could do whatever. Yeah there were red coins and 100 coin challenges but those were both level specific and only served in getting more stars, and Banjo Kazooie made both Notes and Jiggies actually matter.)
instead they throw a bunch of shiny shit at you and hope that distracts you from the pointlessness of it all.
not getting into some of the games character problems, it's kind of crap enough on it's own merits.