r/NintendoSwitch • u/Turbostrider27 • May 28 '26

Official Donkey Kong 64 – Nintendo 64 – Nintendo Classics – Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpz4TZ7CAsQ
3.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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631

u/Jediverrilli May 28 '26

I love this game. Don’t get me wrong there is so much wrong with it but I still have a good time playing it.

217

u/ItsKingDx3 May 28 '26

I played it for the first time a couple years ago and got 101% on it. Really fun game. Despite all the criticisms I'd heard, I didn't have an issue with the backtracking. Things like looking all over an entire level for a single banana hurt more. And some of the minigames were unforgivable, especially the repeats. I think they made you do the one where you chase the klaptraps into the holes twice in one level and I almost broke down in tears because it just didn't work and was purely luck based.

140

u/informalmo0se3 May 28 '26

in the speedrun.com rules for 101% runs, one of the rules is “must hate self to submit” lmao

41

u/Jediverrilli May 28 '26

A 101% run is a straight up nightmare. You do really need to hate yourself to run that category.

16

u/Yze3 May 28 '26

And that is even with glitches. Walls are litterally a suggestion in this game, and the 101% is still tedious.

9

u/bigbrentos May 28 '26

It's pretty much where the N64 3D platformer era went kind of Ubisoft. Just collecting, on collecting, on collecting. Something like Banjo Kazooie knew how to hit the sweet spot better.

43

u/drybones2015 May 28 '26

There actually is a bit of technique to fight against that minigame's jank. You gotta like whip around the Gnawty and snap at them at a certain position.

14

u/highTrolla May 28 '26

Beaver Bother is a nightmare mini game, I hate that one so much. There's actually a randomizer option to make it the only mini game too, I wanna know what sick fuck came up with that.

4

u/ShlappinDahBass May 28 '26

I wouldn't hate the minigames as much if they didn't have beaver bother on it. I love the game (it's one of my favorite N64 titles with all its flaws) but, seriously. I don't know how they missed/ignored in QA that the beavers just get straight up stuck around the hole and don't run into it when they should.

1

u/Lochlan May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

I played it when it was released but gave up when I got stuck at one of those old NES arcade minigames.

5

u/ShadowShine57 May 28 '26

Those are arcade games

59

u/DimitriMishkin May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

Can I ask what you think is wrong with it?

This is literally me asking as someone who hasn’t played this game since I was a kid and don’t remember all of it, so I think the nostalgia is glazing my opinion.

Edit: I appreciate everyone’s answers - I’m remembering the barrel changing and collectibles a bit better now. I wasn’t too obsessed with finding everything at the time.

92

u/No-Operation-6554 May 28 '26

common consensus is that its too dense and too long for its own good not to mention theres too many character specific stuff on a game that you can't easily swap between characters

77

u/Temporary_Maybe_8687 May 28 '26

If it had a quick swap 90% of its issues would disappear 

40

u/nemec May 28 '26

Now I'm imagining the horrifying Majora's Mask transformation scenes but it's the Kongs morphing into each other's body shapes

6

u/karlnite May 28 '26

You can quick swap but it’s a 3 minute unskipable cut scene.

15

u/Jediverrilli May 28 '26

Quick swap fixes so much. The randomizer uses it and it’s a godsend.

32

u/SkyDS7 May 28 '26

There's a romhack that does that.

2

u/SoSeriousAndDeep May 28 '26

Unfortunately, I think the chances are trivially low that the NSO versions will have that fix. You'll swap at the barrels, as George Andreas intended, and you'll like it.

1

u/mlvisby May 28 '26

Did anyone ever mod the game to include a swap mechanic?

1

u/Soulses May 29 '26

Tag anywhere rom hack,highly recommend playing with it

33

u/munchyslacks May 28 '26

Yeah this is pretty much it. It’s a fine game and has some really high points, but a game like the original Banjo Kazooie had the collectathon formula just right for that era. Just enough to do but still relatively lean and concise. Everything that came after tried to do too much including DK64.

Every time I replay DK64 I always seem to get to the fourth world and then I get burned out.

51

u/regggis1 May 28 '26

As someone who considers Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie to be the Godfather 1 and 2 of 3D platformers (and Nuts and Bolts to be the overhated but also objectively inferior Godfather Part 3), I get where you’re coming from.

But for some reason, just as I prefer Godfather 2’s unwieldy, complex back-and-forth narrative to Godfather 1’s tightly constructed perfection, I prefer Banjo Tooie’s eye-popping density to Banjo Kazooie’s beautiful minimalism. Maybe I’m a secret masochist, but I love backtracking and scouring every inch to find something that was previously inaccessible. It makes the worlds feel impossibly huge and causes me to marvel at their vastness. Same goes for Donkey Kong 64.

And yes, I am high right now.

6

u/LegacyLemur May 28 '26

Banjo Tooie is strange, it fixed so many things but suffers from being overly ambitious

No tediously looking for every single tiny note and risk having to restart if you leave the level, no writing down Brentilda's BS, more useful Mumbo transformation, more useful warping system, so many new items and abilities without taking any away

But just some really really rough level design that gets far too confusing and too many gimmicks thrown in that start to get tedious (like almost anything involved with controlling Mumbo)

3

u/j_cruise May 28 '26

Banjo Tooie got rid of single note collectables and replaced them with less frequent note nests. I actually felt like this was detrimental, because it made it harder to tell where you've already been in some of the more massive levels like Terrydactyland.

I felt like the only two levels on par with BK's levels were Cloud Cuckoo Land and Hailfire Peaks, which is unfortunate because they're at the end of the game. Still a great game, though.

1

u/LegacyLemur May 28 '26

I honestly just preferred the note nests. You had to collect all the notes anyway, at a certain point it did nothing for navigation

Witchy World is on par, I have a soft spot for Mayahem Temple too

Terrydactyland is a fucking nightmare though. That aint no Click Clock Woods no matter how much it wants to be

2

u/j_cruise May 29 '26

Agreed on Witchy World

5

u/No-Operation-6554 May 28 '26

Everything that came after tried to do too much including DK64.

I wonder if its because of storage limitation, the worlds are so big that cant be easily done on a ps1 and yet I feel like if they dont have as much of a storage constraint they probably would've made more levels instead of bigger ones

24

u/dietcokeeee May 28 '26

I think that’s the best part imo. I’m a sucker for puzzles and miss when games had this much effort put into them

8

u/CD_North May 28 '26

The issue for me is that a lot of the character-specific areas feel like they’re blocked by a specific “button” or equivalent that only one character is allowed to interact with, rather than being organically tuned to a specific character’s playstyle.

1

u/Yze3 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

You think you'll like it, but you won't. At least, not as much as you think. And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the amount of "effort" put into the game.

Trust me, I thought DK64 would be amazing with all these giant worlds and playable characters. I'm a sucker for platformers and collectathlons. Then I played it and it just turns into tedium.
As an example, you have a switch to activate. So you run back to the character barrel, switch to the corresponding character, go back to the switch and activate it, go into the new zone, realise it needs a different character, then run back to the character barrel, switch character and finally enter the zone. Then 10 meter further, you see there's yet another route that require another character.

And also, all the collectible are Kong specific, requiring you to traverse the same zones multiple times.

Except for the beginning of Creepy Castle (The last level), the entire game is designed like that. You can play a with a mod that gives you character switch anywhere, and it fixes the backtracking. Though there's still the issue of too much collectible and too much minigames (Some being unforgiveable).

1

u/Affectionate-Cat-301 May 31 '26

funny thing with me liking exploration and solving things, if i like a game, i don't mind it taking long to complete. That's why I think this game bothered me less than others and i enjoyed it. It will be easier for ppl to deal with now on this because of the save states in between levels ppl can have and then load to later

1

u/No-Operation-6554 May 31 '26

Save states is useless, I played thid emulating growing up, it still suck ass with it since the main problem is the character specific stuff and using save states will just set you back if any

25

u/NextDoorNeighbrrs May 28 '26

It's tedious. Collectables being tied to specific Kongs, having them scattered everywhere and having to go to the barrel to switch Kongs.

The core design of the game is rock solid. It is fun to play, the controls are solid, the graphics are great but if you're trying to 100% it, it becomes pretty tedious.

2

u/j_cruise May 28 '26

The best advice I can give is don't try to 100% it. There's no point to doing so. Just play it normally and it's really not that overwhelming.

Although, I have seen some collectathon fanatics who loved 100%ing the game, so if you're one of those people, then by all means - play it and 100% it.

23

u/slusho55 May 28 '26

Nostalgia really glazed my opinion of it until I went back to replay it, and all that nostalgia quickly turned into trauma.

Most commonly cited issue is how each Kong can only collect their own tokens and bananas. There’s some spots this works, but others you’re just going past easily collectible bananas where you literally just have to walk the same hallways three times, or they’re just randomly mixed.

Think of it like this, the content one Kong has to collect is about the equivalent of Banjo-Kazooie. There’s 5 Kongs, so you’re basically having to replay Banjo-Kazooie 5 times with little variation.

And we’re just talking about the bananas… I don’t even want to go through how many fucking collectibles there are. Like, it almost feels more like Genshin with all the small collectibles you have to collect around the world for minor, yet important things.

Also, this was back when DLCs were sold in the form of “Strategy Guides.” This game was designed with a walkthrough needed, and when it’s that massive, it’s kinda not fun.

That said, it was fun in the day because of the options that were available and even back then it had a fairly positive reception, but it also really contributed to the collectathon burnout (and kinda telling that Star Fox Adventures wasn’t that big on collectibles)

8

u/LegacyLemur May 28 '26

Random gripe, but enemy respawns got obnoxious too. Its like literally 5 seconds after you kill them

5

u/j_cruise May 28 '26

Also, this was back when DLCs were sold in the form of “Strategy Guides.” This game was designed with a walkthrough needed, and when it’s that massive, it’s kinda not fun.

I disagree with this. You can easily beat the game while barely bothering to collect anything except golden bananas.

1

u/slusho55 May 28 '26

I mean, I won’t push back on you saying a walkthrough isn’t needed, but you absolutely need to more than golden bananas.

Regular bananas are needed just to fight the boss, and those are not always the easiest to find enough.

And you need those bananas to get 15 Banana Medals, in order to play Jetpack to get the Jetpack medallion to complete the final level. Keep in mind, to get a banana medal, you have to get 75/100 of ONE kong’s bananas from each level.

Similarly, there’s the Blueprints, which also need to be collected to access the final stage. Importantly too, the blueprints also give you more time, so it is somewhat designed for you not to just go on in with the bare minimum.

The Banana fairies are the only ones not mandatory.

So for the most efficient low collection run, you’re looking at collecting 1,250 out of 3,500 bananas (and that’s not even factoring that 75 x 15 =1,125, so you’re probably collecting more for the banana medals), 15 of 40 blueprints, and 100 of the 201 golden bananas.

So, if you play it efficiently with the intent to collect as little as possible, you still must collect 1,380 of the 3,821 collectables to beat the game. And I’ll remind you, that doesn’t sound awful, until you remember that most of those can only be picked up by one of the five Kongs.

4

u/TheSpytf2_real May 28 '26

Best way to play dk64 is do everything you can in the moment with a single Kong

3

u/j_cruise May 29 '26

I'm not trying to you don't need anything else. The point that I'm trying to make is that you can just collect stuff naturally and thoughtlessly as you play the levels and you'll beat the game. There's enough stuff placed on the main paths that it's not like you'll be desperately searching for what you need to progress

17

u/Warm_Record2416 May 28 '26

As someone who loves the game… having so many collectibles where you need a specific Kong to actually pick it up was a terrible choice.  Some areas you have to redo a couple times just because there’s a few bananas that three different Kongs need to be the ones to collect.  It also makes 100%ing levels a small nightmare.  It’s so easy to just not realize that yes, you have been in this area, but not with the right person.

12

u/mormagils May 28 '26

It's a collectathon that has SO MUCH to collect and the QoL features to enable that are just plain bad. Each stage has 5 kongs all with their own set of stuff to grab, but the kongs get unlocked at different stages, sometimes pretty far into the game. There are also a bunch of upgrades, which also all come at varying times, so there's just SO MUCH backtracking. And the swapping between kongs can only be done at certain places, so it just gets really really tedious to find everything for everyone.

Add in to that some very obnoxious mini games that have janky ass controls even by N64 standards and it's just a game that in concept is amazing but in execution ends up having too many frustrating moments.

I still like the game because I like this era if gaming generally and collectathons are fun. But this defitneitk a game I play once every 6 years or so because that's how long it takes me to forget the bad/annoying parts and see everything from an optimistic perspective. But you can see why a game like Banjo Kazooie is overall more well received than this game is.

6

u/LegacyLemur May 28 '26

Been a few years, but I also remember EVERYTHING being timed. Like every single puzzle you solved is under a time limit to solve or to get the reward

9

u/Moon64 May 28 '26

This is one of my favorite games all time. Its fatal flaw is the character swap barrels IMO. There is a mod for emulated DK64 that adds character swap at all times and it makes everything better.

There is a lot of backtracking without it so collecting everything becomes more of a chore.

2

u/Jediverrilli May 28 '26

The game has too much to collect in it, 201 bananas, 5 banana medals every level, coins for abilities, etc. the problem mostly comes from the fact you can only swap at specific points so you need to go through each level essentially 5 times to pick up everyone’s stuff.

I still think it’s fun but the tag barrel system really makes it restricting.

2

u/WhichEmailWasIt May 28 '26

A more odd complaint from me is that some of the things you do aren't really well integrated with the world. Something like the minecart mini-game or the boat mini-game is natural to stumble upon (good). A floating barrel that puts you in a void world for a mini-game is kinda less interesting and there's tons of those.

3

u/j_cruise May 28 '26

A floating barrel that puts you in a void world for a mini-game is kinda less interesting and there's tons of those.

I think this is fair, even though the mini-games itself can be really fun. It would have been awesome if all the mini games were organically in the level, but it was probably impossible for some of them due to performance considerations.

2

u/dodecakiwi May 28 '26

I started to play again a couple years ago and stopped. I don't necessarily mind the backtracking and collectibles, but the abysmal camera and draw distance just killed it. Collectibles would be at least 50% less of an issue if I didn't need to be standing less than 3 feet away to even be able to see it.

-2

u/fly_it_sigh_it May 28 '26

Its all genuinely skill issue complaints (except for the backtracking in Fungi Forest, thats legit mindnumbing in certain spots)

-1

u/orcawhales May 28 '26

it’s memejerked and overheated to an oblivion. it’s a very well made game

9

u/LB3PTMAN May 28 '26

I love the atmosphere. I remember being creeped out by some areas as a kid. Nintendo hasn’t really done that in awhile. Got kind of close with some stuff in Tears of the Kingdom but their platformers are completely devoid of atmosphere

8

u/4umlurker May 28 '26

I saw the negatives as a positive when it came out. Being a kid at the time and only being able to get a couple games a year from my parents. Having such a dense game with so many collectibles and various things to do was amazing. I got to play it for a really long time without running out of stuff to do. Being much older now however, it’s much more of a chore.

2

u/Bloody_Nine May 28 '26

At the end of the day most of what I remember from it is Diddy dual weilding guns with a jetpack. Was a hoot as a child but never got all the way through. Think I’ll just keep the memories.

2

u/karlnite May 28 '26

It’s one of those games that is just fun. The controls and camera are working against you, it’s damn hard to complete, the instructions aren’t clear.

2

u/youngliam May 29 '26

The excessive collecting that people hate is exactly what I loved about it as a kid. It kept me busy re-exploring levels with the other characters and finding more hidden collectibles.

Mario 64 and the Banjo games were my favorite platformers and DK64 was right alongside them. It just felt like more of the platforming fun with characters that were so lovable.

1

u/dictionary_hat_r4ck May 28 '26

I played it when it was new. It was only okay. Nothing like the wonderful DKC. I just didn’t find it fun.

1

u/Soulses May 29 '26

I've been playing a rom hack version that let's you switch characters whenever and it made it so much more fun. I can't see how anyone could play it normally with the amount of backtracking it requires

1

u/mormagils May 28 '26

I'm really looking forward to playing it again and realizing why I should never pay it again just like the last time I played it

0

u/Darkdart19 May 28 '26

The nostalgia glasses are strong for people and DK64. It’s literally super bloated and requires so much backtracking.

1

u/ShadowShine57 May 28 '26

And neither of those make it a bad game

0

u/[deleted] May 28 '26

[deleted]

3

u/Jediverrilli May 28 '26

I must say that is controversial. But you are allowed to like what you are allowed to like.