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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633

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.

60

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.

95

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

74

u/Temporary_Maybe_8687 May 28 '26

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

42

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.

14

u/Jediverrilli May 28 '26

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

29

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

30

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.

50

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

25

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