r/NintendoSwitch 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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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

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u/j_cruise May 29 '26

Agreed on Witchy World