The trick with this one that didn't exist for Super Mario Land was that they wanted a strong tie-in quality with the Super Nintendo game. When Super Mario Land came out, multiple Mario games were hits worldwide. They just needed to attach his name and that was that. But there were no Donkey Kong games in ages excepting the most recent 16-bit effort here. And so the core of the game remained the same for Donkey Kong Land, to the point where you could mistake it for a pure port if you weren't paying attention.The plot, believe it or not, is that Cranky Kong (the original Donkey Kong from the 80s games, bear in mind) got pissed that Donkey Kong Country was successful and that its star characters were popular. A-freaking-men, Cranky. So Cranky claims that the game was only a hit because of the fancy graphics and sound, and that the gameplay was crap. Dude. Get out of my head. So he convinces King K. Rool to go steal all the bananas again to force Donkey and Diddy to recover them, this time on a system with bad sound, low graphical capability, and no color. He then expects the game to be a disaster to prove his point about how Donkey Kong Country sucked.
Cranky Kong is my hero.
Now credit where credit's due before I go any further: despite the system's limitations, the audio in Donkey Kong Land is still pretty good. The soundtrack remains inspired, so you won't be tempted to mute the Game Boy in anger or anything as you go. And for what it's worth, the barrel blasting stuff that was so atrocious at times in Donkey Kong Country is noticeably improved here. There are a couple spots that can lead to frustration, but nothing like the level you'd experience on the SNES. And, mercifully, this time around we're spared the levels revolving around being in the dark. Maybe they figured with no color it would be impossible to navigate anything meaningfully in such a stage. Or maybe they just came to their senses and realized the whole concept was idiotic. Either way, gamers profit.The list of positive changes pretty much ends there, sadly. There's one particular change worth mentioning though that doesn't really improve or detract from the game experience. It's that saving can be done after any level instead of having to hunt down Donkey Kong's sleazy girlfriend whenever you want some good old fashioned data backup. But there's a catch to it, naturally. In order to save after the completion of a level, you've got to collect the K-O-N-G letters in the stage. If you fail to finish with all four, you'll get credit for beating the level, but will be unable to save. And with no save point actually on the map, this forces you to be extra vigilant in each stage just so you don't run out of lives and lose all your progress.
And believe me, your progress is most definitely at risk in Donkey Kong Land. Death is lurking everywhere for you, including especially places where it has no business hanging around. I get that the graphics aren't going to be great and I don't really even care that the game can't feature more than various shades of puke-green. What I can't accept is the overall fuzzy quality of the entire endeavor. Consider for a moment how small that Game Boy screen actually is. Think about the general distance you've got to have your eyes from it in order to really see what you need to in a standard game on the system. Whatever that is for you, you've got to get twice as close to make anything out in this one, and that's pretty lousy for a first-party franchise title.The jumping is also really sticky. I'm not sure of what better word I can use as a descriptor here, but clearly "sticky" isn't the adjective of choice for a platformer, which is by nature a jumping game. I guess the apes just feel weighty somehow, or like they drop in ways you don't think they really should every time you jump. It's almost as hard to describe as it is to jump in this game. See what I did there? It's especially noticeable when jumping from something other than the ground - say ropes for instance. While some of the bad levels from Country are gone, the good ones (mine cart stages, I'm looking at you) have disappeared as well. Instead we get giant pirate ships that don't really make any design sense (they are surely not seaworthy, at the very least), the gameplay of which entails jumping from mast rope to mast rope while snakes spawn out of the woodwork to slither toward your hands. Get that business out of here, guys. No need for it.
Speaking of...ugh. Just ugh. Country's water stages suffered from two major faults. The first was a substantial overpopulation of enemies you couldn't hurt, making navigation a nightmare. The second was that they were water levels. Donkey Kong Land fixed the first fault, but retained the second (and arguably more egregious), while adding two more of its own. The first is that the water in this game has crazy stupid inertia. I know that water is by its very nature wet at all times, but that doesn't mean a single tap of the A button ought to launch you across the screen uncontrollably. And the second insidious fault? That damn nautilus is out for monkey flesh and will not stop until it gets some. It only appears in one level, but bloody hell. That stage is even called "Nautilus Chase" and revolves around a bunch of these things just hunting you down as you fight bad swim control through an underwater maze. Keep in mind that you've got to grab the KONG letters too if you want to save afterward, and that detours will almost certainly get you ingested. What is wrong with game designers?! Why does this most basic of mistakes continue to plague me? WHY?! And you know what? They took the swordfish out of this game, so now when you're down in that watery soup of death, you've got no help. Fan-freaking-tastic.One of the game's four bosses is in the water too, just to rub it in a little more. He's pretty easy though, which can be said really for all the bosses. The hardest part of each fight, as with most of the game in general, is just seeing what the heck is going on and making sense of it in the first place. Once you do that, you're golden. It doesn't help then when you're already struggling to make sense of stuff visually that the game's manual straight up lies to you. There's a stage the manual calls "Balloon Barrage" and another called "Construction Site Fight." Well, the former has no balloons and the latter doesn't take place in a construction site. In fact, each level matches with the opposite name, which means they didn't even proofread the instruction booklet that came with the cartridge. There's a real positive sign.
Even with most of the bells and whistles removed, I still got gripes with these levels. Jumping onto floating oil drums that spontaneously combust and then self-extinguish in front of infinitely tall skyscrapers? If you ever wanted to perform such an act, Donkey Kong Land is the game for you. Hanging from a rope and blind jumping off it to a platform that may or may not be there but could very well kill you either way? Heck yeah, we got that too. Or maybe you want a stage where you have to roll a tire around as a portable bouncing tool only to get it stuck and have to go back and redo the whole thing because the design doesn't allow for mistakes. You're covered with Donkey Kong Land. They've got bonus areas, but they're pretty lame and virtually all the same. As you go you'll collect big coins. When you enter a bonus area it'll display the number of coins you've collected to that point on the screen, and an auto-rotating barrel will move back and forth at the top of the screen. You've got to step on a switch on the screen and the barrel will shoot one of your coins. If you grab it, you get an extra life. This is totally inane. Think about it - you get the 1-up for getting the coin. But you can only collect the coin if you already had it and stuck it in a barrel to shoot it at yourself. Why do you need to do this? Is that coin-launching barrel somehow supercharging that stuff with soul energy or something? Or am I once again just trying to assign meaning to something to avoid the mental hernia all the nonsense would bring me?
I guess what I'm really trying to say to you is this: get used to this screen. You will be seeing plenty of it. All. The. Time. Donkey Kong Country had its rough spots but it's got nothing on the difficulty of its neglected little cousin. I wish I could promise a feeling of satisfaction and/or a rewarding ending for when and if you finally do complete it, but I can't. You'll get neither. Maybe a feeling of gratitude and relief that you don't have to keep playing it, but honestly you can have that at any time by simply not playing this game at all in the first place. Just trust me on this one, please. Don't make me have reviewed this in vain.Ultimately you've got to figure Cranky was right to this point. Donkey Kong games are just garbage. And yet again I find myself with a score that's better than the review would indicate. Again it's mostly thanks to the soundtrack, and the fact that I did hate life a little less throughout this game than Country, for whatever that's worth. But seriously guys, if you liked the SNES game, you probably won't get a kick out of its Game Boy "sequel" - too much has changed. And if, like me, you didn't care much for the SNES original, you won't get a kick out of this game - too much is still wrong. So take this score with a grain of salt, and please...be on the lookout for bees. Those bastards hide in plain sight I tell ya.
Bottom Line: 11/20
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