They can be excellent palate cleansers after so much platforming. Auto scrolling, chase stages, mazes, rollercoasters, and minecarts… you’ll find all of that here and more. To be fair, there have been gimmick levels scattered throughout the Donkey Kong Country series. Instead of relying on the distinct abilities of the two Kongs, or the returning animal pals you can ride or transform into, level design variety seems absolutely infatuated with gimmickry. The differences between the two Kongs could’ve made for interesting level design that forced players to take advantage of the duo’s unique traits, but that’s not the direction the game takes. Dixie isn’t quite as nimble, despite being smaller, with a dash attack and a barrel grab that are both slower on the upstart, but her spinning glide gives her unparalleled maneuverability. Kiddy is heavier and when thrown his body weight can break apart floors (a sorely underutilized gimmick throughout the game’s stages) and he can also skip across water if his jumps are properly timed.
This means there’s a little more gameplay variety between the two playable characters compared to DKC2. Rather than dive right in, DKC3 requires a bit more time to get started after text and traversal.ĭixie retains her hair helicopter (hairlicopter?) ability from DKC2 while Kiddy Kong occupies the big boy gap previously inhabited by Donkey Kong himself in DKC. Dixie has to first navigate through NPCs and their dialogue, then manually navigate an overworld map, then reach the first level. Whereas the first DKC drops you straight into a level to begin the action immediately and the second DKC takes it one step back, dropping you onto a map and then onto a level, DKC3 takes further steps back from the action.
It is therefore right at the beginning of the game where notable differences already become clear. At the start of the game, Dixie is dropped into a pond and swims to shore to greet any of three NPCs: Wrinkly Kong who represents the save point, Funky Kong who offers various vehicles for maneuvering about the watery overworld, and a bear who runs a nearby shop and is part of a lineage of bears scattered across the land. The game follows Dixie Kong and her young cousin Kiddy Kong on a quest to rescue Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong from the mechanical clutches of KAOS. It turns out in Donkey Kong Country 3 that there’s a mixture. What a novel thought! So I could ask… Are there features in DKC3 that can be compared and contrasted with the first two games? Are any of these differences notable and significant enough to deserve inspection? Are there any gameplay elements that serve the overall functionality, efficiency, and playability of the game? Or the opposite: gameplay elements that fall flat, seem arbitrary, glitchy, unfair, abstruse, uninspired, or that prevent the player from engaging with the game in a more convenient, understanding, and welcoming manner? The game really exists and we can really examine it and arrive at similar or dissimilar conclusions. Rather, the game critic’s job involves trying to examine the game itself. I think we have an opportunity to rise above such discourse.
It is not my task to make assumptions about people I don’t know and have never met in order to try to explain or explain away the general consensus surrounding a game and its quality. It is the game critic’s task to critique the game. Well, as you might see, the difficulty with suggestions like these as to why people dislike a game is it makes ideological assumptions about an entire group of people, which in this case represents a massive collection of consumers so widely diverse that there’s really little connection between them beyond the simple act of purchasing a category of product.
Maybe it’s because one of the characters is a baby, and gamerz hate babiez, amirite? Not hardcore enough. Maybe it’s because gamers hate female protagonists, for instance. Note in advance that I don’t subscribe to these easy cut-and-paste solutions. It seems easy enough to answer that question if you take the route of normal social media conversation. Why is this game not held in the same high regard, generally speaking, as its two predecessors? Why do we all believe that it’s generally reviled by nearly everybody? But WHY? When I decided to replay this game, that was my one big question. While Donkey Kong Country and even more so Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest are some of my favorite games for the Super Nintendo, I lump myself in with the crowd that has never had much affection for the tertiary title in the DKC series: Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble!. “There’s an infant part in our souls which longs for the lullaby truths of life every night for a tranquil slumber.” -Munia Khan
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