Why People Hate Donkey Kong 64

i don't know if any game in history has been received with such public and critical acclaim only for it to be hated and loathe years after its release when dk 64 released in 1999 it was applauded by critics with them praising its length number of collectibles and gameplay mechanics with ign saying this is rare's war and peace it's that simple these days when there's a conversation about dk64 it's usually about how much people hate the game and nothing else the hate has grown so strong in recent years that some developers say that dk64 is to blame for the death of the 3d platform genre as a whole and as someone who loved the game as a kid and has never replayed it as an adult i was curious to why this game received so much hate so i did a little research and ended up coming away with three main reasons it has too many collectibles the character switching mechanic pads out the game and the mini games are repeated too often now that i have my reasons i wanted to put them to the test and see once and for all if the haters were right so that's what i did join me now as i break down dk64 in each of these three categories [Music] so the first category i looked at was the two money collectibles critique i did this by counting every collectible in dk64 that counts towards 100 completion of the game i then took three other 3d platformers and did the same thing to get a sort of bass line i could compare dk624 dk6242 those three games were banjo-tooie mario 64 and mario odyssey absolute staples in the 3d platforming genre if donkey kong 64 had a comparable number of collectibles to these games then we could probably put the too many collectibles critique to rest but if it had a substantial amount more then maybe the haters were right after all so let's get into it starting first with banjo-tooie banjo-tooie has a total of eleven hundred and four collectibles 45 jinjos 18 globos 1 mega globo 25 cheeto pages 900 notes 90 jinkies and 25 extra honeycomb pieces mario 64 has a total of 1798 total collectibles 120 power stars two keys 176 red coins and 1500 regular coins there are actually 2 672 coins in the game but you only need 1500 of them to complete it mario odyssey has 2082 collectibles in the game 999 moons 1 000 purple coins 40 outfits and 43 souvenirs and finally we've come to dk 64. i hope you're ready for this donkey kong 64 has 3 500 bananas 201 golden bananas 10 battle crowns 20 banana fairies 40 blueprints 40 banana medals eight boss keys one nintendo coin and one rareware coin for a grand total of three thousand 821 total collectibles that is almost double mario odyssey's total of 2082 which is the net's closest game to dk64 donkey kong 64's 3 500 color bananas alone beat out tuis and odysseys and mario 64's total number of collectibles which honestly just blows my mind if you think the sample size here is too low and this doesn't convince you listen to this donkey kong 64 holds a spot in the guinness book of world records for the most collectibles in a 3d platformer in history yeah i think saying this game has too many collectibles is an understatement give the haters a point on this one so the next critique i looked at was the character switching mechanic if you're unaware of how this works every collectible in the game is color coded and only the kong with the same corresponding color can pick up that collectible so if there's a red banana for example only diddy can pick it up but he can't pick up any other color and with there being five different cons the player can choose from that means there's five different sets of color collectibles that each kong has to clutch separately and this leads to situations where you'll be playing as one kong and come across collectibles meant for a different con that you can't pick up so you have to go back to the character switch barrel change to the correct kong and go all the way back to where you previously were to pick up those items naturally this leads to a lot of bad tracking it makes levels feel longer than they should because you're always returning the same ground so i wanted to figure out exactly how much time is spent backtracking in a level to see if this complaint was valid or not so what i did was track the movement of each kong in a hundred percent completion run of the game's first world jungle james i did this by literally drawing each khan's path on a map of jungle james so i could keep track of where each kong had been anytime a kong would go to an area where a different kong had already been i would start a timer and time them until they entered a new area where no kong had previously entered i then added all the instances of this occurring throughout the level for each kong until i had a total time spent backtracking for jungle james it took 71 minutes to 100 jungle japes 25 minutes and 34 seconds of that 71 minutes was spent backtracking so 36 of the time spent in jungle james was dedicated solely towards backtracking 36 of the level is just going bad to areas you've already been to in fact there are only three areas in the entire level that you don't go to more than once this mining area this beehive and this lake every other area in the level you go to at least more than once and remember this is just the first world in the game some of the later worlds in donkey kong 64 get incredibly complex meaning that this bad tracking percentage would probably skyrocket in later levels like fungi forest or crystal caves so i would call character switching padding out the length of the game a valid criticism okay so the final critique we're going to look at is the mini games repeated too often for this i took a look at all 54 barrel stage minigames to see how often they were repeated if they repeated i counted how many times they did and then i ordered them from least repeated mini games to the most repeated okay so let's get into it starting with the least repeated stash snatch is only played once mad maze maul speedy swin sortie splish splash salvage and stealthy snoop are all played two times minecart mayhem minecart ride and busy barrel barrage are played three times parallel path panic teetering turtle trouble batty barrel bandit and beaver brother have to be played four times and big bug bash kremlin kosh crazy kong clamor and searchlight seek are all played five effing times i don't know if you've noticed but the only mini game not repeated was stash snatch out of 54 total mini games there is only one that is original out of the 54 mini games only 13 of them are actually different looking at this i don't think there's any doubt that the mini games are repeated too often i can see we're playing a mini-game once or twice but three or four times is just too many and speaking of too many that's another complaint about the mini games is that there's just too many of them so i already mentioned that there's 54 barrel stage mini games but what i didn't mention is that there's other mini games there are 10 hideout hell mini games 10 battle arena mini games and 7 race mini games which adds up to 81 in total and just to show you how absurd that number is i compared it to the total number of mini games in every mainline mario party game and only 3 mario parties have more mini games than donkey kong 64. donkey kong 64 has more mini games than games based around mini-game compilations that really is the story of donkey kong 64 though isn't it too much too many collectibles too much backtracking and too many mini-games but if you're a gamer that likes that sort of thing then donkey kong 624 is a dream come true and if you don't it's an absolute nightmare i can really see both sides i just hope with this video i was able to highlight exactly what makes people hate donkey kong sits you for

Channel: Press A!

Views: 129,529

Keywords:

Id: yXktcgMnVhg

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2022