Donkey Kong 64 was one of the several noteworthy games that remained in my backlog for over 10 years. Because of that, I would say this game and a handful of others that I have and haven't reviewed yet were all a part of the key reason I made my Backloggd account. In my previous playthrough, I made it all the way up to the final world in K. Rool's lair where you were the amount of time you had to beat it depended on the amount of blueprints you collected. By the time I wanted to tackle it, I somehow forgot how to do all of the kongs' moves. Ultimately, it lead to me dropping the game. I did try to start over from scratch a few times, but I never was able to commit until I decided to beat it this year. I enjoyed it, but compared to Rare's other collect-a-thons, this one probably has the most issues.

It plays like all of Rare's other platformers where your purpose in playing is to collect a plethora of different items spread across 8 different worlds, but some of the collectibles have slightly different functions compared to Banjo-Kazooie. The golden bananas are just like your jiggys or stars, but the different colored bananas scattered around the level serve as a means to access the boss for each world which also plays a necessary role in getting to the next world alongside the golden bananas since you get a key for defeating each boss. It all sounds pretty simple, but the problem is that you aren't just playing as one character like Mario or Banjo. In Donkey Kong 64, you play 5 different characters including DK, Diddy, Tiny, Lanky, and Chunky Kong. In most cases, it's pretty cool to have a roster that big in a platformer. However, the approach Rare took in adding more characters is what is this game's biggest flaw, bloat.

Each and every kong have their own colored bananas to collect and objectives to do. The placement of a lot of where these collectibles are located will lead to a copious amount of backtracking. Another big issue that also amplifies the backtracking problem is that most of the worlds are just too big. It's fairly easy to get lost and even with teleportation pads, getting to some locations can still be rather time-consuming. Speaking of time-consuming, getting 100% in this game requires double the amount of golden bananas needed to regularly beat the game. Given how much you have to backtrack for the colored bananas and numerous golden bananas I would never do it since I'm not a madman. I salute those bold enough to 100% this game.

Personally, I still enjoyed the game a lot despite it being very flawed and straight-up inferior in comparison to Rare's other platformers. Their ambitions with this title were pretty expansive, but ultimately they bit off a little more than they could chew in some areas. If you're a diehard collect-a-thon fan and willing to put up with the repetitive parts of the game I'd still recommend it. If DK64 seems like too much, then I'd stick to something shorter and better-paced like Banjo-Kazooie.

this is it

the best collectathon platformer

doesn't get any better than this