Donkey Kong 64 feels like a video game you would dream about: I mean this in the most literal sense. This is not a "dream" video game in the way that people have "dream homes", this is a video game that is as surreal and nonsensical as the subconscious mind. I'm sure this sense is brought on not only by the content of the game itself, but also by the fact that I'm old enough to remember seeing the game in a store demo kiosk when I was very young, but never actually played it until now.
Donkey Kong 64 has a lot of collectables, that much is certainly true, but that doesn't get to the heart of it. In terms of gameplay, there really isn't much other than the collection itself. What are Donkey Kong 64's core mechanics? You can jump, you can shoot, you can punch, but none of these things have any style or grace; none of them are what the game is "built around". The central mechanic is "walking around and finding stuff".
Donkey Kong 64's level design is completely directionless. The hub world is oddly naturalistic, with multiple levels inside of unmarked gateways; when I collected my first golden banana after talking to K. Lumsy, I didn't even realize that the empty void behind that banana was the entrance to the first main stage. When you go through a warp and into a level, the camera's initial position is not a view of the stage from behind your character, but instead looks back at the gate you came from. The levels themselves are painfully constricted, artificial canyons and tunnels littered with objects and shops seemingly at random.
Progression is nonsensical in both structure and pretense. To progress, you need to collect both standard bananas and their giant golden counterparts; this is obviously a holdover from Banjo Kazooie, wherein the player had to collect both notes and golden jigsaw puzzle pieces to proceed to later areas of the game. In Banjo, you would collect notes to open new areas of the large non-linear hub world, and "jiggies" to enter the levels themselves. DK64's levels have a linear order, so keeping these separate collectables doesn't really meaningfully shape the progression in any way.
The pretense for why you have to do this is even more baffling: you have to collect bananas to feed to a hippo so that he becomes fat enough to weigh down a pressure plate that raises a pig into the air so that he can unlock the boss door (the key is already in the lock, he just can't reach it). When you beat the boss, you get one of several keys to the cage containing a large kremling named K. Lumsy; each time you open one of K. Lumsy's locks, he gets excited and jumps around, and the shockwave from this opens the vestibule of the next level. In order to actually enter the level proper, you need to have the sufficient amount of golden bananas to make a talking signpost get out of your way.
Controlling the characters is joyless. Character and camera control are both weirdly imprecise; nobody should be allowed to complain about Super Mario 64's camera or controls when its contemporaries got away with things like this. When talking with a friend of mine he asked if I noticed that you couldn't jump on enemies, which is interesting both because you CAN jump on most enemies (though none of the characters' jump arcs are high enough for it to feel natural), and because I hadn't even tried to do so on account of how strange the game's hitboxes immediately felt after trying a few attacks. The Beetle Race is the point where I realized this game is just flat out bad, there's no way that section of the game was play-tested, or at the very least any feedback from testing was ignored.
The aesthetic is awful. The settings are bland, the characters are ugly, the music is stupid at best and often barely even present. It is genuinely shameful that this is what followed Donkey Kong Country, and almost as bad that this game's presentation has influenced the DK games since. Why don't the kongs sound like monkeys anymore? Why do they just sound like people doing silly voices now?
The memes surrounding the DK rap are probably better than anything about the game itself.
Donkey Kong 64 has a lot of collectables, that much is certainly true, but that doesn't get to the heart of it. In terms of gameplay, there really isn't much other than the collection itself. What are Donkey Kong 64's core mechanics? You can jump, you can shoot, you can punch, but none of these things have any style or grace; none of them are what the game is "built around". The central mechanic is "walking around and finding stuff".
Donkey Kong 64's level design is completely directionless. The hub world is oddly naturalistic, with multiple levels inside of unmarked gateways; when I collected my first golden banana after talking to K. Lumsy, I didn't even realize that the empty void behind that banana was the entrance to the first main stage. When you go through a warp and into a level, the camera's initial position is not a view of the stage from behind your character, but instead looks back at the gate you came from. The levels themselves are painfully constricted, artificial canyons and tunnels littered with objects and shops seemingly at random.
Progression is nonsensical in both structure and pretense. To progress, you need to collect both standard bananas and their giant golden counterparts; this is obviously a holdover from Banjo Kazooie, wherein the player had to collect both notes and golden jigsaw puzzle pieces to proceed to later areas of the game. In Banjo, you would collect notes to open new areas of the large non-linear hub world, and "jiggies" to enter the levels themselves. DK64's levels have a linear order, so keeping these separate collectables doesn't really meaningfully shape the progression in any way.
The pretense for why you have to do this is even more baffling: you have to collect bananas to feed to a hippo so that he becomes fat enough to weigh down a pressure plate that raises a pig into the air so that he can unlock the boss door (the key is already in the lock, he just can't reach it). When you beat the boss, you get one of several keys to the cage containing a large kremling named K. Lumsy; each time you open one of K. Lumsy's locks, he gets excited and jumps around, and the shockwave from this opens the vestibule of the next level. In order to actually enter the level proper, you need to have the sufficient amount of golden bananas to make a talking signpost get out of your way.
Controlling the characters is joyless. Character and camera control are both weirdly imprecise; nobody should be allowed to complain about Super Mario 64's camera or controls when its contemporaries got away with things like this. When talking with a friend of mine he asked if I noticed that you couldn't jump on enemies, which is interesting both because you CAN jump on most enemies (though none of the characters' jump arcs are high enough for it to feel natural), and because I hadn't even tried to do so on account of how strange the game's hitboxes immediately felt after trying a few attacks. The Beetle Race is the point where I realized this game is just flat out bad, there's no way that section of the game was play-tested, or at the very least any feedback from testing was ignored.
The aesthetic is awful. The settings are bland, the characters are ugly, the music is stupid at best and often barely even present. It is genuinely shameful that this is what followed Donkey Kong Country, and almost as bad that this game's presentation has influenced the DK games since. Why don't the kongs sound like monkeys anymore? Why do they just sound like people doing silly voices now?
The memes surrounding the DK rap are probably better than anything about the game itself.