I've recently decided to start a playthrough of Donkey Kong Country 2 in order to try and better understand how a sizable proportion of DKC fans could ever put it above the original on SNES.
You see, I was blown away by the original DKC when it released in 1994. It was an extremely solid and inventive platformer that resurrected an underutilized IP in a big way and packaged it all together with some of the best graphics and sound of the 16-bit era. I played that game to death and can still remember every nook and cranny by heart. When DKC2 came out one year later, my initial excitement for a sequel to one of my favorite platformers dulled quickly once I got my hands on a demo unit in a local Target.
Maybe it was the absence of Donkey Kong, himself, or maybe it had something more to do with the shift in tone from the original... but for one reason or another it didn't grab me enough to where I would've asked for it that holiday season. Then years and multiple console generations went by, and on occasion I'd try out DKC2 and DKC3 via emulation to see what I had missed. Whenever I'd try DKC2, I was always left with the same impression: it just doesn't come together as well as its predecessor.
So now I am committing myself to playing through the entire game before passing final judgment on it, and as I go I am slowly starting to understand more of the game's appeal with fans of the series.
Here are some places where I feel it has improved upon the original:
So there you have it. Now my opinions could change by the time I'm finished with DKC2, but as of right now I believe I'm a little under halfway through.
I made this thread because I often seen DKC2 praised as the superior game in the original SNES trilogy on here, and I'd like to have some light shed on that as I play through the game fully for the first time. Maybe you all can shed some insight that will increase my appreciation for the game as I go.
You see, I was blown away by the original DKC when it released in 1994. It was an extremely solid and inventive platformer that resurrected an underutilized IP in a big way and packaged it all together with some of the best graphics and sound of the 16-bit era. I played that game to death and can still remember every nook and cranny by heart. When DKC2 came out one year later, my initial excitement for a sequel to one of my favorite platformers dulled quickly once I got my hands on a demo unit in a local Target.
Maybe it was the absence of Donkey Kong, himself, or maybe it had something more to do with the shift in tone from the original... but for one reason or another it didn't grab me enough to where I would've asked for it that holiday season. Then years and multiple console generations went by, and on occasion I'd try out DKC2 and DKC3 via emulation to see what I had missed. Whenever I'd try DKC2, I was always left with the same impression: it just doesn't come together as well as its predecessor.
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So now I am committing myself to playing through the entire game before passing final judgment on it, and as I go I am slowly starting to understand more of the game's appeal with fans of the series.
Here are some places where I feel it has improved upon the original:
- Difficulty: The original is very fluid, fun, and presents its fair share of challenges later on in the game, but DKC2 is a little harder on average with its level design. As a seasoned platformer veteran, I like this uptick in difficulty. Just the way a sequel should be.
- Structure: I like how DKC2 expanded on the progression structure that was already there in DKC1 in some small, but clever ways. Collecting gold coins (that mercifully respawn after deaths) that can be used toward Swanky Kong's quizzes to earn extra lives is a smart addition, as are several of the other Kong relatives or deviations that you come across on the maps.
- Boss Design: I've only fought three bosses so far in the game, but it's already clear that more thought went into designing these encounters than those from the original. The fight with the sentient pirate saber was particularly noteworthy, and I can see how this style of boss-fight design inspired Retro Studios when designing Returns and Tropical Freeze.
- Music: Yes, David Wise is a genius composer and his work on the DKC series is peerless in the genre, but for my money his presence is much more felt in DKC1. Music seems to be comparatively sparse in DKC2, both in its usage and its composition. It seems like they were focusing more on atmosphere in DKC2, mixing in ambient sound effects from the environment during lulls in the more subdued tunes. DKC1's tracks are fewer, perhaps, but they are all top-notch and put front-and-center on every level.
- Level Design: One could argue that Rare was more experimental with the level design in DKC2, and that's commendable in its own right. However I don't think that it paid off in a lot of cases, and the end-result is a game where some great levels get lost in the mix with a bunch of experimental ones that rely too much on verticality and don't allow as much for fun, fast platforming. This is all very subjective, of course, but that's my take on it.
- Graphics: I'm sure a lot of you are gonna scratch your heads over this one, but in my eyes the first game looks better on the whole. I think some of the models were imported into the game's sprite assets at a higher resolution in DKC2, but the game runs at a slightly lower framerate than the original and some of its character/enemy designs seem to lack the polish of those from the first game. I can't put my finger on what it is, but some of the enemies (and friendly animal mounts) look like the bad kind of 90's CGI, whereas the early Silicon Graphics assets in DKC1 all still look great to my eyes.
So there you have it. Now my opinions could change by the time I'm finished with DKC2, but as of right now I believe I'm a little under halfway through.
I made this thread because I often seen DKC2 praised as the superior game in the original SNES trilogy on here, and I'd like to have some light shed on that as I play through the game fully for the first time. Maybe you all can shed some insight that will increase my appreciation for the game as I go.
