Donkey Kong Land (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
429A playthrough of Nintendo's 1995 platformer for the Nintendo Game Boy, Donkey Kong Land.
Donkey Kong Land was, like many Game Boy games released in the mid 90s, something of an "adaptation" of a game released on more powerful hardware. In this case it was Rare's system-selling Donkey Kong Country for the SNES released the previous year. Unlike what we typically saw in attempts to smash cutting-edge, 16-bit console experiences onto an 8-bit monochromatic handheld, it's clear that Rare was determined to make as few compromises as possible.
Though the game reviewed well, many people at the time questioned just how much of the spirit of Donkey Kong Country could actually be retained in the move to a machine that could only display four shades of green simultaneously.
I think it is safe to say that Rare came a whole lot closer than most people expected. All things considered, it was a smashing success. People loved it. Somehow, the development team managed to imbue it with a lot of the magic that made the original so special.
The gameplay is a fair facsimile of the original Donkey Kong Country's. Some of levels are reproductions of their 16-bit equivalents, some of them are brand new levels based on the same themes and design ideas, and some were entirely original creations built specifically for Donkey Kong Land. There's enough new content here to make DKL feel like its own game rather than a rehashed sequel or a DKC "port." I tend to think of it as a spin-off that remixes several elements.
The controls feel just like the SNES game's ones, too. Donkey and Diddy still bounce between, or roll through, enemies as easily and as fluidly as before, and even a couple of the animal helper friends made the transition! The small screen and the low resolution do, however, make for a lot of blind leaps, and until you know the stages fairly well, you will die often. Thankfully the game isn't stingy with extra lives, so it generally manages to stay fun and challenging without being too frustrating. You probably will rage a few times at those unfair "oops" moments, though.
At the heart of this issue, though, lies an impossible conundrum: how does a game's most impressive, notable achievement also manage to be its greatest failing?
The graphics are a razor-sharp, double-edged sword. On a technical level they are an absolute marvel. Rare did them with the same SGI workstations that they produced Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct on, and the attention to detail is absolutely impeccable. Everything is still completely recognizable, and the smoothness of the animation is a miracle considering that it was shoehorned into a banana-yellow, 4 megabit cart. That's an eighth of the size of DKC!
Unfortunately, the graphics are also the game's worst problem. The lack of color makes it extraordinarily difficult to differentiate between the sprites and the background layer. Exacerbating this issue is the sheer amount of detail in the graphics: the game clearly demands more of the Game Boy's LCD panel than its poor response time could ever hope to handle. All too often, any sizable screen movement creates a smeary mess that obscures *everything* you need to see. Granted, it was compatible with the Super Game Boy and the SGB was clearly the optimal way to play it, but I'd wager that the great majority of people played DKL on an OG Game Boy back in 1995.
That's why I recorded the video using the DMG shader in Retroarch. The shader mimics the "dot-matrix" look extraordinarily well. Just to make sure that I was representing it accurately, I pulled out a real Game Boy and a copy of DKL to compare, and this really is how it looked. It's amazing what you can adapt to when you don't know any better, isn't it?
The music, on the other hand, is fantastic. Most of tracks are chiptune "demakes" of the original SNES tracks, and they sound superb in their PSG-driven glory - even if the title/ending theme sounds suspicioisly close to a tune out of Rare's Game Boy Beetlejuice game. I'm not complaining - David Wise is the man - but for a production of this size, it seemed like an odd corner to cut.
I could say the same for that "ending."
Overall, it'd be easy to rant and rave about its faults, but I love it, warts and all. Deeply flawed through it may have been, Donkey Kong Land was a killer experience on the Game Boy. And though DKL, like the hardware it was designed for, has aged terribly, try to imagine it from the perspective of a kid in 1995. Maybe you'll still be able to catch a glimpse of the magic at work here.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.