Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! (1996) [SNES]

“There’s an infant part in our souls which longs for the lullaby truths of life every night for a tranquil slumber.”

-Munia Khan

While Donkey Kong Country and even more so Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest are some of my favorite games for the Super Nintendo, I lump myself in with the crowd that has never had much affection for the tertiary title in the DKC series: Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble!. But WHY? When I decided to replay this game, that was my one big question. Why is this game not held in the same high regard, generally speaking, as its two predecessors? Why do we all believe that it’s generally reviled by nearly everybody?

It seems easy enough to answer that question if you take the route of normal social media conversation. Note in advance that I don’t subscribe to these easy cut-and-paste solutions. Maybe it’s because gamers hate female protagonists, for instance. Maybe it’s because one of the characters is a baby, and gamerz hate babiez, amirite? Not hardcore enough. Well, as you might see, the difficulty with suggestions like these as to why people dislike a game is it makes ideological assumptions about an entire group of people, which in this case represents a massive collection of consumers so widely diverse that there’s really little connection between them beyond the simple act of purchasing a category of product.

Groupthink

It is the game critic’s task to critique the game. It is not my task to make assumptions about people I don’t know and have never met in order to try to explain or explain away the general consensus surrounding a game and its quality. I think we have an opportunity to rise above such discourse. Rather, the game critic’s job involves trying to examine the game itself. The game really exists and we can really examine it and arrive at similar or dissimilar conclusions. What a novel thought! So I could ask… Are there features in DKC3 that can be compared and contrasted with the first two games? Are any of these differences notable and significant enough to deserve inspection? Are there any gameplay elements that serve the overall functionality, efficiency, and playability of the game? Or the opposite: gameplay elements that fall flat, seem arbitrary, glitchy, unfair, abstruse, uninspired, or that prevent the player from engaging with the game in a more convenient, understanding, and welcoming manner?

It turns out in Donkey Kong Country 3 that there’s a mixture.

Revenge of the Baby-Sat

The game follows Dixie Kong and her young cousin Kiddy Kong on a quest to rescue Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong from the mechanical clutches of KAOS. At the start of the game, Dixie is dropped into a pond and swims to shore to greet any of three NPCs: Wrinkly Kong who represents the save point, Funky Kong who offers various vehicles for maneuvering about the watery overworld, and a bear who runs a nearby shop and is part of a lineage of bears scattered across the land. It is therefore right at the beginning of the game where notable differences already become clear. Whereas the first DKC drops you straight into a level to begin the action immediately and the second DKC takes it one step back, dropping you onto a map and then onto a level, DKC3 takes further steps back from the action. Dixie has to first navigate through NPCs and their dialogue, then manually navigate an overworld map, then reach the first level. Rather than dive right in, DKC3 requires a bit more time to get started after text and traversal.

Dixie retains her hair helicopter (hairlicopter?) ability from DKC2 while Kiddy Kong occupies the big boy gap previously inhabited by Donkey Kong himself in DKC. This means there’s a little more gameplay variety between the two playable characters compared to DKC2. Kiddy is heavier and when thrown his body weight can break apart floors (a sorely underutilized gimmick throughout the game’s stages) and he can also skip across water if his jumps are properly timed. Dixie isn’t quite as nimble, despite being smaller, with a dash attack and a barrel grab that are both slower on the upstart, but her spinning glide gives her unparalleled maneuverability. The differences between the two Kongs could’ve made for interesting level design that forced players to take advantage of the duo’s unique traits, but that’s not the direction the game takes.

Tricks and gimmicks

Instead of relying on the distinct abilities of the two Kongs, or the returning animal pals you can ride or transform into, level design variety seems absolutely infatuated with gimmickry. To be fair, there have been gimmick levels scattered throughout the Donkey Kong Country series. Auto scrolling, chase stages, mazes, rollercoasters, and minecarts… you’ll find all of that here and more. They can be excellent palate cleansers after so much platforming. However, the issue that arises in DKC3 is it puts less demand on your platforming skills and the Kong’s differences than it does on forcing you to adapt to some new gimmick it throws your way once, never to be seen again. Inverted controls while swimming. Being chased by a bazooka firing from the foreground. Ghost barrels phasing in and out. Conveyor belt ropes. Being pushed off of cliffs by bulldozer enemies. It’s a game comprised of palate cleansers.

And not all gimmicks are created equal. I thought the wood saw pursuing you upward in an auto-scroll stage through trees was not just a clever idea but also a tense and thereby enjoyable experience that demanded you get those jumps right. Then there’s a flying rocket level with bizarre controls. While individual gimmicks can be hit or miss, I think it’s the number of them and the fact that you don’t encounter many of them again which makes the overall experience seem like the actual platforming gameplay is overshadowed. Other platformers manage to combine earlier gimmicks into later levels for interesting challenges. Here, there are some very transparent stages, ones entirely dominated by a single “hey I have an idea: what if we had a level where lightning bolts rain down?”.

An overworld of difference

Overworld map secrets and coin collection further distract from a core element of tight, precise, stand-out platforming that Nintendo games were typically known for. The overworld contains several hidden stages and mini-games to access, as well as bear NPCs to visit to complete item acquisition puzzles. The latter will involve a serious amount of backtracking and a surprising lack of relevancy when it comes to the silver coins you can collect. Gold bonus coins unlock stages in the game’s secret lost world but silver coins? I beat the game and maxed out the completion percentage and only made less than half a handful of purchases with the silver coins, a mirror being the most expensive item. I think that what might’ve been a good idea had it been developed, this concept of trading items back and forth between NPCs, ends up being somewhat tedious and thus not very interesting. But you’ll need to complete these trading side quests if you want to unlock the “good ending” and collect all the banana birds.

DKC3 is not a bad game. It’s not even below average. Not in the least. It just has many distracting or downright out-of-place ideas, too many gimmicks, and too little reliance upon developing platforming skills in the player based on the differences between the playable characters. With so many ideas in its levels, so many are simply half-baked or underutilized. In the realm of Donkey Kong Country where the two other games on the SNES are held in such high esteem, DKC3 doesn’t quite seem tall enough to ride. It’s far from the worst Super Nintendo platformer but it’s not surprising that some consider it to be the weakest of the 16-bit DKC trilogy.

The 8-bit Review

Visuals: 9/10

Since DKC3 looks so similar to its two prequels, it’s difficult to measure any real difference in the graphics. I did note the presence of a lot more pink, purple, and blue, but the color palette seems suitable for the game’s characters. The overworld is lovingly rendered with many little details and the large boss fights are the centerpieces you want them to be.

 Audio: 8/10

There was a shift in composing duties between DKC2 and DKC3. David Wise returns to give the game the musical oomph that it needs, though he evidently did less work on this soundtrack than in the previous game. Here, the student overtook the teacher with Eveline Fischer producing the majority of the music. “Water World” can’t reach the same ambient profundity as “Aquatic Ambience” and there’s nothing in the track as good as “Bramble Scramble”, but DKC3 still shows up with some truly excellent tracks. “Hot Pursuit”, “Nuts N’ Bolts”, and especially “Rockface Rumble” (that percussion!) are among my favorite due to their ability to ramp up my energy whenever they played, further welcoming me into the world of the game. Tracks like those do exactly what they’re meant to do. And don’t forget that N64 cameo accompanied by a remix of the Super Mario 64 castle theme called “Wrinkly 64”.

 Gameplay: 7/10

At base, DKC3 is everything you’ve already played in the other SNES DKC games. And that’s good. Beyond that, it’s superficially littered with misspent ideas. There’s no real balance between the attention its gimmickry gets, all the variety lavished on this game’s stages, and any core platforming element. There are simply too many new ideas too quickly, so rather than feeling innovative, it can simply feel flat. Fewer ideas or gimmicks that could’ve been better developed would have been an excellent design choice, in my view.

 Challenge: 7/10

With all three DKC SNES games in mind, I still consider the first game to be the hardest. Those darn mine cart stages. I’m more than happy that DKC3 does not possess such barriers so early on. Many of its later stages can be pretty tricky. Due to the number of “gotcha!” moments the game attempts to impress you with, the difficulty kind of seems to be all over the place. There is a secret hard mode with no continues or DK barrels, if you’d like more challenge.

 Accessibility: 6/10

Yet another element affected by the overreliance on underdeveloped gimmicks is accessibility. Given its historical context, it should come as no surprise that there are no tutorials explaining what each new stunt or ploy being thrown at you means. You simply have to figure it out on the spot and this plays out through the entire game. This will mean some frustrating deaths as not all of these inscrutables provide adequate space for exploration.

 Replayability: 8/10

With dozens of secrets, trading side quests, three types of currency to collect (silver, bonus, and DK coins), and multiple vehicles to explore the overworld with, plus a final secret area, there’s quite a lot of replayability to reach that 103% completion. Hard mode awaits.

 Uniqueness: 5/10

It’s tough to say whether DKC3 is truly unique. I’ve spent a lot of this critique identifying differences between it and its predecessors, but simultaneously, it’s essentially familiar, despite the many squandered ideas on display. I decided to go right down the middle for this score. It’s the third game in a trilogy so it had to try something new, but I’m just not sure how successful its ideas really are.

 Personal: 6/10

Aside from a few specific stages, I didn’t quite feel the thrill of adrenaline when playing through Donkey Kong Country 3 as I did with the previous games. Beyond that, what I initially thought was a game I’d never completed before turned out to be one I had, but I only remembered that when I reached the final boss, Baron K. Roolenstein. Sure, that could be reflective of my own senility–despite the fact that I can remember quotes from 30-year-old commercials verbatim–or it could be reflective of a game and a series that had reached the end of its creativity and innovation, become the antithesis of memorable, a formula which had grown stale and needed to take a break for the time being. While it was followed up by a generational leap in Donkey Kong 64, it would be more than a decade after that before another DK Country title hit the shelves. Maybe that’s just indicative.

Aggregated Score: 7.0

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.