Donkey Kong Country 3 Game Boy Advance: Oddities

I love Donkey Kong Country 3 for the Super NES. It was Rareware's last game for the 16-bit system, and with its impressive graphics and sound, fun game play, and neat challenge, it was a wonderful swan song. It was only fitting that it was also the company's final game for a different system, the Game Boy Advance, years later. However, when it was ported to Nintendo's reliable hand held system, various changes were made that resulted in events no longer making sense and head-scratching moments at many points throughout the game. Today, I shall list the various oddities that may have come about as a result of the game being rushed, or Rare making a lazy port out of a 16-bit classic. The strange features include...

1. Sometimes when you visit Wrinkly Kong, she'll ask you to tell Cranky to stop wasting his money playing Swanky's bonus games. In the original version, you would play against him in Swanky's Sideshow for a chance to win prizes. In the remake, Cranky does not play the new variation, Swanky's Dash, at all, as he is too busy training at his dojo or giving the Kongs encouragement when they beat a boss.

2. The happy forest music plays in each forest stage...even the one where you flee from a giant saw, which makes it out of place in that scenario.

3. The team toss maneuver has Kiddy throwing Dixie a bit lower than before. At one point, you have to bounce off of an enemy just to throw Dixie onto a platform. A great inconvenience in my opinion.

4. If you beat Brash Bear's record in Riverside Race and speak to him afterward, he no longer pounds his fists in anger, but the log bridging the river on the world map still appears. Just how did Brash make it appear?

5. Barnacle Bear used to be an old, retired sailor. Here, he has become a lot younger and looks more like an admiral.

6. With Swanky's Sideshow removed from the remake, it may be tough for those who did not play the original to get the hang of throwing snowballs in order to defeat Bleak the snowman.

7. After defeating Squirt, Cranky says that they are another step closer to saving Diddy Kong. Apparently, he has forgotten that Donkey Kong has also been captured.

8. Krematoa now shares the same, happy-sounding, music as the other maps...which does not fit it at all considering it is supposed to be a world full of mysteries.

9. Bouncing off barrels in some stages now means you take damage if you leap onto them incorrectly, leading to some frustration.

10. In the sound test (enter Music on the code screen), there is a tune called Jangle Bells which turns out to be the music played in one-way stages like Demolition Drain Pipe. It should actually be called Hot Pursuit because it is the name of the music used for those stages in the original game. Jangle Bells is actually the Christmas-style song that plays in the bonus areas in the first version after typing the code word Merry. The remake has no such feature.

11. Also in the sound test, a tune called Mama Bird, which is actually nothing more than birds chirping, has the wrong title entirely. It plays at the beginning and end of the Stampede Sprint stage, and is not heard when you are talking to the Banana Bird Queen.

12. In Funky's mini games, even lightly brushing the wall can result in damage to your vehicle.

13. You are not even told the basic plot of the game until later on, as there is no opening cut scene unlike the other ports.

14. The character parade, a staple of the series, has been omitted for reasons unknown.

15. The credits play in front of Donkey Kong's tree house from the first game, though the location has nothing to do with the entire adventure.

16. The ending as a whole is very much rushed, with an all-too-fast chase and no crash heard at the end of Cranky's water-skiing stunt.

17. You can pay Bazaar Bear 13 coins to gain information about secret caves, and he will tell you that there are exactly 13 caves hidden in the entire game. That is true for the original version, but the remake actually has 14 caves: one was added to the new world of Pacifica.

18. Not really an oddity, but a bit of an annoyance: if you had enough coins to unlock more than one Lost World stage in the original, Boomer Bear would unlock 1-4 stages at once. Now, he unlocks only one stage at a time, even if you have enough coins to have him feasibly open multiple stages simultaneously.

19. Brigadier Bazooka Bear has gone from being a venerable general to a generic-looking soldier.

20. Defeating Baron K. Roolenstein in his submarine hardly seems worth the effort save for getting to see the game's ending (provided you have collected everything in the game), as you are only rewarded a single Bear coin instead of a DK coin like in the original version.

21. For unknown reasons, the stages Springin' Spiders and Barrel Shield Bust-Up have changed places.

22. It is now needlessly complicated to use Ellie's water squirt: you must hold down on the Control Pad and the R Button simultaneously to suck the water up, and Ellie does not squirt as high as she could before.

23. The mysterious music from the lake stages plays during the final ending scene...though it is a happy ending, and thus it becomes one more poorly-placed piece of music.

24. The crystal patterns in the secret caves get incredibly long later on, virtually forcing you to write them down in order to succeed.

25. If you save all of the Banana Birds before your final battle with K. Rool, the queen will ask you to visit Wrinkly in order to bring all of the birds to her. However, seeing Wrinkly will no trigger anything special until after K. Rool is defeated. In the original game, you had to beat K. Rool before saving every last bird, as you needed his DK coin to help you unlock the Gyrocopter needed to rescue a few birds.

26. Wrinkly will sometimes mention saving the game in her retreat, when you now actually save on the world map. You could save in her caves in the first version, but they have all been replaced by Cranky's Dojo.

27. In the new stage Surf's Up, there is no K and O to help you spell the word Kong...at least, none that I have ever found in any of my play throughs.

28. Sometimes, you can get shot out of a barrel and subsequently struck by an enemy off screen, which is especially annoying if said hit results in losing a life.

29. In one of the bonus stages in Kong-Fused Cliffs, you can claim a bonus coin and then fall off a cliff. Doing so changes the bonus victory music to the bonus loss music, even though you have technically won the bonus stage.

30. Since the Floodlit Fish stage is a bit brighter even before you strike a glowing fish, performing that action does not seem to be necessary.

31. Striking a Booty Bird results is a deflating sound effect, which sounds a bit odd for that creature.

32. Cranky Kong can supposedly beat the game with a 103% score in four hours. About the only way to top his score is by either sheer dumb luck or by cheating to get 105%.

33. The title screen shows the Knautilus submarine passing through the Rare and Nintendo logos. The sub was meant to be a surprise...a reward for completing all of the Lost World stages, so why did Rare decide to spoil it before the game even started?

Maybe I skipped a few oddities, but I feel that this list should give people an example of why I feel that this port of Donkey Kong Country 3 were rushed out with all due speed. What makes it even more tragic is that the ports of the first two games had more effort put into them and felt more faithful to the original versions than this game did. If Rare could make solid ports out of the first two Donkey Kong Country games, why could they not do the same thing for the final game? Were they rushing to get it out for the holiday season or before the DS overtook the Game Boy Advance as Nintendo's major hand held system? Did they run out of ideas or became lazy? Has it really gotten so bad at Rare that their declining quality is really starting to show in their work? Whatever the reason, the oddities listed above make the hand held version of Donkey Kong Country 3 inferior to the original version, and a sad end to Rare's involvement with the Game Boy Advance.