DK King of Swing
Puzzle/Platformer(?)
1 Player (with multiplayer minigames)
System: Gameboy Advance
Developer: Paon
Year of Release: 2005
Beaten: November 15th, 2014
Except that one time...
DK King of Swing is an out of the blue spiritual successor to Clu Clu Land. Instead of being in a top down maze you play as Donkey Kong as he attempts to climb through various locales (the typical jungle, desert, ice, ocean and sky level tropes all rear their familiar heads) by swinging around strangely placed pegs in the sky. Instead of just moving forward you have to deal with gravity, utilizing your momentum to launch yourself higher is probably the most fun aspect of the game. There were times when I was just flying through the stages and it felt amazing. A charge attack allows DK to attack enemies and boxes which hold bananas. Bananas are the lifeblood of this game. If you hit B you can spend ten bananas to heal a single heart of damage. Pressing A spends twenty bananas and you... "Go Bananas" which let's DK move slightly faster and take out enemies by just bumping them. It's necessary a few times but I saved my bananas for healing in most cases. Instead of unveiling various pictures this time you're gathering medals for an Olympics like event known as the Jungle Jam that DK and his pals were planning until King K. Rool stole them and spread them across the land. Dick. Aside from that each level has a hidden crystal coconut, I'm not sure what purpose they serve plot-wise, but collecting them all unlocks things for you.
Gameplay works well for the most part. You use the shoulder buttons to control DK's hands and while it's mostly intuitive during the more hectic levels I would sometimes hit the wrong button which usually sent me into a pit. Luckily the game is actually fairly forgiving. You have three hearts, and upon losing them while you do have to restart the level, you keep all the bananas you had before attempting it. So if you use up too many healing you could kill yourself to get them back and try for a better run. This probably won't be too much of a concern until the last few levels though. Most levels are short, and getting the medal and crystal coconut in each level is usually a simple affair. Crystal coconuts are usually hidden in bonus barrels of the DKC variety where you're transported to a bonus room and have a set amount of time to collect all of the bananas to make a coconut appear. This can be sometimes frustrating as you only have one attempt per life, but since the levels are so short it usually doesn't take long to get back to them after quitting out of the level.
It's different to be sure, but I would describe the majority of the game as fun. There was one point that drove me to anger more severe than most games do though. The last actual level and the final boss proved to be thoroughly frustrating affairs for me. I might have just been playing badly, but attempting to get both the hidden items in the last level took me way more tries than it should have, which wasn't helped by this being the largest and most annoying level in the game. The first room has you bashing a sequence of barrels that only appear once you've hit the one before it. It sends you all around the room multiple times as cannons shoot at you. The following two rooms have lots of small pegs to grab over bottomless pits. The main problem is that I was constantly taking damage which lead me to heal myself, but the medal could only be reached if you used the Go Bananas ability but the jump you have to make was still difficult to make. This ate through bananas at an alarming rate. I ended up having to grind bananas in earlier levels until I was maxed out at three hundred.
Aside from the four normal levels per world there is a boss. These are all pretty standard featuring game mechanics freshly introduced from that world. The first you simply charge into when there's an opening, then you toss rocks at a phoenix, and feed bombs to a yeti. There's one really interesting fight against a big skeletal snake at the bottom of a lake, he charges you forcing you to avoid him then grabbing him by the tail and dragging him near a spiked wall as you rotate around a peg he repeatedly slams into the spikes, damaging him. While still a fairly simple concept I wasn't expecting it and found it quite clever. As I mentioned in the last paragraph the final fight, obviously against K. Rool, was the other of the two stages that frustrated me to no ends. DK is strong but not very fast, and the first part of the boss fight is a race. You have to activate the Go Bananas ability to win and even then you barely manage to win by a hair. Sure it's tense, but after winning you have a second phase where you actually battle K. Rool. He attacks in much the same manner as you, charging you from pegs in the room, but he's much faster about it and if you attack at the same time you both just get knocked back with no damage. So it becomes this frantic game of predicting where he will be and if you end up losing you have to deal with the race section again. After finally grinding up three hundred bananas the second phase was much easier as I could heal as much as I needed. Through sheer attrition I finally bested him.
Finally with K. Rool defeated, you take the medals back to Cranky Kong. Assuming you've collected everything you unlock a few features, most importantly Diddy mode! Yup, you have to play through the whole game again as Diddy. Horrified by this revelation, as I was coming off that potent rage, I sought out the Jungle Jam mode. Yeah that is actually a mode in the game. And it's pretty terrible. There are single and multiplayer option so you can share the pain if you're a sadist even! Basically it's twelve challenges (with three secret races you unlock through a further secret password screen.. yeah) that has you face off against three opponents. I haven't tried multiplayer mode but I managed to get the top score in each single player event which does count towards the overall percentage. The coolest part about Jungle Jam is the ability to play as other characters, like Funky, the ghost of Wrinkly, a kremling, and K Rool himself.
And so we come to Diddy mode. On the one hand this is awesome, Diddy is faster and "weaker" (I don't know what that means as he takes everything out in the same amount of hits) but being faster you can launch him further and the game goes by much quicker. On top of that there are no crystal coconuts in Diddy mode so all you have to worry about is medals. The one massive downside however is that all the bananas have been removed from the levels. Enemies and barrels still drop them sure, but just as an example of how annoying this is the level I used to grind for bananas in DK mode got me over fifty bananas a run while as Diddy at max I could get eighteen. Yeah. When I finally got to those last two levels it took a lot longer to grind out those bananas. But lo and behold our savior Diddy Kong! For the troublesome leap leading to the last medal doesn't require him to waste twenty bananas on his ability thanks to his longer jump, and I managed to finish the level perfectly in one try! And what's this? Thanks to his increased speed the race against K. Rool was a cinch and I still had enough bananas to heal up during the second phase, beating him in my first try. Suddenly one of my most loathed sections of a game was turned into child's play before my eyes. Hallelujah!
If you're familiar at all with the DK series you'll know they tend to have silly completion percentages. I don't know what it is with games going above 100% but DK is infamous for it. This title in particular having the highest percentage of a DK game I'm aware of. To achieve the complete 200% you must beat DK mode with all medals and coconuts, Diddy mode with all medals, get a gold medal on each Jungle Jam event, and a gold medal in time trials for every stage as both DK and Diddy. Yeah, this game has not only time trials, but two sets of them. I hate time trials, so I fear my file will forever be stuck at 141%. I played the first of these trials and after several attempts on the I could only achieve a silver medal, having done everything else I don't feel bad about abandoning this venture.
So aside from this being a spiritual successor why did I bother opening with that Clu Clu Land bit? After obtaining every medal in Diddy mode you actually unlock Bubbles as a playable character in Jungle Jam mode! He looks just as he did on the NES and has great stats for it. While it's really neat, Jungle Jam kind of... sucks. I honestly wish you could have used any of the playable Jungle Jam characters in the adventure mode but alas, as far as I know even achieving 200% doesn't allow this.
DK King of Swing is an interesting game, it makes no real sense why they chose DK as the series to continue the Clu Clu Land line, but I think it worked out for the better. I'm not a fan of the original Clu Clu Land honestly and this game takes the basic premise of that and incorporates new ideas that actually makes it interesting. Dealing with gravity, being able to grab and throw certain objects, or mess with switches, and the collectibles all just improves the base design exponentially. At least from my experience with both games. If you didn't care much for the gameplay in Clu Clu Land don't write off King of Swing based on that exclusively. Aside from one instance of pure frustration (which could have totally been caused by my own temporary awfulness) I really enjoyed my time with this and I'm excited to eventually try out it's sequel Jungle Climber for the DS.
No comments:
Post a Comment