I’m routinely surprised when looking back at the games of the original Gameboy. While there are some basic games, yes there are many examples where you see just how amazing the game developers were, what they were able to pull off. This fact is even more astounding when you take into account the limitations of the hardware. So it’s time yet again to look at the frankly amazing job some of these people did translating a SNES game to the hardware.
Donkey Kong Land sets a clear challenge, can it recreate the gameplay, fun and experience of Donkey Kong Country ( Sgathaich: Donkey Kong Country 2 )but on an 8 bit handheld mono colour system? Well happy to say the answer is yes, but it’s not a one to one or even a toned down version of DKC. Donkey Kong Land does a fair few things differently, and I don’t mean simplifying levels.
One of the first differences I note which relates to a big complaint I had about Donkey Kong Country is the bosses. With that game the bosses were just big versions of enemies (or even a barrel) until you got to the last boss. Now while there are only 4 bosses, only the last one is the same as his console equivalent. While the first boss is more a wave of enemies, the next two are different from regular enemies, especially the 3rd. Yes, no giant jumping gopher here.
Another thing unique to this game is that some of the new biomes/level concepts are things that did not appear in Country. As well as the rare Sky Level with clouds and moving platforms there are Modern City Levels of which the final world that’s the main theme. It’s worth noting that there are some level concepts that presumably due to limitations couldn’t be used, they do a good job of replacing them with different things.
That’s not to say there aren’t some negative changes. While in Country you could save as often as you like as long as you have access to Candy’s save point, in Land you have to find all 4 KONG letters in a level to successfully save. This for me back in the day meant after beating a hard level I would go all the way back to a level I knew where all the letters were just to have security while progressing. This isn’t too much of a problem if you’re using the Switch Gameboy player and save states, but if going for a 100 percent faithful recreation, you will get frustrated by that detail.
It’s very impressive how much Donkey Kong Land archives for a Gameboy game, recreating the feel of what then was one of the most graphically impressive SNES games. If you’re good, or played it before it wont take too long to complete, but then that can be said about basically every non rpg Gameboy game. In fact outside of that save problem I am hard pressed to find a negative about it.
Rating: 🎮🎮🎮🎮
