Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 42, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat

Bongos or no, Jungle Beat is the pinnacle of Donkey Kong platformers, because it's much more than "just" a platformer.

I’m ranking the top 101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is one of my favorite games to talk about. It’s just such a fascinating little slice of the kinds of things I love to think about in video games: not just in its conception and execution, but in its backstory and legacy, too.

Jungle Beat is the first-ever game developed by Nintendo’s expansion studio in Tokyo, very descriptively named Nintendo Entertainment & Analysis Division Tokyo. This studio was formed in 2002 so that Nintendo could bring on board new development talent that didn’t want to work in Kyoto: Tokyo is the capital of Japan and its largest city, and it’s also about a six-hour drive from Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto, if Google Maps is to be believed. Shigeru Miyamoto, who created Donkey Kong over two decades before, wanted a new DK game in this post-Rareware world for Nintendo, and EAD Tokyo got that as their first assignment.

Now, there had been other Donkey Kong games on the GameCube, in the time since Rare, the developer of the Donkey Kong Country series and Donkey Kong 64, was sold to Microsoft. These were the Donkey Konga titles, which didn’t use a standard controller: instead, these rhythm games used the DK Bongos, which were specifically made for the Konga titles. Those DK Bongos were the key to how Jungle Beat was going to work. The entire game was based around the use of the Bongos rather than a traditional controller: Kong would slap his hands together and create sound waves that would stun enemies, which he could then latch on top of and deliver a fast-paced beating to, a beating delivered via the drums in your lap. The idea was to create a game that was much different, and simpler in some respects, than the games Rare had developed, and to do that through the use of the Bongos. EAD Tokyo certainly succeeded at their goal.

It might sound weird to play with Bongos, but it was clear when Jungle Beat released in 2004 for the GameCube that they worked with the platformer. Nintendo’s re-release of Jungle Beat on the Wii, which used the Wii Remote and Nunchuk like drumsticks in place of the Bongos, also worked exceptionally well, albeit a little more tiresome to play because of the grip and wrist movements needed in comparison to the bongo hits. Admittedly, there are games where “waggle” and motion can detract from the experience, or are outright and obviously unnecessary, gimmicky, even. The worst version of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is the Wii one, for this reason, and not just because they made my boy right-handed to make it work visually.

In Jungle Beat, though, it all fits. Kong slaps the ground to cause seeds to sprout into plants, he stuns enemies by clapping his enormous hands together, he throws punches at the speed of your rhythm. It all feels good, especially when you’ve latched onto a boss’s face and are pounding them into submission.

Image credit: Nintendo.co.uk

Do not confuse “simplified” inputs for “boring” gameplay, though. In traditional Donkey Kong platformers, you lead Kong (or a member of his family) around a level full of collectibles, with your goal being to make it to the end of the stage, and then the world, until you’ve reached and defeated the final boss. How well you do while achieving this goal isn’t really a concern to the game: if you completed the levels, you did well enough. This is pretty standard platformer stuff. In Jungle Beat, you’re not playing “just” a platformer. It’s a score-attack game, by way of a platformer. You can’t even experience all of Jungle Beat unless you achieve high enough scores in each level. It, along with Donkey Kong ‘94, is the best example in the franchise of a long-running franchise blending its arcade roots with its evolved incarnations, but even more so here, since there was so much more Kong to pull from 10 years later, and an excuse to explore arcade sensibilities that the franchise did not in the 80s, too.

Bananas aren’t there to be collected in the way you’re used to in DK games. You don’t get an extra life when you collect 100 of them: your goal is to collect as many bananas as possible so that you have a high enough score at the end of the stage to unlock crests, and enough of these crests unlocks more of the game for you, including the last stage and boss. In the Wii version of Jungle Beat, you need 200 bananas for one crests, 500 for a second, and 1,000 for the third.

It’s probably worth noting that there are not 1,000 bananas in any world in the game. This is how it all works: you play through a Kingdom, where there are three levels. The first two are “traditional” platforming stages, and the third is a boss fight. The bananas count for just one banana if you run into it, but if you’re airborne and grab it, it’s worth more, and this multiplier keeps on until you touch the ground again. So, by pressing the A button on the Wii Remote while airborne and surrounded by bananas, Kong will grab all of them in range, turning, say, six bananas into a multiple of that. The longer you can stay airborne while avoiding damage that will interrupt your combo, the more bananas you’ll come away with.

While flying through the air, you’ll also want to stun and defeat enemies to give yourself more chances to catch bananas and extend your combo, or grab onto flowers or fall into barrels that send you hurtling through the air toward more bananas, or bounce off of special wall sections that keep you from losing your combo, and so on. It’s multilayered, and takes time to fully master, but the game also helpfully gives you some hints about tactics and places where you can score big after you’ve completed the stage the first time.

Your health in the standard stages are three hearts, and if you’ve managed to keep all of them by the end of things, you get an extra 50 bananas for each heart. In the boss fight, your health is your banana supply. So you need to not only collect every banana you see in the two stages leading to the boss fight, but you need to nail the boss fight in such a way that you actually get to log a high score by the end of it. The boss fights are excellent, a cross between the dodge/punch mechanics of Punch-Out!! and traditional side-scrolling Donkey Kong platforming. You might take some bumps early on, but as you learn how bosses move and how you should move, you’ll begin to ace these bouts without taking any damage. In combination with your improved banana collection in the preceding stages, this is where you’ll see high scores, and crests, start to roll in.

There were complaints, at the time of release, that Jungle Beat was too easy, and too short. It is easy to just waltz through the game, yes, which also makes it a short experience. But it’s the quality of the game that matters more than it’s pure length, and Jungle Beat is designed so that you’re replying stages again and again, better each time out, until you’ve mastered each level’s ins and outs and combo opportunities, until you can clear it without taking damage to maximize your score. It takes just a few minutes to clear the multiple levels and boss fight of each Kingdom, something like five-to-10 depending, which makes them very easily replayable, and allows for you to recall where bananas and enemies and your past mistakes are.

Think of it like an arcade game, except it’s not trying to eat all of your quarters. It still wants you to play, and play, and play, mastering the game from top to bottom, but you just pay the $50 or whatever upfront instead of 50 cents or $1 at a time, which absolutely added up to more than $50 over time, and you know it. That’s not “too short,” it’s a design decision you didn’t like at a time when more, more, more was all anyone seemed to be able to think about with their games. The Vice City-fication of games. Which should sound pretty familiar in the present moment (the Ubisoftification of games?) considering the explosion of “everything must be open-world and also 100 hours long.” Why the h*ck was cover-shooter Gears of War 5 open-world, Microsoft? Explain yourself.

Ahem. Admittedly, as an arcade game enthusiast and the kind of shoot-em-up fan that is often thinking about whether he can hang a decade-old HD television up on the wall vertically so I can enjoy those games in an absurdly opulent version of TATE mode like God and Treasure intended, I am more open to what Jungle Beat was offering than those without that kind of arcade-y, again and again and again until you’ve done it perfectly sensibility. Still, though, if you’re going to play the $/hour game as a reviewer and critic, you need to consider how many hours the game will be played, not how many hours it takes you to see the credits the first time.

I’m still playing Donkey Kong Jungle Beat 17 years later, so I’d say I got my money’s worth and the game isn’t too short at all. I imagine I’m not alone in this. (And if I am, well, get on my level, I guess.)

As for the legacy of Jungle Beat that I alluded to: Nintendo was so impressed by the gameplay and innovations of EAD Tokyo’s first game that they were handed the reins to Mario. Not another DK-level franchise in the Nintendo-verse, but Mario. Nintendo EAD (Kyoto) developed Super Mario 64, a landmark achievement in the industry that remains beloved to this day, and Super Mario Sunshine, a game so good for weird reasons that even with its obvious flaws it remains a favorite of many: both are on this list! Despite this, they had Mario taken from them after Jungle Beat, and given to Nintendo EAD Tokyo, instead. This is where Super Mario Galaxy came from, as well as Mario Galaxy 2, and Super Mario 3D Land, and Super Mario 3D World, which in turn got us Captain Toad Treasure Tracker. All because Jungle Beat knocked it out of the park.

Now, I’m not giving Jungle Beat any kind of extra credit in the rankings because it passed some kind of internal Nintendo test that ripped Mario away from its traditional development home in Kyoto. In my best Marge Simpson voice, I just think it’s neat. If you’ve never given it a shot before, and have access to, in order of ease/cost of acquisition, a Wii, a Wii U (digitally available), or a GameCube, then you should try Jungle Beat. Don’t compare it directly to classic Kong, or the Country series, either. Jungle Beat is its own thing, where the only recognizable Kong-verse character, intentionally so, was Donkey Kong himself. It’s a completely different direction for the big ape, one he hasn’t been to since. But it’s one worth heading in, even if just the one time.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.