Nintendo’s ‘Donkey Kong’ Games, Ranked from Worst to Best

Look, education is important. Often, the best way to get kids to take their studies seriously is with a spoonful of sugar. Animation and video games have long been Trojan horses for schooling, and 1983’s Donkey Kong Jr. Math is an earnest attempt at making arithmetic engaging. It’d just be more effective if the game itself were actually fun.

A spin-off of 1982’s Donkey Kong Jr., the edutainment platformer looks a lot like its inspiration, featuring DK Jr. swinging from vines patched with numerals with daddy DK standing overhead like an angry schoolteacher. The gameplay asks kids to find the correct equation that leads to the answer above, but rather than using a pad and pencil, the methodology involves painstakingly moving the ape vine to vine to select each number, then the operation, etc. It’s an exhaustingly slow way to do mathematics and ended up being Nintendo’s sole edutainment release for the NES in North America, for good reason.

Nintendo’s no stranger to making exceptional racing games, with both the casual-aimed Mario Kart series and more hardcore F-Zero (R.I.P.) setting the standard for their respective lanes throughout their iterations. But for some reason, when it came time for Donkey Kong himself to headline his own speedy racer, the developers really phoned it in.

Originally intended to utilize the DK Bongos peripheral (a GameCube controller literally shaped like bongos) to steer the characters, a late-stage decision was made to shift the game to the Wii, forcing the design to emphasize motion controls instead. With a basic gamepad, it’d just be mediocre Mario Kart, but by forcing players to physically shake the Wiimote and Nunchuck controllers, Barrel Blast ends up going from being boring to a downright chore.

As a handheld game, King of Swing makes for a serviceably good time in spurts. Lifting the basic puzzle-platforming mechanics of the NES game Clu Clu Land, it has players controlling DK as he grips and whiles in little circles from aerial pegs to gain momentum and catch bananas.

That’s really it, there’s no deeper layer to it. While early Donkey Kong games weren’t exactly expeditious in their movement, the snaillike pace at which this Game Boy Advance title’s version of DK moves can quickly grow exhausting. At its best, it can be a pensive sort of distraction that a modern mobile game might provide, but compared to the much more complex offerings of the GBA all-star library, it’s mostly a bust.

The Nintendo DS sequel to King of Swing fares better than its predecessor, despite retaining a similarly sluggish pace. Investing slightly more in its in-game narrative, the story sees the DK crew taking a vacation before running afoul of their nemesis King K. Rool, demanding that the Kong clan swing from little pegs to stop the baddies from stealing crystal bananas.

Utilizing the DS’ dual screens, Jungle Climber has the illusion of greater verticality, even though the bulk of the action still takes place on the bottom display. With some new moves, increased action, and an aesthetic overhaul to better match the iconic Donkey Kong Country series than the more cartoonish design of the previous game, the sequel is an improvement overall — although its lack of touchscreen support for new mechanics is a headscratcher. Even more than the first game, Jungle Climber makes a good case for a modern DK smartphone game.

Developed by Nintendo EAD Tokyo prior to their work on Super Mario Galaxy, Jungle Beat arrived just a few years before the Wii but foreshadowed its general design philosophy of taking what would otherwise be a very solid game and hindering it with gimmicky controls. In this instance, it meant making a brand-new Donkey Kong side-scroller (years ahead of the franchise’s true return to form in 2010) with stunning audiovisual design and lackluster gameplay.

Using the DK Bongos, originally created for the rhythm game Donkey Konga a year prior, Jungle Beat is a streamlined take on the Donkey Kong Country formula where slapping the drum kit in different ways makes the character move and attack. Due to its minimalist design, it lacks the depth of a true platformer, instead serving as an easy-to-play score attack game that never really capitalizes on its genre or mechanical schtick.

Finally, a real use for the DK Bongos — or rather, their intended use. Developed by the same internal team at Namco responsible for the Taiko no Tatsujin series (A.K.A. that drum game seen in every Japanese arcade this side of Lost of Translation), the Donkey Konga games took the inherent musicality of the franchise and made it a tangible part of the gameplay.

A full two years before Guitar Hero took over college dorms everywhere, Donkey Konga let players haphazardly slap along to covers of tracks like “Rock Lobster” and “Losing My Religion,” as well as classic Nintendo compositions from franchises like Mario and Zelda. Despite diminishing returns leaving the third game as a Japanese-only release, the Donkey Konga games were a genuinely fun spin-off for Nintendo, and an idea that hasn’t really been touched upon since.

As a whole, the Donkey Kong Land games serve as a pint-sized adaptation of the classic Super Nintendo Country series, trimmed down and remixed to match the capabilities of the OG Game Boy. After two exceptional entries based on the first two DKC games, Donkey Kong Land III found itself with the short end of the stick, working from the blueprint of the weakest title in its big brother’s series.

But even the worst Donkey Kong Land game is still an exceptional platformer when it comes to Game Boy standards. Essentially using all the same design principles of the previous game, it’s a fluid, tightly controlling action game that centers on side characters Dixie and Diddy Kong on a quest to discover the Lost World (meaning neither DK nor his sidekick Diddy are playable). The game suffers from many of the same issues as its predecessors, with an overly ambitious attempt to recreate the aesthetic of the SNES games ending up a muddied mess on the handheld’s grayscale screen. But while those games overcome the their weaknesses with excellent level design and music, the third entry falls just short.

It can’t be overstated just how impactful the original Donkey Kong came is. The 1981 arcade game was a Hail Mary play: designed to make use of excess arcade cabinets after a previous product’s failure, created by a first timer named Shigeru Miyamoto, and blatantly ripping off a plethora of well-known media. It could’ve easily been a disaster; instead, it put Nintendo on the map and changed the trajectory of digital gaming forever.

The first Donkey Kong famously paints the titular character as the villain, with players taking on the role of Mario (then called Jumpman) to jump and hammer-smash their way through four levels, avoiding perils and outsmarting the CPU to rescue a kidnapped Pauline. As one of the most famous games of all time, Donkey Kong cabinets remain highly valued for collectors, but even playing virtual ports of it today, it also holds up well. Elegantly designed to be easily readable and, most of all, fair, it maintains a retro feel without ever feeling dated in a derogatory way.

In gaming, as it often is with cinema, the curse of the threequel can loom large. Such is the case of Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble, a generally great video game that just happened to follow back-to-back all-timers with the first two Donkey Kong Country games. On paper, it has a lot going for it, namely its then-cutting-edge visuals that are among the best produced for the SNES. It also plays exceptionally well, mainly lifting all its core controls and design from its direct predecessor.

But alas, it just doesn’t have the sauce to stand up to the DKC duology. Like DKC 2, Double Trouble doesn’t actually star Donkey Kong, but it also sidelines Diddy in favor of his girlfriend Dixie and her baby cousin, Kiddy Kong. Playing as the pair has its moments, as both control vastly different — leaning more heavily into their dichotomy than DK and Diddy did in the original Country game. But despite its pretty aesthetic, the game’s music is forgettable, and the new ideas introduced in its level design end up amounting to excessive backtracking and busywork to hit switches or defeat overly complicated enemies. Despite having a more childish look for its characters and story, the game is ultimately more difficult in a cheap way than any kid would want to deal with.

When you think about what a Game Boy screen should look like, odds are there’s a very simple series of geometric shapes in mind. Maybe it’s the blocks of Tetris or the simple pixels of Super Mario Land, black and green all bleeding together to produce a workable facsimile of a video game. 1995’s Donkey Kong Land proved that the brick-like handheld actually had the juice for something more — in the right hands.

A streamlined adaptation of SNES’ Donkey Kong Country, DK Land pulled every trick in the book to translate that game’s stunning pre-rendered graphics for a substantially less powerful platform, resulting in rich character animations and lively environments that demolished its Super Mario Land equivalents in visual splendor. The game also controls tightly, mirroring its home console counterpart in overall feel, and never feels like an inferior version cobbled together to make it on-the-go. Donkey Kong Land remains a technical marvel, and a seriously undervalued entry in the Game Boy lineup that plays better today than most of the titles people tend to remember being great at the time.

Building on all the things that made the first Donkey Kong Land great, the sequel picks up the torch for a faster, better designed slice of portable gaming perfection. Adapting Diddy Kong’s Quest, it follows DK’s sidekick and his girlfriend Dixie on a journey to save the big guy from their collective nemesis, King K. Rool.

Like its SNES counterpart, DK Land 2 plays more swiftly and agile than its predecessor, primarily due to the omission of Donkey Kong himself. The levels are inspired by the main game, but reworked to suit the smaller pixel count and more diminutive dimensions of the Game Boy screen. But with clever stage design that utilizes greater verticality and backtracking, the game makes the most of its limitations to make for a blistering adventure that rarely feels cheap in its perils. It’s rare today to pick up a classic Game Boy game and feel totally enamored for reasons other than nostalgia, but Donkey Kong Land 2 plays as well as anything made today, and is one of the best games made for the original Nintendo handheld.

There’s a really fun twist in 1994’s Game Boy iteration of Donkey Kong where the player, controlling a vastly more agile Mario than the arcade version, handily speeds through the original game’s four levels to topple DK — only to have the ape snatch up Pauline and take off. The damsel is now in another castle. It’s a familiar bait-and-switch, one that Bowser’s done ad nauseam with Princess Peach, but it’s a cheeky setup for the fact that this new take on Donkey Kong has some new tricks up its sleeve 13 years later.

Turns out, the entirety of the OG DK is just the introduction, showcasing how much Mario has improved since his overhaul in 1985’s Super Mario Bros. What follows is an entirely different game, a puzzle-platformer partially inspired by 1988’s black sheep Super Mario Bros. 2, that sees Mario searching for keys and tossing items at enemies to find his way to the finish. It’s a great reimagining of what Donkey Kong could be and would live on as inspiration for the similarly designed Mario vs. Donkey Kong series that would become a Nintendo handheld staple a decade later.

Depending on who you ask, Donkey Kong’s first foray into 3D is either a masterpiece or is responsible for the downfall of the entire mascot platformer genre. The truth is neither, but it’s certainly not perfect. The final DK game to be developed by British studio Rare (who successfully rebooted the series with the Donkey Kong Country trilogy), DK64 suffered from the weight of high expectations. Post-DKC, Rare had released Banjo-Kazooie, a game that arguably set the gold standard for how 3D platformers should play — even more so than Super Mario 64 — so shouldn’t Donkey Kong’s game have done the same?

On its own merits, Donkey Kong 64 is still a great game. Starring a whole slew of new DK Crew members, including Kongs named Chunky, Tiny, and Lanky, it continued fleshing out the series’ mythos with ridiculous characters, making them all playable for stints of time. It was also one of the first games to require an add-on Expansion Pack, a memory-boosting peripheral that upgraded the N64’s graphics. While it’s not the best in its respective genre, DK64 successfully proved the franchise could work in three dimensions — knowledge Nintendo would sit on for the next 26 years until Donkey Kong Bananza.

Back in the Wild West days of gaming circa the 1980s, development was a fast and loose process. Once a game hit, a sequel was churned out in less than a year, frequently just using assets from whatever other project wasn’t working. The result were franchises where every entry felt like an entirely new experience, almost completely unrelated save for some minor throughlines.

That’s Donkey Kong 3 in a nutshell. Whereas both DK and DK Jr. were puzzle platformers, the third game is a shoot ‘em up starring a gardener named Stanley who must blast bug spray upward to keep the menacing ape from dropping insets, snakes, and more from ruining his garden. Frankly, that’s all the setup needed; DK3 plays unlike anything else in the series but is an exceptionally well-designed arcade experience that’s snappy to play and instantly captivating.

The first big shakeup for the Donkey Kong franchise came with just the second release; using an old switcheroo, it’s DK himself who has now been kidnapped by Mario (in a rare antagonistic portrayal), and its up to DK’s son Junior to save the day. Outside of forever breaking the tenuous lore of the games by introducing the concept of multiple generations of Kong, DK Jr. is most famous for changing up the original game’s formula (and ultimately surpassing it) in much the same way Ms. Pac-Man did to its predecessor that same year.

Rather than ascending an urban construction site as a human, DK Jr. lets players control the baby ape, swinging between vines and dodging hazards to climb to the top of each stage. At first glance, it’s not quite as intuitive as its forebearer; poor jumps can lead to quick deaths, and the vine-to-vine transitions require some thought. Once it clicks, however, DK Jr. is easily the best of the original slate of arcade games.

One of the funny things about Donkey Kong is that, outside of the original arcade games, all his best games came not from Nintendo, but from second-party developers like Rare or subsidiaries like Retro Studios. After successfully revitalizing the Metroid series with the hugely acclaimed Prime trilogy, the Texas-based company turned its sights on the Donkey Kong franchise, which had been limping along on the sidelines for a decade.

Visually, it looks a lot like the DK Bongos boondoggle Jungle Beat, albeit with more cartoony and expressive animations; but gameplaywise, DKC Returns is a wondrous evolution of the Country formula that hits all the right nostalgia notes — from the music to level design — while layering in tons of new abilities and mobility. It’s also hard as fuck, a true testament to throwback era of platforming games that directly inspired it.

After the financial disappointment of DK3, Nintendo shelved the Donkey Kong games for over 10 years; the franchise was in dire need of a facelift. That’s where British studio Rare came in. Infusing the series with almost all its modern attributes — from a third-generation DK donning a red tie, the introduction of sidekicks like Diddy, and a vibrant jungle aesthetic brought to life with moody melodies — Donkey Kong Country is a definitive milestone for the brand.

It’s almost insane how much bigger and better DKC is compared to most other side-scrolling platformers of the era. Utilizing pre-rendered 3D models rather than simple pixelated sprites, its backdrops are densely populated and filled with complex lighting and weather effects. The characters themselves are lively in motion, fluidly moving and reacting (the little high-fives between DK and Diddy remain a delight). And although it was inspired by 2D Mario games, it plays very differently and stands in toe with all-time classics like Super Mario World.

While Donkey Kong was busy rubbing elbows and riding karts with Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom cast, it was his buddy Diddy who ended up headlining the series’ first big racing game. Rather than the big ape, Diddy Kong Racing stars the smaller simian and a host of new characters — including the first appearances of Rare creations the goofy bear Banjo and naughty squirrel Conker, who would go on to lead their own 3D platformers for the N64.

With only a sidekick leading the charge, DKR could’ve easily been a moot spin-off, but its legacy far outweighs the premise. The game differentiated itself from Mario Kart by allowing players to choose between karts, planes, and hovercrafts — meaning that each course played wildly differently as the vehicles’ individual physics and controls changed by selection. It also featured a fully explorable world comprised of different sub-areas, each filled with secrets and collectibles. In some ways, it was more like a hybrid of 3D platformer and racer, where discovery shined just as much as hitting the finish line. It’s a concept later lifted by Sony for their own kart racer Crash Team Racing (1999), and features ideas that Nintendo itself wouldn’t even implement until over a quarter-century later with this year’s Mario Kart World.

The follow-up to Retro’s revival of the Donkey Kong Country sub-series does everything a great sequel should do. It’s prettier, plays better, and moves away from the slavish nostalgia of its predecessor to craft its own tone. Bringing back more of the DK crew as assist characters for DK, Tropical Freeze lets players pair up with mainstays like Diddy, Dixie, and Cranky — each with their own attributes that can affect how DK can traverse — to create a greater sense of variety within each stage.

Most importantly, it’s just a great side-scrolling platformer. During the 2010s, a down period for the Mario franchise where mid-tier titles like New Super Mario Bros. were recycling ideas without much innovation, Tropical Freeze exemplified everything that made a truly great Nintendo game. Brimming with creativity and surprising level design, it’s a high watermark for what a modern 2D platformer can be. Unfortunately, rather than capitalize on its successes, Nintendo opted to once again put DK on ice following what should’ve been a springboard moment.

It’s safe to say that nobody saw Donkey Kong Bananza coming. After another 10-year stint in IP prison following Tropical Freeze, DK had once again moved to the margins as a supporting player in handheld titles and crossover party games. For the launch of Nintendo’s next-gen console, Switch 2, many fans had assumed they’d see another 3D Mario waving the welcome banner. Instead, DK rose to the occasion, arriving with not just one of the best games in his history, but one of the best 3D action games of the modern era.

While Nintendo had seemingly ceded the mascot game to PlayStation’s Astro Bot just last year, Bananza shows that the Japanese company still has some fight in them. Developed by the same team that produced Super Mario Odyssey, it’s a maximalist and often surreal action adventure where players have the freedom to explore by way of destruction. Using DK’s fists (an oddly underutilized tool, looking back), the game emphasizes a tactile style where punching anything and everything is the way forward to discovering secrets and solving puzzles. While other games of its ilk might focus more on the cerebral satisfaction of brainily solving the best route forward, Bananza throws contemplation out the window in favor of a punch-first, ask-questions-never philosophy that evokes the perpetual endorphin high of smashing shit in a rage room, all wrapped in soft candy-coated package.

It might sound sacrilegious to say that the best Donkey Kong game is one where you never even control the titular ape, but throughout the series’ history, it’s clear that many of its highlights only require the DK vibe rather than centering on the character himself. Donkey Kong Country 2 pulls the well-worn change-up the franchise is known for, once again making DK himself the one to rescue while players control his Diddy and Dixie.

While the first DKC built a tag-team dichotomy between DK’s brutish strength and Diddy’s speed, the sequel makes their boons more subtle. Diddy is faster, but Dixie has a better jump and can use her ponytail to helicopter hover. While it might seem redundant, it actually makes for a much more urgent style of gameplay. The level design is even stronger than the already masterclass stages of the first game, and the evolution of the visual style delivers some of the most gorgeous 2D visuals ever put in a game. Its music goes harder, leaning into eerie moods and synthy spaces that build on and evolve the musicality of the series. A side-by-side comparison of DKC 2 to almost any 2D side-scroller of the last 25 years will show just how much the shift to 2D or 2.5D hybrid aesthetics lost the recipe for many arresting visuals with a rich palette.

Diddy Kong’s Quest is an all-time high for the Nintendo franchise, and should be studied by big name studios and indies alike in how best to bring the magic back to 2D gaming.