DK Bananza’s DLC Isn’t Great
[Music] Donkey Kong Bonanza was easily one of my favorite games of the year thus far. So, I was really, really excited to see that Donkey Kong Bonanza was getting DLC, especially being DK Island, cuz I was pretty disappointed that you couldn’t go to DK Island after you beat the game. If you saw our reaction to it, you know that I was pretty excited for this. After I wrapped up work that night, I bought the DLC and I started playing. And I don’t really know how I feel. DK Island is fun to explore. The fact that you can go there, that it has the same music from Donkey Kong 64, it’s cool, but I couldn’t help but notice that you don’t really do anything here. It’s just a playground. And that’s fine, I guess, but I was hoping that there would be some benandium gems to find, some boss fights to be had, just just a few objectives to actually do here on the level itself. There are six bonus stages hidden throughout the stage. So, if you want to get some extra gold, this is a good way to do it. But after running around for a bit, I just kind of ran out of reasons to explore, and that was pretty disappointing to me. DK Island is a great addition. I just wish that it had come with some kind of actual content to play. Yes, we have Emerald Rush, and we’ll get to that, but I wanted something that was exclusive to this level that you would do here, similar to the content from the main game that you would do here on DK Island. And there’s there’s just not anything here really. You can spend 100 chips in order to get a statue to play around with on the island. You can take pictures with Rambi, Diddy, Cranky, and Dixie. And that’s cute, but there still isn’t a ton going on. There is a cryptic puzzle up here with this banana-shaped fractton, which I thought was pretty neat, but overall still a bit underwhelming. Okay, you can stop screaming in the comments. I know we want to talk about Emerald Rush, which on its own is actually pretty cool. The first time you play Emerald Rush will be here on DK Island. So, you could make the argument that the stage is the introduction to this new gameplay mechanic. And sure, I guess that’s fine. But yeah, it still leaves a rotten banana taste in my mouth. Anyway, Void Kong is here. He hires you to join his company, which has now changed goals. Rather than collecting gold, he’s all about collecting emeralds. And the way you do that is actually pretty neat. You’ll have 90 seconds to explore the stage and collect emerald. Anything that was previously gold in the stage before is now emerald green. The catch is that DK will be wiped of all of his abilities. You’ll get these abilities back by finding benadium gems, finding fossils, and clearing goals that Voidcon will give to you over the course of your 90 seconds. Each round of 90 seconds has a quota of emerald that you have to obtain. At the end of that 90 seconds, it gets subtracted from your current total, and then you keep going. So, yeah, this is a rogike. And you’re not just limited to DK Isle. You can play Emerald Rush on other layers, too. And the strategies that you need to employ will change based on the layout. The layout in each layer doesn’t actually change, so you can spend time planning out routes and getting better at each stage. As you complete Emerald Rushes, you actually get access to higher difficulties, which increases the rewards you get, but also makes the quota much higher. It wasn’t really until my third or fourth run on TK Isle that the mode really started to click for me. I was playing on difficulty four or five, and on those difficulties, they take away most of your bonanza transformations. You have to obtain them by playing now. And in this particular run, I had only gotten access to the ostrich and the snake. I kept getting ostrich skills repeatedly backto back. I had one that would increase the emerald yield when I defeated an enemy as an ostrich, and I had another one that increased the emerald yield if I defeated them using the egg bomb as the ostrich. I started collecting and upgrading those two skills as much as I possibly could. And then I started exclusively doing Void Kong’s missions in which most of the time he would spawn enemies for me to fight. I started racking up emeralds so incredibly fast that I think by the end I had over 70,000 emerald extra left over. I was nowhere near close to losing that run. And that felt really good. I felt like I actually strategized, used what the game gave me, and was successful because of it. But then after I finished that round, I found myself not really feeling that compelled to keep going. I kind of felt like I had understood how to beat the game and that I didn’t really need to try that much more. I felt like I could rely on these specific setups that the game gave me and pretty much succeed without any resistance. I think part of the problem for me is that Emerald Rush runs take quite a bit of time. On certain difficulty levels, you’ll be doing up to 10 different rounds, 90 seconds each. That’s not a short amount of time. That’s over 10 minutes playing Emerald Rush on a single run. You know, I know rogue likes tend to last a long time, but when you have so many stages available to you and so many difficulty levels on those specific stages available to you, it’s almost too much. When you beat a run, you’ll gain points and increase your rank as a member of Void Co.’s team. And this will get you access to more stages. It’ll get you access to new outfits. And that’s cool, but without having any additional traditional game to play. I don’t feel any particular reason to do any of this. And that’s a hard pill to swallow when I had to spend $20 on this in the first place. And maybe I’m alone in thinking this, but I just don’t feel like there’s enough here for me to chew on. There’s a lot of quote unquote content to play in Emerald Rush, but I don’t feel like it’s particularly valuable to play. Once I had figured out how to beat Emerald Rush, I didn’t feel like I had to try in order to continue to succeed. And at that point, you’re just going through the motions. I want to like this content more than I do, but it just didn’t leave that big of an impression on me. There are some other cool flavors such as Pauline having slightly different versions of her songs in Emerald Rush when you transform, but I don’t know. I feel like the value proposition here is way off. $20 for a level that has no additional content outside of the other new content being Emerald Rush doesn’t sit right with me. $10 maybe or maybe free as an expansion pack member on NSO. But I don’t see why people who finished Bonanza would really want to come back and play this in particular. But I’m curious what you think in the comments below. Have you bought the DK Bonanza DLC? Are you enjoying it? Am I completely off base? Please let me know. I I’d love to get your perspectives on this. As much as I love visiting DK Isisle, seeing DK’s friends, reaffirming that Candy Kong exists, there’s just not enough going on here for me. For all your Nintendo Switch 2 news, reviews, and everything between, stay here to GVG. We have a lot more on the way. But until then, keep the games good and the vibes greater. Bye now. [Music]
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