We’ve done practically every other Nintendo franchise with at least 10 entries at this point (actually probably not even close, but whatever), it’s time for Donkey Kong! One of Nintendo’s oldest living franchises, Donkey Kong is still cranking out the hits. Sure, the franchise spawned the Super Mario games, which went on to become much more successful than the Donkey Kong games ever did, but don’t write off the big ape! There are many great Donkey Kong games in the Nintendo library to check out, maybe even more than you realize!

And hey, after you check out this list, why not check out some of our other top 10 franchise games according to Negative World? Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Kirby, Mega Man and more can be found here!

Exactly like last time you will see a few numbers in the header for each game in the list. The first is the average score (out of 10) for that game calculated from all member ratings, and the number in parenthesis is the amount of members who have scored this game (IE the amount of ratings that went into the calculation.) I only included games with 10 or more user ratings.

So that’s our list. If you’re wondering where Donkey Kong 64 is, it fell in number 12, behind Donkey Kong Jr. 12 might even be too high for that collect-a-thon abomination.

What do you think of our list? Agree, disagree? Why not sign up and tell us?

PS. Dear God what is this monstrosity?!


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@carlosrox
I know dude! I actually rented it in the 90s and was like, "WTF? Diddy aint my hero. Where's the big guy?" So I barely made it off the Pirate Ship. Now I see the error of my ways. I will fix this.

@Mop it up
Huh??? Wasn't Banjo Tooie the game that took the collectathon thing to its greatest heights? I remember seeing my friend's game and he was way far into it and it just looked like it was LOADED with moves, items, etc. No way it has less collecting than Banjo Kazooie, right?

@carlosrox I've always heard it had more than BK and less than DK 64. Haven't played much of it myself though.

@carlosrox Donkey Kong 64 is the game with the greatest abundance of collectibles. Banjo-Tooie is less of a collectathon than both Banjo-Kazooie and especially DK 64. For example, musical note scores are not a thing anymore. The notes do still exist, but you find them in bunches of 5, and they unlock moves instead of new areas so you have more time to find the notes before you need them. Also, Jinjos do still exist, but you no longer need to find all the ones in one level on one try/life. It's now mostly about collecting the golden puzzle pieces. There are more types of egg ammo in the game, but you now collect ammo in bunches and it's plentiful, so it was never anything I had to worry about collecting and didn't find myself running out.

I personally feel that Banjo-Tooie is no more about collecting than, say, Super Mario 64. It does have larger levels though, which might make it tougher to keep track of things.

The larger levels and decrease in collectables made Tooie a step down from Banjo Kazooie in my opinion. Some levels feel downright barren with too much empty space. Others (particularly Grunty Industries) can feel like a cluttered mess. Some jiggies are also frustrating or a pain to get, which I can't really say applies to the original. I think Banjo got the ratio of space/exploration to collectables nearly perfect for me. I still like Banjo Tooie a lot, though. Maybe approaching it with that comparison to Mario 64's stars in mind will help me enjoy it more.

Wow this mind blowing news to me. BT had less collecting than BK. Wat.

It's sort of hard to say. @Mop it up is right in that it was streamlined in a way since items were "clustered" together (i.e. there were still 100 notes in a stage but they only appeared in clusters of 5 and were typically not tucked away in shadowy corners, etc), and that you didn't lose anything after dying (unlike the notes and jinjos in BK, which you had to get all at the same time).

However, BT is a much larger game in terms of scale, so @Hero_Of_Hyrule makes a good point about how it can feel more barren. Like it takes longer to actually get stuff DONE while BK was more compact. Some of the Jiggies in BT really required some serious backtracking.

Even so, they were both highly ambitious games for the time and I really enjoy both of them, BK moreso.