Donkey Konga: The Worst Rythm Game Ever Made

 

No genre is free from it's trash entries and rhythm games are no different.  If you had asked me what I thought was the worst rhythm game before playing Donkey Konga I might have said Parappa The Rapper.  But despite my extremely low opinion of Parappa as a rhythm game, I can appreciate it as being one of the first and the music absolutely fuckin SLAPS but then Donkey Konga comes along and shows me first hand what a really trash rhythm game looks like.

I'm not the kind of guy to get really hung up on UI.  Unless the UI in a game is particularly unreadable or badly made then its not the kind of thing that will even cause a blip on my critical radar.  But right out the gate, the first thing thats very noticable when you hit the start button is that Donkey Konga's menus feel cheap.  This is a first party Nintendo game, featuring one of the companies biggest mascots that's been around since 198 fucking 1 and it has a menu screen that looks like something you'd find on some shovelware bullshit that you'd find at the bottom of a bargain bin, thrice discounted to a dollar.  Zero effort put into these menus at all.  One of them is even called "DK City" or something, the area where you use coins to buy new music and stuff and I thought it make take me to a fun little jungle island interface but no, just the same shit garbage menu to buy nonsense.

But that's just the menus, in the actual rhythm game itself the UI is also trash.  There are 4 types of notes, a left hit, a right hit, a double hit and a clap.  The notes are an obnoxiously bright shade of red and yellow so when you're playing on the harder modes your eyes start to strain trying to read the chart.  There's also no options for speed mods which makes reading charts a pain in the cock but the only reason this isn't more of a problem is because the game is piss easy and even a newborn that's been dropped could clear the highest settings.  Even worse with the UI is that the feedback for successfully hit notes is fucking bullshit.  In literally every other rhythm game that exists there is some feedback for telling the player they hit a note.  Usually the note will vanish and you'll get a little mark that tells you your accuracy, like in DDR you get Marvellous or Perfect or whatever.  In Donkey Konga, though, when you hit a note you get get feedback mark but the note KEEPS FUCKING SCROLLING past the hit zone.  That's behaviour entirely reserved for missed notes, what the fuck.  Not that getting distracted matters even in the slightest because the game isn't tracking full combos anyway.  There are 3 ways to end a song.  Fail, which I have never seen, pass with a silver crown and pass with a gold crown.  The only difference is if your life bar at the end of the song was full or not.  You could go away from your bongos for 75% of a song, then play the last stretch perfectly and end on a gold crown.  It's like the complete opposite of IIDXs failing with a AA rank, it's fucking bullshit.

But all of this is just set dressing, the most important thing is the music right?  Well guess fuckin what? That sucks too.  Nursery rhymes that would even make its target demographic eye roll, terrible covers of pop songs including the worst versions I have ever heard of Another One Bites the Dust and All the Small Things and weird old shit for grandad.  The only good tracks on the game are the Pokemon Theme Song and the DK Rap.  When you're rhythm game has only 2 good tracks in it that is probably  more than any shitty UI and toddler grade peripheral will ever be.

The most frustrating thing about all this is that the template was done for them already.  Donkey Konga isn't even an original idea, it's a straight rip off of Taiko no Tatsujin just with the Japanese drums replaced with bongos

Taiko is great too, it's good good music, plays great, looks great, there's a reason that it's been around for so long and is a staple of basically every arcade, even the shit ones in shopping malls and sports centers, even to this day.  All Nintendo had to do was make it like that and instead we got this low effort, lazy, poorly thrown together dollar store knockoff.

Donkey Konga is bar far the worst rhythm game ever made.  Even the biggest arcade rhythm flops like Museca don't even come CLOSE to this level of shittiness.  An embarassing title from Nintendo that makes a good case for maybe not all video game preservation being a good thing. Fuck this game and fuck anyone who worked on it.