Collection essentials #182: Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble (SNES)

After two smash hits, Nintendo and Rare didn’t want to stop making these games, so for the third year in a row the world got a Donkey Kong Country game. This would have to be the last one, as time was running out on the Super Nintendo; the next console generation was in full throttle now, with Nintendo having released their newest console earlier in the year. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that DKC3 was the least popular of the three games, but still quite successful in its own right, reaching the highest respectable position of 11th-best-selling Super Nintendo game of all time.

The story this time around, is, well…uncreative. In the previous game, Donkey Kong got kidnapped, and the objective was to save him. This time, Donkey Kong AND Diddy Kong got kidnapped. I guess they just really wanted the excuse to make Dixie the main character this time. So who’s her partner? Well, it’s the brand new “Kiddy Kong”, who is clearly a toddler, but belongs to a big and strong species of ape so he’s already stronger than Dixie is. Kiddy because plays like a “heavy” character like Donkey Kong did in the first game, so the third game lacks a “nimble” character like Diddy. Kiddy Kong is quite unpopular among the fanbase. There was even one YouTuber (The Geek Critique) who made a video all about this game which was almost an hour long and, as a joke, never mentioned Kiddy Kong even once and never showed any gameplay footage with him on screen.

Not many fans consider this the best game of the trilogy, and I tend to agree that it’s not as good as the second game at least, but it’s still a very fine game in its own right. One way it tries to stand out is having a hub overworld map that you can freely move around in, with the more rigid level select being confined to particular sections of the world once you enter them. There are once again plenty of optional stuff to select and secrets to find, with bonus levels to unlock like in the previous game. Levels in DKC3 tend to revolve around some kind of creative gimmick that is only seen in that one level. For example, there’s one stage where you must control an elephant companion, but the elephant is afraid of the rat enemies, so you need to find ways to dispatch them from a distance.

I played much less DKC3 than the first two games in my childhood, as friends rarely had it, and it was the last one I acquired myself, so I have less nostalgia for it. But I still did have a lot of fun with it when I did play it. I don’t think I ever found and beat all the secret levels in the game, so that’s something I’ll have to go back and do at some point. 

By the way, you can play all three of the Donkey Kong Country games on the Nintendo Switch for free if you have an online subscription. I highly recommend you do so. It’s a beautiful trilogy of essentials.