Donkey Kong Country Returns (3DS) I got this game for free as an end-of-year gift from Club Nintendo, back when they actually had a cool rewards club. Incidentally, I got Tropical Freeze for free that way too (I think I picked it out as an end-of-ever gift). I actually did most of this playthrough back in 2015, but got stuck on World 7, unable to find any of the secret switches. I finally went back to wrap it up (using a guide to find what I missed).
I'm gonna spoiler tag the rest of this because honestly, I hate to be a killjoy in here and some of this gets really self-loathing, but it's how I feel. Get ready for it.
I hated playing this game. And it's not the game's fault. It seemed fun. It was my own fault. I'm just a terrible gamer and couldn't play this game to save my life. There were stages that I spent literal hours on. There were levels that took me several hundred tries and on my life I am not even exaggerating that. There were levels that I died on well over 100 times before even seeing the first checkpoint. The worst were 8-3, and the final boss, the latter of which was particularly frustrating because once you even make it to him (which, even once I was 100% familiar with the course I still only did like 1 in 5 tries), I had to one-shot him because once you die to him once they're no way to get Diddy back without doing the whole course over again and I found fighting him with solo DK to be even more futile than playing Smash Bros. with a solo Popo. To make matters worse, when you fail so much you get that stupid option for Super Kong ringing in your ear every time you die (this kind of option is something I refuse to do in any game ever no matter how many times I fail), just to remind you how much you suck. I had multiple complete breakdowns over this game, and I wish I were kidding about that. I'm not. Over fucking Donkey Kong. The only reason I finished it is because I didn't think I had that long to go with only a world and a half left, and once I had sunk at least a dozen more hours in at that point, I forced myself to stick to it and it was painful as fuck, because it made me feel unbelievably awful about myself. I honestly have no idea how I'm so bad at video games considering how much I play them, but it's pretty similar to almost everything in my life. I never get good at anything no matter how much I try. This game has really made me feel like a failure. I don't feel accomplished having beaten this game. I don't feel proud. I in fact feel embarrassed as fuck. I feel like the last horse limping across the finish line as the crowd painfully cheers out of nothing but sympathy. I feel absolutely pathetic. I feel like I did the absolute fucking bare-ass minimum of what a nine-year-old could have done in a quarter of the time. It seemed like a really fun platformer, but the experience was totally ruined for me. Obviously I'm not exactly frothing at the mouth to play Tropical Freeze or any other DKC games anytime soon, if ever, because I just don't want to put myself through that personal torture again. I'm sure this post seems overdramatic as fuck but it's really how I feel. For the past few months, I've just been feeling like I'm an absolute failure who just sucks at everything, and this game did nothing but reinforce that feeling.
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darkx Games beaten in 2021 - 20; Most recent - Donkey Kong Country Returns