Review: Nintendo’s Donkey Kong theme park adds extra a-peel to Super Nintendo World

Nintendo and Universal Studios Japan’s Donkey Kong Country area has been in the works for the best part of a decade. We first glimpsed the Super Nintendo World expansion via a design leak in 2019, and finally, five years later, and after multiple delays, it will open to the public in Osaka, Japan, this week, with a Florida version due next year.

Walking through the area’s majestic entrance – which for SNW’s first three-and-a-half years, was covered by a suspicious, nondescript closed door – you’re immediately struck by a captivating vista of movement and colour. There’s no doubt this is another stunningly recreated game world which, with the help of Nintendo mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto, has been translated into an interactive playground in real life.

Just like Super Nintendo World’s main area, the attention to detail is captivating, and the sight of DK barrels, bongo drums, collectibles, and minecart tracks sprawled out ahead will make you want sprint in, like a excited child, and start playing with all of its toys.

Donkey Kong Country officially welcomes the public in Osaka, Japan from December 11, 2024. However, last month, USJ kicked off a pre-opening period, during which some of its highest-tier annual pass holders were allowed to visit early, and members of the press, including VGC, were invited to experience the area for the first time.

With interactive attractions, a food vendor, store, and ride, Donkey Kong Country expands the size of the existing Super Nintendo World by 70%, according to USJ. Its main attraction is its roller coaster based on the games’ memorable mine cart ride levels. There’s also a new store themed on Funky Kong, and a bongos mini-game. Like the Mario area, DKC also features interactive elements and themed merchandise and food.

While the content here isn’t quite as rich as in Universal’s Mario world (most of that 70% land increase is ultimately taken up by the ride and its queue, while there’s a real lack of verticality), and there are some genuine missed opportunities in its use of the IP, USJ and Nintendo have built another truly special park experience with great food, fun merch, and the best Nintendo ride in the whole park, which greatly elevates the overall Nintendo World experience.

Expand Kong

Beyond its great theming and striking use of animatronics, the original Super Nintendo World’s triumph is in its interactivity. When you visit the Osaka theme park, or its smaller Los Angeles version, you feel less a visitor, and more like a player. That’s thanks to the world’s use of special wristbands, which combine with a smartphone app to allow players to play interactive games, discover Easter Eggs, and track their scores and compare them with other park guests.

As you can see from our photos and video on this page, Osaka was suffering from Typhoon-esque showers during our visit to Donkey Kong Country, so we didn’t get to spend quite as much time as we’d have liked exploring every nook and cranny of the area in search of secrets. However, from underneath our rain mac, it was clear that the environment isn’t quite as rich with interactivity as the Mario world, even though there are some definite highlights.

Just like the games, visitors can find collectable K-O-N-G letters hidden around Donkey Kong Country, unlocking a stamp in the Super Nintendo World app. There are also barrels with touchscreen roulette games, where players can ‘collect’ items such as one-up balloons by stopping them at the correct time, again in return for app stamps. The only real ‘game’ in DKC is Rambi’s Jungle Conga, an attraction which invites guests to hit a pair of bongo drums in time with a set of flashing lights to make the friendly rhino pop out of his crate.

Visitors can also get up close and personal with DK outside of his new treehouse, complete with a Vauxhall Corsa-sized pile of bananas. Next door is Funky Kong’s Fly and Buy, a merchandise shop with themed items such as DK plushies, headbands, hats, and more, though on opening day, it does feel like it’s missing a killer item, like Super Nintendo World had with its ‘Tokotoko Mario’.

The best merch right now can be found at the food vendors, which serve, in our opinion, the best scran in all of Super Nintendo World – and you get to keep the cutlery. Jungle Beat Shakes sells a banana-flavoured milkshake called DK Crush Sundae, which comes with a barrel mug and DK spoon. The sundae was delicious, even if we were less excited about the ice cream cone full of popcorn propped on top.

A second vendor sells a generous ‘DK Wild’ Hot Dog, with an avocado and cheese sauce. Perhaps the experience was propped up by a week of sushi and ramen leaving us craving western junk food, but this was the best thing we’ve eaten at USJ – and you bet we pocketed the slick DK minecart card it comes with.

Off the rails

While Donkey Kong Country isn’t as strong as the Mushroom Kingdom area of Super Nintendo World in terms of interactivity, it beats it clearly in one significant way: it has by far the best ride in all of the Nintendo park. Whereas Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge is more of an AR experience than a ride, and Yoshi’s Adventure is a straight-up kids experience, Mine Cart Madness is a roller coaster that even theme park enthusiasts have been looking forward to.

To reach the ride, visitors must enter the Golden Shrine, which is the DK-themed temple looming large at the very back of the Donkey Kong Country area. Inside is a golden maze of passages, complete with giant monkey statue, a very cool animatronic Cranky Kong, and primitive artwork on the walls of apes, barrels and, if you look hard enough, even the odd hidden Pikmin.

The queue area is nowhere near as detailed as the excellent Bowser’s Castle interior which precedes Mario Kart, and we do wonder how the experience will be affected by the inevitable two-hour-long queues during opening months, but at least the reward at the end is very much worth it.

That’s because the Donkey Kong-themed ride, while nowhere near the most high-end of coasters, has a very special trick: the ‘carts’ which visitors ride in are secretly elevated above its track, in something that’s been called ‘hidden track technology’. This allows the ride’s designers to place a fake track below the wheels of the car, and create the illusion that riders are jumping over gaps, or falling into a gaping chasm, just like the Donkey Kong Country video games.

After boarding the four-person car, riders are slowly and dramatically elevated towards a giant barrel cannon, which is where the ride kicks into gear. After blasting off, while there are no loops on Mine Cart Madness, the hairpin turns were enough to have everyone in our car screaming in fear, no doubt influenced by the fact that, as one of the first people to ride the coaster, we were asked to sign an injury waiver moments before boarding.

Thankfully, that hidden track technology is the absolute triumph of Mine Cart Madness, creating the genuine illusion that you’re leaping over gaps in the course, or about to fall into a gaping hole. Even though we were aware of its trick well before boarding, it was no less scary staring towards a mangled gap in the track ahead of us, before dramatically leaping to the other side.

At one point in the ride, DK and Diddy come screaming towards you in their own minecart, only for your car to switch tracks moments before collision. Not only is it a thrilling experience, but it feels totally authentic to the Donkey Kong games, and by the time we reached the celebrating DK animatronic at the finish line, we couldn’t wait to ride Mine Cart Madness again. Just look at our faces:

Music matters

So Donkey Kong Country isn’t quite as rich as the original Super Nintendo World area in terms of its interactivity, but its brilliant Mine Cart Madness ride elevates the experience into something really special – especially when judged not as a standalone area, but as an extra half of Nintendo’s overall theme park. If there’s one criticism we have for the theme park world, however, it’s in its use of the Donkey Kong franchise, and how it misses out on classic beats from the series’ celebrated history.

Like Super Nintendo World, Donkey Kong Country is mainly themed around a game from ten years ago, when the project was presumably being put together. For SNW it was Super Mario 3D World, and for DKC it’s the Donkey Kong games made by Retro Studios.

At the time ,that would’ve made a lot of sense: 2010’s Donkey Kong Country Returns and 2014’s Tropical Freeze felt like the future of the franchise a decade ago. Unfortunately, DK hasn’t had a mainline release in the decade since, and that leaves USJ’s Donkey Kong Country theming feeling a little out of place in 2024, even though a remaster of Returns is due out on Nintendo Switch next month.

Full disclosure: I am a nearly-middle-aged man who was fortunate to work with many of the original Donkey Kong Country developers during my time at Playtonic. I am also a David Wise fanboy. However, I still believe that when most fans think of Donkey Kong Country, they still think of those classic Super NES games by Rare, with their iconic characters and timeless soundtracks.

For whatever reason, and although the Retro games were clearly heavily influenced by the original Rare games, there is little use of Rare’s work in the Universal Studios area. And I think that’s a shame. The characters, from the checkpoint pig, to the Tiki Tak enemies, are lifted straight from the Wii adventure, and favourites like the Kremlings and Smash Bros. Ultimate’s King K Rool are seemingly nowhere to be seen.

More disappointing is the near-total-lack of David Wise music, even though the British composer created the score for the most recent (and most excellent) entry, Tropical Freeze. Nintendo owns all the musical scores for these games, so this is seemingly a decision of choice rather than any rights issues, and that means DKC is mostly made up of remixes of Kenji Yamamoto’s far less memorable Returns themes, bar a brief version of the DKC theme at the entrance.

This may seem like a petty complaint, but to me and many fans, David Wise’s music is as intrinsic to Donkey Kong as Koji Kondo’s melodies are to Super Mario. This feeling was only heightened after we left Donkey Kong Country and returned to the main Super Nintendo World, where we would bet a small fortune nobody could exist without humming those incredible Mario tunes for any significant length of time.

That is, of course, a real fan’s complaint, however, and won’t affect the experience for the vast majority of visitors, and there’s still a chance that a DK Rap or an Aquatic Ambience Easter Egg might be hidden in some corner of the area we weren’t able to explore. But we do hope Nintendo takes note and uses more classic DK music in its future projects, especially with a standalone Donkey Kong movie understood to be in the works, after the upcoming Mario sequel.

Worth leaving the Country?

Donkey Kong Country is best viewed as another excellent half of the Super Nintendo World theme park area, complimenting its neighbour with Nintendo’s best ride ever, its most unique food items, and another captivating game world for fans and non-fans to lose themselves in.

For those who’ve already thoroughly explored Universal’s Mushroom Kingdom, the overall number of experiences in DKC probably doesn’t justify an international flight on its own. However, there’s no doubt the addition of the Donkey Kong area makes the overall Super Nintendo World significantly better – especially that excellent Mine Cart ride – which should make those in North America particularly excited for the full park’s launch in Orlando, Florida next year.

It’s not yet clear if Nintendo plans to add more themed game worlds to Universal Studios, but judged by its first two, it’s undoubtedly capable of building an entire theme park of worlds we’d love to visit. Video game IP has never been more valuable than it is today, and Nintendo is pushing beyond its traditional borders more than ever. There might not be room in Osaka for Zelda, Pokémon, and Animal Crossing expansions, but we’d certainly leave the country to visit them.