Past meets present: Mario vs. Donkey Kong

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

What is the purpose of a remake? Now there’s a question without an easy answer. It depends on who you ask the question to, and it also might depend on the remake. In the case of Mario vs. Donkey Kong, the remake of which was released for the Switch in the late-winter of 2024, the goal seemed to be to introduce a new generation to a 2004 Game Boy Advance game, whether through simply making it available on present-day hardware, or by having the kids of those who played it back in the day join in the new co-op mode with their parents who were revisiting it. In a vacuum, that’s not a terrible idea, as far as remakes go, but there’s a bit more to it to consider, too.

The graphics have been given an overhaul, of course: the Game Boy Advance was a 32-bit handheld capable of some excellent sprites and detail, but that was the cutting-edge portable tech of two decades ago. Joke about the Switch being behind the curve all you want, but that was in comparison to the Playstation 4 and Xbox One (and later, the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series… series); it’s got a whole lot more horsepower than the GBA, which itself was, like the 8-bit Game Boy before it that ran parallel to the 16-bit SNES, working with similar tech to its console predecessors, only tinier and less expensive thanks to the passage of time and technological progress.

There’s additional stuff to do, too: not just the co-op mode, where a second player can take control of Toad to help Mario out in his quest to recover the mini Mario toys that Donkey Kong stole because advertising works, but also two additional worlds, making for eight of them rather than six. Which also means that, because there are “Plus” versions of every world that play differently, you’ve actually got four additional worlds to get through, and now 130 levels. So, sure, it’s a remake of a game that used to retail for significantly less, but there’s a lot more of it in multiple ways.

There’s also a mode made for less experienced players — Casual Mode — which ditches the time limit on levels, and also gives you multiple bubbles, which basically serve as hit points to keep you from automatically dying when you take damage from a trap or enemy. Basically, when Mario (or Toad) hurts themselves somehow, they’ll be swept up in one of those bubbles, and brought back to the last Checkpoint Flag that they touched — these checkpoints are only available in Casual Mode, as well. It’s a good way to introduce newcomers, young or otherwise, to the intricacies of the Mario vs. Donkey Kong gameplay, which is different than both Mario and Donkey Kong. The series is very much its own thing, a spiritual successor to Donkey Kong ‘94, which itself was the portable culmination of Donkey Kong’s arcade games and ideas Nintendo came up with in other platformers in the decade in between those titles.

The standard difficulty is “Classic Mode,” but that’s a misnomer. It is not the game as it was back in 2004 on the GBA, but instead, it’s a somewhat watered-down version of that experience. In Mario vs. Donkey Kong’s original form, you had a time limit and a scoring system, and the two went hand-in-hand in determining your grade for a given level: if you were fast enough and scored enough points, you’d get three stars — perfect — on a stage. Stars are not only a badge of honor, but acquiring them also unlocks the post-game Expert levels — if you’re bothering to perfectly clear the earlier levels of a puzzle platformer, chances are good that you’re going to have the appetite for ones labeled “Expert.”

There are still Expert stages to unlock, but the scoring mode has been removed, and so, too, has fall damage — falling from too tall of a height now stuns you, rather than potentially killing Mario and forcing you to restart a stage. Which in turn messes with some of the level design throughout the game, not just in terms of reduced danger and fewer skill checks, but also because you can straight-up just fall down in some places to solve puzzles instead of having to find what used to be the less-lethal path to the exit.

I take zero issue with the introduction of what Classic Mode includes — introducing Casual was an excellent idea, and then having something like an actual Classic Mode that replicates the gameplay of 2004, and a Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2024 setting that includes the lack of fall damage and strips the scoring system away for an easier experience would have been just as good of one. Removing the option to play the actual classic way entirely turns this into a one step forward, two steps back scenario. It answers the question of who this remake is for, in a way that isn’t as satisfying as it should be.

Here’s the problem at the center of this change: Mario vs. Donkey Kong was a pretty good game, that, even in 2004, was inferior to the title it was the spiritual successor to. The level design by Nintendo Software Technology wasn’t quite as good as what Nintendo EAD had managed in Donkey Kong ‘94, making for a less engaging title basically throughout. The game improves as it goes, with the later ones doing a much better job of keeping you engaged — the Expert stages and the Plus ones, too, make the rest of it worth playing — but it just doesn’t hold up in the same way. It’s a little too simple for a little too long, in a way that makes it feel like a slog at times, at least comparatively. An issue that’s exacerbated by the reduction of friction in its 2024 remake — if you thought the levels were already a little too easy to get through, and not satisfying because of it, you are going to feel that even more in the Switch edition.

For puzzle platformers and the like, being nearly impossible to solve isn’t the goal. But the greatest feeling as a player in these kinds of games comes from being convinced that you’re doing something challenging, and succeeding at it in a way that makes you feel like a special little genius. It might be a little lie of design that allows you to feel that way, sure, like you just pulled something off no one expected to be pulled off even though what you did is probably just, you know, what you’re supposed to be doing just as the designers had envisioned, but we’re all willing to let the lie stand as truth without challenging it, because it makes us feel good. The Mario vs. Donkey Kong remake doesn’t make you feel special, because you rarely, if ever, feel challenged in any way by it for most of the runtime of its eight standard worlds. Wrap a level in a hurry? Well yeah, of course you did, there was nothing to it. No friction, and no elaborate building on of any concepts introduced within that world — that issue was at the heart of what made the original GBA edition so obviously inferior to Donkey Kong ‘94, and it’s only worse here when all the edges have been sanded down to make a puzzle platformer that you can mostly turn your brain off for.

It should be stressed that Mario vs. Donkey Kong isn’t a bad game, but it is a disappointing one that seems to have doubled down on the worst aspects of the source material. Is it worth plowing through the first eight worlds to get to the more interesting Plus variants and the Expert ones? Sure, yeah, if you’re really into these games, but it’s going to feel like you’re numbing your brain for a few hours, and whether you want to experience that in a world with endless options for what to play instead is something only you can answer for yourself.

As for how Mario vs. Donkey Kong plays in its remake form, it depends on what levels you’re in. In the game’s standard worlds, each world is made up of six levels, which are broken down into two sections. The first has you attempting to secure a key and bring it to a locked door, which sounds simple enough, but the key is tucked away many platforms away from you, guarded by enemies and/or spikes or electrifying sparks or other kinds of obstacles, like colored blocks that can be switched on and off by corresponding switches, the pressing of which will throw up barriers elsewhere in the stage. Conveyor belts are another hindrance slash help, and in addition to the key, you will also have to find your way to a present or two scattered around the stage, and they’re not always placed along the same paths — or require the same layout vis a vis switch pressing — as the key and the locked door.

When you get through the door, you’ll be in the second part of the stage, which no longer has you hunting down a key, but does have you going for the other present or two — collecting all three presents nets you a three-star rating and a “Perfect!” rank on a stage — with the final goal now reaching the little mini Mario toy contained in its very large gacha-esque bubble container. Getting to this little guy clears the level, and you rinse/repeat until you get to a seventh stage, which has these six little dudes following Mario’s movements around in a different way. Basically, they can’t traverse the environment the way Mario does, but they’ll try their best, and you need to guide them to (1) collect three letter emblems that spell out “toy” in order to (2) open up the toy chest they are to be placed in when (3) you guide them to said toy chest. So, there might be a tiny crawl space for them to walk through that Mario cannot, which you need to guide them through by getting to a higher (or lower) level that you can traverse, in order to coax them into following your movement. Eventually reuniting because they found a trampoline to hop on, while you could have just used a ladder or what have you to get up there yourself. Obviously, you can walk these guys right to their doom, but clearing the stage with all six intact gets you another perfect rating, and more hit points against Donkey Kong, who you will face off against in a boss fight in each world’s eighth stage.

Of course, finishing off these boss encounters without taking damage nets you another perfect. You can retry these stages — or any other — without losing a life, which is nice, but the boss fights, given the presence of Mario toys as hit points, is the only time you can take damage and then restart — in all other cases except for when you’re carrying around a key, you just die when hit, so there’s no time to restart. You already used up that life, don’t get greedy.

Mario’s movement is a bit different in Mario vs. Donkey Kong than in a standard Mario outing. He can jump, of course, but there are many forms a jump can take. You can chain jumps together to get higher and longer ones, which became pretty standard after it was first introduced into the canon, but you can also do a handstand and jump out of that, and the chain jump from these will take you even higher than a standard jump — while in a handstand, you’re also impervious to damage from items being dropped on you, since they just bounce off of the bottom of Mario’s boots instead of his head. You can do a quick back-and-forth on the D-pad to jump higher backwards, which can be extremely useful for shortcuts and avoiding obstacles and traps — you’ve got options. The hammers from the original Donkey Kong, back when Mario was canonically into construction instead of plumbing, are here, too, and you can throw them up into the air with the Y button mid-use instead of being stuck with them until they’ve run their course — this also lets you toss hammers to higher platforms while you climb a ladder or use a trampoline, and you can then resume your mashing with them from there once you’ve caught it again.

It all feels great to do, but again, the issue here is that you barely have to master any of the high-level movement, because the game just doesn’t require you to in order to successfully complete a level with even a perfect ranking. Part of what made Donkey Kong ‘94 work so well is that it continually introduced new obstacles and concepts for you to master in each world, and made them more and more complicated and necessary until you were guaranteed to have that in your toolbox for whenever it was needed. Mario vs. Donkey Kong shows you something, expects you to do it once, and might not expect it from you again for a couple of hours. You don’t continually hone your skills so much as remember that oh yeah, there’s a jump for that a few hours after the last time you were reminded.

The one place that you do have to contend with this is in the Time Attack mode, which unlocks after you clear the standard eight worlds. Time Attack has you trying to complete stages as quickly as possible, which creates a sense of urgency and requires a mastery of things, but again: that this is a feeling you can only get after you’ve already trudged through is annoying, when it used to be just part of the core experience on your first run if you wanted it to be.

There’s plenty to like about Mario vs. Donkey Kong’s remake, but it takes awhile to get to the fireworks factory, as it were, and it now resides on a system that also has Donkey Kong ‘94 on it for all Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, courtesy the Game Boy’s NSO app. The good news is that Nintendo Software Technology’s later outings in the series were better and more interestingly designed in a number of ways, because they moved away from what had already hit its peak in ‘94 — navigating Donkey Kong’s traps as Mario himself — and made the minis the star of the show, basically answering the question of “what if Mario vs. Donkey Kongs was also Lemmings?” One of those questions no one was asking, until they did, and it turns out it should have been asked even sooner.

Whether Nintendo bothers to add those titles to the Switch (2) at some point is unknown, but given that they were designed for the dual-screen functions and touch screen of the Nintendo DS, and the Switch 2’s mouse functionality should be able to replicate at least the latter part of that… well, there’s reason to hope. And if the price of getting to those titles is having Mario vs. Donkey Kong remade first, and my kids now happily introduced to a series with more significant highlights in it than that, then hey, it was worth it… even if it wasn’t a remake made with people like me in mind.

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