Wow, we finally get a game that has pretty much everything you could ask for from a DKC game except Kremlings, and the lack of Kremlings has everybody fuming. Unbelievable.
Again, imagine an SMB game that has "everything you could ask for from an SMB game except anything related to the Koopa Troop." Imagine that after so many years of waiting for a new Mario sidescroller, that's the game we got instead of NSMB and NSMBW -- one that looks and plays just like the originals, except not a single one of the enemies you remember from the first four games is in there. No Goombas, no Koopas, no Bowser, no Hammer Bros., nothing. All new enemies made by people who had nothing to do with the originals. As great a game as that is, can you really call it Super Mario Bros.? I mean, even Mario 2/USA had Koopa shells. If there's no Koopas, it could be Super Mario Something (Land, for example) and be just as good a game, but you can't just toss out something so fundamental without a second thought (not to mention that it's not the same guy doing the music when it easily could have been, and they're instead going to be relying mostly on remixes of the original songs -- which, if their awesomeness is still preserved, will likely serve only to make the new music pale in comparison). And incidentally, everybody isn't fuming. I'm slightly apprehensive and Weegee concurs in part. Everyone else seems to be fine with it seeing as they haven't said anything about it. You're the only one who seems to be angry about something.
Where the hell were you people back when Jungle Beat **** on the franchise as a whole? Hypocrites...
Well, for one thing, I wasn't registered on the forums five years ago when Jungle Beat was relevant. Furthermore, read my post:
if you're not going to put Kremlings in, it's starting to look more like Jungle Beat 2 than Country 4 to me. Not that that's a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, mind you -- Jungle Beat is a great game and still very underappreciated, it's just not what we were expecting.
Jungle Beat is a very good game. It doesn't have the same mythos and overall feel as the Country games, but that's perfectly fine so long as it's not calling itself Donkey Kong Country 4. You can still have a Donkey Kong game without Kremlings, just as you can have a Super Mario game without Koopas. But the Country sub-series has specific rules and conventions that were set down by the previous games, just as the Bros. sub-series has its rules.
Extreme hyperbole to make a point: Baten Kaitos Origins is a great game, but what if it had been named and marketed as Mario Golf? It would still be a great game and wouldn't be any less a great game because of the name, but it's not Mario Golf, and if you're expecting Mario Golf when you play Baten Kaitos Origins, you're going to be disappointed.
I am not saying this game will suck because there's no Kremlings. I'm not saying a Donkey Kong game without Kremlings should never be made. I am sure this game will be very fun and will do justice to the Donkey Kong name as a whole. I'm just saying that at the end of the day, it's never going to feel completely like Donkey Kong Country 4 without a single trace of the enemies that were so iconic and ubiquitous in the last seven games in that series. It's like NSMB without Koopas. Like Sonic 4 without a grass level. Sure, they'd still be great games without those elements (well, NSMB would at least) and would really suffer very little for their loss in terms of overall gameplay, but can you really give them those names when they leave out something so integral and symbolic to the series?
And really, my answer to that is "maybe." After all, Sonic Advance 3 didn't start with a grass level and was, IMO, a perfectly legitimate contender to be called Sonic 6. I'm optimistic about it. I can see this working. I'm just cautiously apprehensive about it. No Rare, no David Wise, and no Kremlings certainly doesn't look like the perfect formula for DKC4 on paper.
