Donkey Kong Country Returns has to be considered one of the greatest platformers of all time. In a year with Super Mario Galaxy 2, it's pretty much unthinkable that any developer will be able to top the achievements laid out by these two games, not only in terms of inventiveness (they are nothing if not inventive games), but in terms of closing the case of video game design and "perfecting" (in a broad sense, of course) the tenets of the genre of platformers.
Right up front, one is made aware of DKCR's status as a video game. Those original Rare platformers on the SNES laid the template, setting up the rules, just as Super Mario Bros. 1 – 3 did (albeit with much less critical and cultural reverence, of course). It's telling that it's not Donkey Kong Returns, or Donkey Kong Returns to the Country. The title signifies one thing only – for the facetious, the return of a brand, but for the purposes of my argument, a re-evaluation, re-imagining, and metanarrative reconstruction of those first three DKC games.
In most platformers, the player-avatar doesn't stand in as a real character – Mario isn't a defined personality like, say, Squall from FFVIII is. They stand in merely as projections of the player. Any feelings that can be read on the characters certainly have to be taken as your own, and these feelings range generally from joyous to anxious to frustrated to defeated. in Donkey Kong Country Returns, Retro Studios are more aware of this phenomenon than I've seen in the platforming genre, outside perhaps of the Bit.Trip series: Donkey Kong stands in not only as the player-avatar, but also as a connection to video games past. What better mascot for this than the original video game superstar?
He is, quite literally, a tie-wearing gorilla. When you're playing the game, Donkey Kong could just as well be Mario, or Lolo, or any platforming star. His dumbstruck expressions and general "animal" persona are no different than the waves of platforming stars, though with one critical difference: Retro, through subtle bits of animation and tiny details like Donkey's seeming indifference to the most dangerous of pitfalls, make sure that the player is totally aware of this.
Much has been made of the game's difficulty (which, if you've played the originals, you'll know that it's actually a smidge easier than those games, if considerably harder than most games released today), but the game's brilliance lies not in its difficulty, necessarily. Rather, the difficulty puts the focus squarely back on the thing tying the player to the game: mechanics and input. Platforming in DKCR is rhythmic, both subtly as with most platformers, and more explicitly, almost in the vein of Bit.Trip Runner. It's this foregrounded rhythmic quality to the game that makes each button press, each well-executed remote shake, each press of the directional pad, a thing that the player is much more cognizant of than they normally would be in this genre.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of a game like Super Mario Bros. (and continuing onwards through the series, perhaps with the exception of Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Sunshine) is how quickly the controls become transparent and second-nature. Because of the effectiveness of this approach, the conventional wisdom has decreed that this is how controls should be handled in all games. And for the most part, this is a good approach, especially when over-complication can ruin the textual elements of video game experience.
But games like Bit.Trip Runner (the whole series, in fact) and DKCR show that making the player aware of the control, the relationship of the game to the player, and placing the player outside of the narrative of the world (DKCR is perhaps one of the most successful video games of all time at pushing you forward while simultaneously striving to actively make you not care about the narrative) can be an effective approach as well. Unlike Bit.Trip, however, which plays as a clever homage, DKCR is all about simultaneously reinforcing and deconstructing platforming tropes.
One of the greatest successes of the Super Mario Galaxy franchise is the way in which the player is basically waging a war against the furthest recesses of the human mind in its level design. DKCR isn't quite as successful as those games in that particular aspect (how could it be, grounded as it is in a tenuous reality?), but it does toy with conventions successfully. Rocket barrel levels put the focus squarely on one button being pressed to navigate a crumbling, dynamically changing world; barrels will shoot you into the background and back to the foreground, effectively putting into question the very architecture of every level you play; and platforms will shoot out of thin air, only to crumble or recede just as quickly. For fun-seekers, this can be seen as some of the most playful and inventive level design ever attempted in a 2D platformer, but it's just as revelatory for those interested in studying the genre of platformers.
DKCR, then, comes to stand in as a representative, but also a criticizer, of platformers. Some levels seem to question audaciously, "why play a game which will likely bore you when you could be playing this?" A fair question, too, and one that seems to find its answer in placing DKCR in a short stack of games that could rightly be considered one of the best of all time.