Sometimes a new game will be so weird and offbeat that it's guaranteed to be a sensation, due to its spurning of any classification or convention. What generally occurs after that point is someone tries latch on to that success and ends up making something somewhat lackluster. For the purposes of this review, the quirky originator is Namco's PS2 drum game, Taiko no Tatsujin. The game following to the beat of someone else's drummer...Namco-developed, Nintendo-published, Donkey Konga.
Story
Uh...Donkey Kong's sitting in the jungle one day. He finds some drums, and decides that...much like Strong Bad, he'd like to have "the rhythm", too. So he breaks out some Conga drums, the guys from Mortal Kombat come by and paint K's on them, and he starts playing "konga" tunes instead.
Ok, so there's no story...not one I can translate, anyway. Unless you want me to make up one about how DK runs out of cash and needs to do demeaning things to earn money, we'll just skip right on ahead to the gameplay section.
Gameplay
For those of you familiar with Taiko no Tatsujin, Donkey Konga will be really easy to get the hang of. You've got a left drum, and a right drum. Watch the icons that scroll by. The yellow ones mean you're supposed to hit the left drum. Red icons mean you hit the right drum. The fuschia colored icons mean you hit both left and right drums, and the Blue star icons mean that you clap. The Purple Horseshoes? Those are in boxes of Lucky Charms.
Just like in TnT, you'll have long extended icons which mean you hit whichever icon as many times as you can. (A "Renda" command in Japanese.) Aside from that, there are no other little gimmick icons...just those 5.
You start out with a few different modes. Most of these are completely devoid of fun, so where you want to head at the beginning of the game is the "Street Live" mode. You start out with Easy and Normal modes of the songs unlocked. While playing the songs, you earn chips, which can be cashed in to unlock the Expert version of the songs, some boring minigames, and a variety of uninteresting drum sound sets.
Street Live also has a bunch of "Cool" modes which are actually anything but. They just require you to memorize the song and the order of the icons. Instead of seeing an icon, you'll see a barrel. Now you have to figure out which button to hit. It's the Donkey Konga version of playing DDR songs without looking at the screen.
The wacky mini-games you can unlock in Donkey Konga range from banana juggling to a variation of the 100m dash from TnT, the 100m rope climb. This time you have to avoid enemies in addition to banging the drums quickly. Not really all that impressive.
Musical Selection
33 Songs...none of them are unlockable...so basically, what you see at the beginning is what you get for the entire lifespan of the game. The music falls into a very wide range of genres; classical folk songs ("I Met A Bear", "Grandfather's Clock"), anime songs (the Hamtaro theme, Galaxy Express 999), J-Pop (Kuraki Mai's "Kaze no La la la la", Utada Hikaru's "Colors", Smap's "Shake") TV and Commercial tunes, (The Pikmin CM Song, The "Ai Nori" TV theme from like, Year 4...the song that came after ELT's "Fragile") video game music (A Remix of the Super Mario Theme, The DK 64 Theme) classical tunes (Hungarian Dance, Turkish March) and Latin tunes (La Bamba, Mas Que Nada).
Sadly...there are some absolutely horrid versions of some of the songs in here. The girl Namco got to sing Hamasaki Ayumi's "Fly High" sounds worse singing it than *I* do when I sing it at karaoke. The theme for the Donkey Konga game itself sounds awful. However, there are some pretty good tracks to offset the awful ones, too...mostly the ones without any vocals. The Super Mario Remix is probably the best of the bunch, but Turkish March is my favorite song track to actually play.
What really ticks me off about the music selection though is that Namco released Taiko No Tatsujin 3 at just about the same time as this game. The music for TnT 3 SUCKED. It was the worst selection of songs in any of the versions, with more old people Enka music and lame-ass Namco original tracks than ever before. Hardly any recent pop music at all. It made for a very quick playthrough and putdown.
Then I got Donkey Konga, saw that Namco worked on it, and I thought, "Hey wait...there are more new songs in THIS game...I just got the shaft on TnT 3, didn't I?" In any case, if, unlike me, you did not get shafted by buying both games at about the same time, then the musical selection isn't that bad. You can dodge the awful tracks pretty easily and find something that is groovable for you.
Overall
Donkey Konga doesn't really scream value to me. Of course, it is the first installment of the series, and the first game of Taiko no Tatsujin did set me back a bit as well. However, this game carries the added stigma of being a shameless rip-off of that game. I'm guessing Nintendo was hoping there weren't too many people who owned a GC and a PS2 because they'd recognize the game as being a TnT knock-off right away. I'm giving this a lower score than the first Taiko no Tatsujin game for two reasons.
First off, Donkey Konga's Tarukonga feels flimsy. The drums are too small to give a solid thump with your hand and so the layer of abstraction that's supposed to be formed there (i.e. you feel like you're playing an instrument, not hitting buttons on a controller.) is VERY quickly peeled back.
Second...it's a follower. This game's already been done. Granted Nintendo may have a larger catalog of music to cull from when churning out future versions of the game...but the insistence on Namco forcing Namco-owned and Namco Original music into the game are what eventually drove me away from Taiko no Tatsujin...they'd only be doing the same thing here.
All in all, this would be a fun rental. (Assuming it comes over here and you can find a place to rent it and the drums.) If you're lucky and you have a friend like me who's already plunked down the cash for the game, you'll have a pretty good time messing with it. If you're the one buying it, unless you've got a fairly big chunk of change burning a hole in your wallet, pass and import Taiko no Tatsujin on the PS2 instead. (Or wait for its possible Stateside release.) If you already have Taiko no Tatsujin...pass altogether.
