The original Mario vs. Donkey Kong for Game Boy Advance was fine 20 years ago. It took the action-puzzle-platformer game format that had been established in 1994’s Donkey Kong on Game Boy, made it full-color, expanded on the gameplay to add variety, and was in general a solid little game. Bite-sized levels were perfect on the GBA, and it had a bunch of them.

20 years have transpired and instead of making another sequel, they just remade the second game. This is probably actually better than trying to make another sequel, because after this game they went off the deep end of touch control interfaces and it stopped being an action-puzzle-platformer and started being “What if Lemmings but worse?”

As I have discussed in the past, this game begs for the creation of a new term on the port-remaster-remake spectrum. Time for a brief diversion.

My understanding is that the spectrum as it exists today is:

  • Port - We took the game from here, and put it over there. Ex: ROM Collections, releases to platforms after initial release, etc.
  • Remaster - We took an old game but removed all former hardware limitations. Max framerate, max resolution, maybe re-rendered textures, maybe higher quality audio. Basically the same game but significantly prettier. Ex: “Enhanced Editions”, “HD” re-releases, basically anything re-released between console generations.
  • Remake - We took an old game and chaos-dunked it into the trash. We found the design documents, and started from there, almost certainly changing things along the way. Ex: All the Resident Evil RE-makes, the FF7R trilogy, the Dead Space remake, etc.

But then there’s the approach this and other similar games took, that Nintendo seems particularly fond of. Like a commonly-understood remake, all assets, code, engine, and so on are all immediately binned… but instead of going back to the design documents and working from there, they DIRECTLY remake the old game but on modern technology, staying true to the original all the way down to re-implementing 30 year old bugs.

What the hell do you call that? It’s not a remaster, that implies it’s literally the original product but better. It’s not a reenvisioned game, because it explicitly is not changing anything. To me, remake is the correct term: it’s literally the same game but they remade it from scratch, and ended up with the same game.

Maybe add a qualifier of “obsessive” to remake? I don’t know, but we need to come up with something, because there is an INCREDIBLE difference between something like RE4 Remake and Mario vs. Donkey Kong.

It looks nice. It plays well enough. There’s some jank in the basic move abilities, but it’s authentic jank. There’s two new tilesets which effectively means 4 new worlds and 4 extra bonus levels, bringing the grand total of levels up from 102 to 136… but the levels are all still short, and still very easy. Across all 136 I think I had to look up hints on 3 maps, and in all cases the puzzle wasn’t “tricky” or “difficult” it was just obtuse. I burned through it in few days worth of nightly 2 hour play sessions.

Anyone remotely familiar with the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series should probably skip it, this is not a game for fans of the series. The purpose of this game is to introduce the game to new fans for $50 instead of dropping the original on Switch Online. Not Recommended (in most cases).