The numbers of inconsistencies and plot holes present in Nintendo's Donkey Kong franchise are vast, and unfortunately, rather prevalent. This is not the mere kind of "A snowman appeared in the desert level" level of plot hole, this is the "We didn't bother to think through our main franchise characters, the ones we will be using as figureheads to sell our titles, very well at all."
I went into depth on why the Donkey Kong we have today is definitely the same they had thirty years ago, and in that article I used one of the other errors as a sight gag. In 1999, RareWare, then owned by bigwig Nintendo, released a follow-up to their successful Donkey Kong Country trilogy: Donkey Kong 64. This was the first Donkey Kong game to put the big guy in the starring role for quite a while, and he was accompanied by a slew of other Kongs. Naturally, we were once again paired with the heroic Diddy Kong, Donkey's smooth talking nephew, but we were also introduced to the sibling of Dixie Kong. Tiny Kong, as she came to be known, was the youngest of the playable Kongs in the game, and she was also the smallest. These were the pigtailed primate's defining features.
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| Then they took it all away. |
Suddenly out of the blue, she was changed. Diddy Kong Racing DS appeared on store shelves, and it brought with it a tall, curving, gypsy hooker monkey who had the gall to call herself "Tiny." This failed attempt at sex appeal was certainly not the Tiny Kong I knew, and neither was it the sexy I knew. Maybe it's because I've become pretty ape-phobic in past months, and know that a blowjob in this department could easily end in one of the most atrocious things a man could conceive, but no matter how far in the air they place her ass, and how close to the ground they dangle her hair, I am never going to find this monkey arousing.
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| Well, at least she isn't Tranny- I mean!- Candy Kong. |
The sudden change didn't cause much of a buzz, because frankly, most people don't really give a shit. But I did. And I still do. I give lots of shits. At least once a month I try to figure out how Nintendo could go back and create a game to explain what happened to the poor, innocent child chimp that I knew and loved and used to beat the stuffing out of demonic jack-in-the-boxes. Why she became the prostitute of the jungle. What happened to make her older than her supposedly "big" sister, Dixie. And just who her pimp is.
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| My guess is Swanky. |
Nintendo has always been a little iffy when it came to the continuity of their titles, but for the most part, they managed to avoid randomly aging characters with established family and plot relations. This is what happens when the company doesn't care about continuity, and doesn't respect the franchise they have. This is what happens when a developer takes the mentality that something is "just a game" and doesn't appreciate video games as a story telling medium. While it's all fine and dandy on occassion, you know, in spinoffs and such, it doesn't really work when there's a continuity involved.
For my closing comments I will tell you my theory on how Tiny came to be.
Baron K. Roolenstein built a device in the present day, that transported child Tiny into the future. There she met her older herself, who attempted to send her back to the past. Instead, the older Tiny got sent to the past, and the younger Tiny was stranded in the future.
I dig it.
