YMMV / Donkey Kong '94

• Anti-Climax Boss: Despite the epic buildup and music, the final battle with Donkey Kong plays out almost identically to his other fights. There's some wind in the level, and his barrels create poison mushrooms when broken, but it's still easy to hit him with three barrels. And even when he grows to the size of the entire tower for the real final boss, he can be easily defeated by staying on the platforms, safe from his fists, and pelting him with barrels.
• Awesome Music: The final boss theme is epic and fast-paced, perfectly suitable to the final (actually penultimate) battle against Donkey Kong.
• Cult Classic: While not the most well-known or successful Game Boy game, it enjoys a good-sized following that considers the game to not only be a great puzzle-platformer, but one of the best games on the Game Boy in general.
• Difficulty Spike: While for the most part, the game has a reasonable progression in difficulty and allows for players to put their puzzle solving to the test, Iceberg cranks the difficulty up to almost unfair degrees, with Rocky-Valley being nowhere near as difficult. In particular, 7-7 is filled to the brim with Red Herrings, and the door in 7-11 is outright invisible.
• Even Better Sequel: Some people prefer this to the original arcade game, given how it expands upon the core game in virtually every aspect.
• Fridge Brilliance: Nintendo nowadays says that Mario developed his abilities while chasing DK to save Pauline. Considering that this game actually birthed many mechanics the series would come to tout in later installments (such as the backflip and triple jump), it all comes together nicely.
• Good Bad Bugs: The fact that closing gates are stopped by any tiles Mario can interact with (including temporary ladders) results in an Easy Level Trick for at least one stage. Stage 2-3, to be exact.
• Goddamned Bats: In the most literal sense, they can't even kill you by themselves but they are very annoying.
• It Was His Sled: The game being a Stealth Sequel to the original game rather than a simple port is a very novel surprise if you don't know what you're getting into. Nowadays, however, anyone who's even remotely aware of this game knows it's a sequel.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The time-up theme. Similar to the infamous drowning theme from the Sonic the Hedgehog games, it is a frantic jingle that builds up until Mario dies from running out of time.
  • The music for the Iceberg map. Fittingly for the point where the game begins to get seriously hard, it's pretty much This Is Gonna Suck in music form.
  • The sequence that plays before the title screen is rather chilling: A hole has been broken into a brick wall and eyes peering out from the darkness of the hole with ominous music to match.
  • How about the final level? You beat stage 9-8, Donkey Kong falls to his doom, and everything now seems okay. Wait, what's this? Stage 9-9? Did the giant DK head just smile?!
• Older Than They Think:
  • This is the first game to depict Donkey Kong with his now-iconic necktie, several months before Donkey Kong Country.
  • Several of Mario's moves from the 3D games, such as the backflip and triple jump, made their debut in this game. Mario can even perform a roll if he falls from a certain length, years before Super Mario Odyssey made it a part of his moveset.
• Remade and Improved: While the original arcade game is undeniably a classic, many fans see this game as being a massive improvement of the original game, due to its more refined controls, a much longer campaign and more interesting level design.
• Scrappy Mechanic: While the combat roll Mario does at the end of falls of a certain length certainly helps with Mario's surviving skills compared to the original arcade game, at the same time the animation and momentum of the roll are uninterruptible, so Mario can very well roll straight into an enemy or hazard (or down a hole into a lower portion of a level and simply waste time instead) if you aren't careful.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The first four levels are the levels of the original game. However, Mario starts with all of the upgraded abilities that you get to exploit in this game. Even if you don't know how to do his new moves, this includes improved jump height, improved speed on ladders, and the ability to fall much farther before dying. Consequently, it's much easier to clear the first four levels than it was in the original game. A level in the Tower is much closer to the actual 25 meters, although it's just as easy to get through as the first level with Mario's new moves. The other levels, however, didn't receive the same treatment.
• The Woobie: Pauline is this, once you think about everything she's been through. Getting kidnapped by a giant thuggish ape is bad enough, but being carried away by said ape over the span of a game that lasts more than a hundred stages? Not even Peach has been hauled around this much, or at least never in a single game. She's probably an emotional trainwreck by the time that Mario finally rescues her. It's no wonder that she's been absent for so long from the overall series; it probably took years of therapy for her to recover from the events of this game. Even then, she still hasn't caught a break from being caught in the middle of the disputes of Mario and Donkey Kong (albeit a different one), though she at least managed to be friends with DK this time. She seems to have come out alright down the line though, as she eventually makes a return in Super Mario Odyssey as the mayor of New Donk City — a town that grew from the events of this game (as evidenced by the throwback level being acknowledged as the city's origins) and even getting locations named after the big ape's friends and enemies.

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