EDaring Do and the Tie Wearing Kong

• MLP: FiM
• Adventure
• Thriller

Adventure calls as Daring Do heads towards a newly discovered island in search for artifacts. What she finds however is a gorilla wearing a tie with the letters 'DK' on it.

• Crossover
• Other
• Daring Do

Amereep · 69k words  ·  68  2 · 2.7k views

I don’t quite specialize in crossovers and I must confess that the Donkey Kong genre is one that is mostly unfamiliar to me. However, I was specifically requested by the author to give this fic a (long overdue) review, so I’ll give it my best crack.

The story to me comes off as a fun adventure story, with a lighter touch than one might expect given the thriller tag. Tie Wearing Kong does handle the crossover concept rather nicely, and Daring Do is an excellent character to bridge the gap between these two franchises. 

Let’s hit it. 

Daring Do, everyone’s favorite adventurer travels to the distant Melee Island, in search of a mysterious artifact. However, she quickly discovers that Doctor Caballeron has arrived already and as usual, he’s up to no good. Daring quickly encounters the natives of the island, including DK himself, and the two quickly realize they must work together to stop King Krule and Caballeron.

The story is filled to the brim of typical aspects of an adventure story. There are riddles, dangerous temples, dozens of henchmen, and traps galore. I’m not exactly sure if this edges into the tropey category, but I’ll return to that point in a minute.

It’s clear that this story is rife with references to the game it’s borrowing from and possibly several other franchises as well. Now given that I’m a rather dense individual these probably went over my head. But still, I think that even if the concepts at play aren’t exactly brand new, the author sets them up and executes them well. The overall tone of the story is again light-hearted, and the execution largely follows in this manner.

Let’s go back to the earlier point I made. I think someone could make the argument that parts of this story are too tropey, but I disagree. I think that it actually suits the manner of the story quite well. Something that affected my reading of this story was that it definitely feels brighter and less gritty than other adventure stories. And that’s perfectly fine if that’s what the author wants to do!

To clarify, I’m fairly confident that the author wanted to tell the story in this manner based on a few factors. There are several parts of the story that are quite silly, with jokes and character chemistry. I don’t mean silly in the bad way, I only mean it in the sense that this to me is a story designed to make you smile.

There’s one more note I’ll make here about the pacing of this story. The author picks a peculiar path with their word counts, and as the story goes on the word counts get longer and longer. This has a strange side effect of the story feeling much longer than it really is, and at times it seems to drag on a little bit. Could this be fixed? Perhaps, if the author shuffled some things around so the word count was more even throughout the story. But should it be fixed? I’m not certain and will leave that up to the author. 

There were quite a few characters throughout the story, each of them with roles of varying importance. 

Daring Do was played more comedic here than other depictions of her being more gritty and serious like Lara Croft for example. The author makes a comedic aside to her being afraid of spiders, and generally just having to deal with the actions of the other characters. However, I think there’s enough here for me to confidently say this felt like Daring Do. 

With Donkey Kong and co, the characterization gets a bit tougher. I think that the author made a really great choice in having the language barrier be a factor at play here, with Daring struggling to communicate with the other kongs.

DK himself is pretty straightforward. He isn’t quite the sharpest tool in the shed, to the chagrin of Daring, but he’s a pretty fun hero to follow. His sort of klutzy nature balances out well with Daring’s skills and experience, and I liked the way they played off of each other.

There are a lot of other characters who come and go throughout the story, including Ahuitzol and Caballeron and other characters from the DK franchise. I will say that the minor characters didn’t really have much to them, and I think the author meant them more as references for fans of the Donkey Kong franchise to enjoy. They do have their own quirks, but it feels a lot of information about them is meant to be inferred from the genre rather than described by the author.

One of the biggest problems I did have with the story was with the technical aspect. And I hate to be a stickler about it, but I felt I had to bring it up.

First of all, the story has quite a few tense inconsistencies. The author shifts between present and past tense fluidly, sometimes in the same sentence:

The air is fresh, the wind is plenty, and the pegasus was sleeping in the cargo hold.

In this instance, the ‘is’ indicates present tense, but the ‘was’ indicates past tense, which can be jarring to the reader. 

There are also a few instances where dialogue tags are not connected properly with the tag.

“You're welcome." spoke the pegasus in an annoyed tone from the fact that he didn't even thank her.

When connecting tags, the period at the end of the dialogue should be a comma. 

I’d recommend the author find an editor to help flush out these errors.

On a final note, the presentation of this story is not something I’d consider to be in my wheelhouse. But, I respect the fact that this largely is a more comical and light hearted story, so any minor quips I have about the presentation and prose can be dismissed. Just because I don’t like direct character introductions and onomatopeias doesn’t make them wrong. In this context, I think it’s best if I look past them.

All in all, this was a fun little adventure that presents itself in a whimsical manner. The plotline and execution all reflect this fact very well, and while I was expecting a daker, more action-packed vein of a story, this didn’t disappoint me. 

Sure, the prose may need some technical work and the story may feel like it drags on towards the end, but if you can get invested in this story, I think you might enjoy it. 

If you’re looking for an adventure tale that isn’t dark or gritty, you may enjoy this one.

Sorry this took so long, but I’m just now getting back into the reviewing saddle so to speak. I know you’ve been anticipating this for a long time and I hope it was worth the wait! 

7361771

It’s clear that this story is rife with references to the game it’s borrowing from and possibly several other franchises as well.

There actually are a lot of references that aren't based towards Donkey Kong, about half of them. Many of them are from other games, but I've made references to movies like Indiana Jones, TV series like Ducktales, even real individuals like Koko the Gorilla. In fact, if you Google the name of the island the story takes place on (Melee Island), you'll be treated to a video game called, 'The Secret of Monkey Island' (thought it'd be appropriate sense we're dealing with primates).

I’d recommend the author find an editor to help flush out these errors.

You're not the first one to suggest that I should get an editor. I'm a bit of a hypocrite where I tend to have trust issues with most of the things I work on. I might want it written one way to imply foreshadow or to make a little joke, and lending it off to someone who could change that is very uncomfortable.

I've been trying to make it a habit on keeping an eye out for the errors like the ones you mentioned in my recent works and try to fix the ones I was unaware of back then myself (this story took 2 and a half years to make, there's bound to be a lot in earlier chapters).

Sorry this took so long, but I’m just now getting back into the reviewing saddle so to speak. I know you’ve been anticipating this for a long time and I hope it was worth the wait!

Don't worry about it. It was a request, a franchise you're unfamiliar with, and you had a lot of other stories that also needed to be reviewed. It'd be insensitive if I bullied you to get something done that you're willingly giving your time for.

I did post this story to Equestria Daily, but it was denied after waiting a month and all I got back was a short description telling me that they only read the first chapter, so seeing you placing more of an effort then they did really lightened my spirit.

They told me pretty much what you said on past and present tense of speaking (I thought I got them all during the long delay of your review (Google Docs is not to be trusted anymore)). They also told my that it's loaded with unnecessary exposition (like informing the fruits that grow on the island) which I found odd as I was only setting a mood and painting a scenery. My guess as to why they said this is because of the overflow of stories they might get regularly, so attention is something they don't have much to spare (which reestablishes that the wait for your review didn't bother me).

If your prolong analysis has done anything to me, it only made me wonder if you were studying up on the Donkey Kong franchise.

But anyways, thank you again for your time on making this review.