Skyward Sword was a great Zelda game, that even though it was messy at points , it's still undefeated in terms of story, variations in items and their usage and upgradability throughout the game, dungeons and boss battles. It's not exactly a graphical artwork as Wind Waker or Twilight Princess where, but it had many things I wish Breath of the Wild had.
Bruh, SS's story comes across as Link's allies overly complicating his journey, only sometimes with the thin justification of having to "test him" and other times by sheer accident.
Bombs are still useless for anything other than broken walls due to it following the "time detonation" system, the Gust Bellows can't do anything other than blow on pinwheels and piles of dirt, the Whip can't do anything other than pull "loop switches", and Bow is gotten way too late in the game to get any mileage.
The dungeons are decent at worst as smaller variants of the classic dungeon formula, but really, dungeons alone can't carry a Zelda game (a well-designed world can though).
Speaking of Zelda, there's objectively no "best Zelda" as all games take a drastically different approach ever since Ocarina of Time. So a "best Zelda" all comes down to taste, as the Zelda games differentiated a lot ever since OoT, which is both a good and a bad thing.
I mean, I do appreciate how each Zelda game even at their worst have tried to be different from one another, but "drastically" is a bit of a stretch. Relying on sword, shield, bow, bombs, and hookshot alongside the two-act structure needed to go; there's only so much they could do relying on the "common items" and two sets of dungeons.
Retro Studios should've been more ambitious with Donkey Kong and shouldn't take so many different projects and instead just master one IP they could make steady releases for.
In general, Donkey Kong as an IP has never been shown the right attention and respect. Even in the days of Rare, it was clear they prioritized their own projects over Donkey Kong after DKC2, sure DKC3 and DK64 where great games but they lack the polish and ambition of the first two platform games. Shameful to see Retro follow their footsteps. Making PAON the only developer who was ever fully committed to the series. This is also mainly the fault of Nintendo and not taking things in hand themselves as soon as they could.
I wish many more Nintendo IPs got the honest but simply approach the Kirby series have. Steady releases for a steady audience with a main development team. Mario, Zelda and Pokemon got this too but it's more understandable with these as they're huge series. But the Kirby approach should really be an end goal for Nintendo's lesser known yet popular series.
Having a team work on one IP year after year after year will bore them and lead to turnover.
I still don't really know that "the right attention and respect" even means to Donkey Kong fans. Regularly releasing platform games that follow the same general format will stagnate the series, and doing that alongside releasing spin-offs is unrealistic for a relatively small Mario sub-franchise.
Even Kirby started to face the problem with stagnation with Star Allies; we were just lucky HAL merely designated Star Allies as the "grand finale" of the 2D Kirby games and were already making plans for the future even during SA's development.
I think a large part of it is that while a lot of Nintendo franchises have had consistent development teams, Donkey Kong has changed hands so many times. That, in turn, leads to each team basically starting from scratch so they can find their footing, and for one reason or another they tend to not stick to the series for long.
Like, Super Mario games and the Zelda games have their own dedicated in-house Nintendo teams. Splatoon and Animal Crossing share a development team that basically trades off between titles, letting them both be released at a nice pace. The Mario Kart team also did ARMS but is otherwise a dedicated Mario Kart team. Monolith Soft consistently makes new Xenoblade games when they're not providing assistance as hired hands for other Nintendo projects. HAL Labs can consistently make Kirby games because those and the BOXBOY games are basically all they make. Intelligent Systems consistently makes not only Fire Emblem games, but also Paper Mario and WarioWare titles, albeit those two at a slower pace than their main bread and butter. Next Level Games has also been, in my opinion, knocking it out of the park with Luigi's Mansion. And Pokémon is basically its own self-sustaining machine.
Now granted, I don't think Retro has any ill will toward the series whatsoever. If they did, it would likely show in the finished products, but DKC Returns and Tropical Freeze definitely had passion poured into them. They've just been busy with other projects for a long while now (their presumably cancelled at this point New IP, and now Metroid Prime 4). And honestly I don't fault them for focusing on Prime 4, since they were the developers of the entire mainline Prime series.
I'm in favor of Nintendo farming their IP out to indie developers, or even mid-size studios or big publishers so they can make spin-offs. I think Nintendo can stand to put together another EPD team, but this team should be dedicated to remakes and remasters of their older games.
Donkey Kong has changed hands...a lot. Started in the arcade with the originals done by Nintendo in-house, then Rare for the Country series and 64, then (I think) back to in-house Nintendo for Jungle Beat, then Paon for Jungle Climber and King of Swing, until finally going to Retro for the newer Country games. This could go one of two ways. They could have Retro make another new DK game once Prime 4 is done, further cementing Retro as their go-to for Donkey Kong, or have it continue to change hands and be caught in a cycle of not knowing what to do next. The latter was the unfortunate fate of F-Zero and Star Fox, with Miyamoto even saying that outsourced titles like Star Fox Adventures and Assault, as well as F-Zero GX, were internally recognized as failures and cautionary tales for outsourcing. And since then we've not gotten a new F-Zero game in 18 years (19 if you don't count the Japan-only Climax) and the only truly new Star Fox game, Zero, is regarded as the most maligned entry in the franchise.
However, if Retro returns to it, it could end up, instead, like 2D Metroid, which seemingly has a very bright future after Mercury Steam released Samus Returns and Dread did very well.
Huh, I guess that explains why Nintendo continues to be very cautious about outsourcing. They seemed to be more open to external collabs towards the end of the Wii U era and beginning of the Switch era because they were letting a whole bunch of studios handle their IPs: Koei Tecmo with Hyrule and Fire Emblem Warriors, Ubisoft with Mario + Rabbids, Brace Yourself with Cadence of Hyrule, and Bandai Namco with Pokkén and New Pokémon Snap. Things just slowed down after that.
I feel like not only Donkey Kong, but also Wario and F-Zero have potential as being handled by outside studios, but Nintendo will need to learn to be less strict with their IP for that to happen.
