Rare Appreciation Thread

[Kriven]

Chunky's inclusion in DK64 has to do with Rare's approach to protagonist during the early-polygon era. The philosophy seems to be that protagonists are always the middle ground--they aren't the fastest, the strongers, the highest jumper, but they are proficient enough at all of those things not to be left in the dust. When it came time to create specialized obstacles for the DK Krew, Donkey Kong was given the vanilla protagonist path and there needed to be a more generic "strongman" character to do the heavy lifting.

I don't really agree with that methodology, because it does strip away some of the more defining aspects of a character and create a lot of confusion in other areas (like Diddy Kong suddenly being a lightweight character when he should be about as large as Mario and played the middle ground in Diddy Kong Racing). That's what was going on there, though.