Just over a year after it first released, Donkey Kong Country Returns HD – a port of a now 15-year-old Wii game – has received a new playable character alongside Switch 2 enhancements.
Obviously, Nintendo is big on Donkey Kong again with the theme park, rumored movie, and the best game of 2025, Donkey Kong Bananza. But it's easy to forget that Bananza wasn't the only DK release in 2025, as a remaster of Donkey Kong Country Returns sneaked out in January and was swiftly forgotten about, aside from the complaints about its price and missing visual effects.
Except, it turns out Nintendo didn't forget about it at all, as out of the blue it has released a new update for the game. It not only includes upgrades for Nintendo Switch 2, including enhanced visuals and making the loading screens less miserable, but more significantly, Donkey Kong Country Returns now has Dixie Kong as a companion character. She's seemingly ported directly from Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, but for a 2010 Wii game to get a new playable character over 15 years later, in a free update released a year after the remastered version, this is one of the weirdest Nintendo moves in recent memory.
Of course the question is now, why the hell didn't the original release have this? Donkey Kong Country Returns HD has to have been one of the most scrutinized first-party Nintendo releases of all time given that it was a full priced re-release of a Wii game that was not only from 2010, but cheaper then than it was for the Switch version. Not that Dixie Kong would make the cost worth it, but it would definitely have been a far better reason to pick the re-release up.
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