Thing is, Donkey Kong Country wasn't developed in Japan, and Metroid by Japan standards is very low on the quirkiness scale.

I want to start by saying that I am a big Donkey Kong fan. I have a very large collection of Donkey Kong games and memorabilia. I have a Donkey Kong standup arcade and every Donkey Kong Game & Watch as well as every Donkey Kong arcade port for every home console going back to the Atari VCS including the system and computers like the Colecovision, Intelivision, Atari 800, and so on. The same goes for Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3. To go along with it all I have vintage 80's Donkey Kong board games, coin banks, toys, figures, tokens, trading cards, books, and more.

I love Donkey Kong. It's a challenging game that can never be perfected. It takes months and years of playing to even break 100,000 points and that's only 1/10 of the official high scores of the best of the best.

When I say I love Donkey Kong you can take that to the bank.

But I don't feel the same about Donkey Kong Country. I have them all and I think they are all quality games. But, to me, they are just average platformer games with no real challenge outside of collectables. I've never been a "gotta get them all" gamer. I finish games far below 100% and when I replay it's not to go after more collectables. It's ironic because I don't care about in-game DK collectables by in real life I collect DK stuff. I also collect Panzer Dragoon, Halo, vintage 80's stuff, and general Sega, Nintendo, and Atari stuff. I guess I only like collectables if I can hold them because collecting those Bananas feels more like a tedious chore than a fun challenge.

So, I don't really care if a new Donkey Kong Country game is made by Retro or anyone else. But I would love to see Donkey Kong go back to his roots and become more of an arcade action game like the original.

Long live the Kong!

Donkey Kong Country Returns is absurdly challenging even when not gunning for collectibles. It's not uncommon to burn through 30 lives in a single level. 

DK Returns is deffinitly the best of the series, imo, but you missed my point entirely. I think the entire series are just "ok" platform games. It's not just about challenge. I love the arcade original for a lot of reasons. My luke warm feelings for DK Country games has to do with the average feel of the gameplay. The SNES games looked great, but I didn't feel like they played great. Mario and Sonic did platforming so right that DK Country just felt wrong to me. Even DK Returns has a clunky feel to it's gameplay when compared to NSMB.

That and I don't care about collecting millions of bananas.

BTW, I've yet to play NSMB2 but I'm sure I'll get it eventualy. I'm hoping the whole coin thing isn't like DK Country.

In that case I can agree. Even though I love the original DKC games, it's more based on nostalgia than love for its controls and level design. DKCR is nearly perfect in those areas, but the platforming is heavier (no surprise - Donkey Kong is huge) and requires item collecting as a means to grind through the difficulty. Definitely a different approach than Mario and Sonic, but that's what I like about it. It could've been a clone of Mario with prettier graphics and Donkey Kong as the main character, but the games strived to be something more, and I love them for it.

I don't think you'll like NSMB2 too much. You already said that you don't play games for completition and didn't like collecting bananas in DKCR. If you ever played a Mario game before, NSMB2 will be far too easy and short, I breezed through it in about 2 hours (only 6 worlds on the "main" route). After the story all there is left to do is completing the star world (requires all star coins, so probably nothing for you) and the coin rush (in which you play about 12 levels from the game over and over again, until you've reached 1 Mio). If you have the possibility to play it I would recommend you NSMBU instead of NSMB2, it is by far the superior game. NSMB2 isn't a bad game, but if compared to NSMBU you see what the main theme developed and what not.

Errr... huh? You misunderstood my post. What I said was: I think Retro are good, but not as good as Nintendo's Japan based teams. 

I still don't see why you think it's 'absurdly challenging'.  I mean, it's harder than MOST games that have come out in the last while, but to call it absurdly challenging tells me you just suck at platformers.  donkey Kong Country 2: diddy's Kong Quest was harder.  Rayman Origins was harder, and Rayman Origins wasn't really that hard.  

Your difficulty tolerance must be miniscule. 

I think DKCR returns was way harder than Rayman Origins. The only hard level was the final one, when I played the game with a few friends it only took us one afternoon and a night to complete the game, 4 or 5 hours of the ~15hrs playtime was the final level. DKCR was still overall a bit harder

Hmm, I thought it was well done. I would like another, or more than one, DKC game from them. One or more on the WiiU, and one on the 3DS.