My hot take: yes, the Donkey Kong Country graphics looked very impressive at the time, as a technological feat that gave a 3D-rendered appearance on a console not capable of 3D rendering*.
But that doesn’t mean they were actually good.
Nowadays, I think it’s pretty well accepted that rendering your 3D model into sprites is the quick/lazy way to do it, and generally produces inferior results to creating your pixel art by hand to get things like the dithering and appearance after CRT blur is applied just right. Praising these sprites for being 3D-rendered is looking at them a bit with rose-tinted glasses.
More importantly, while Donkey Kong Country may have looked pretty at first glance, IMO it didn’t play as well as a good pixel art platformer like Super Mario World. A big part of the reason for that was that the imprecision of the sprites (leaving the edges at whatever pixel the floating-point-based 3D renderer happened to round them to, as well as in some cases obscuring those edges in shadow) made it harder to tell exactly where the platforms ended and where the character was in relation to them.
(* other than flat-shaded triangles with a SuperFX chip, which is not even close to the complexity of the DKC renders)
My hot take: yes, the Donkey Kong Country graphics looked very impressive at the time, as a technological feat that gave a 3D-rendered appearance on a console not capable of 3D rendering*.
But that doesn’t mean they were actually good.
Nowadays, I think it’s pretty well accepted that rendering your 3D model into sprites is the quick/lazy way to do it, and generally produces inferior results to creating your pixel art by hand to get things like the dithering and appearance after CRT blur is applied just right. Praising these sprites for being 3D-rendered is looking at them a bit with rose-tinted glasses.
More importantly, while Donkey Kong Country may have looked pretty at first glance, IMO it didn’t play as well as a good pixel art platformer like Super Mario World. A big part of the reason for that was that the imprecision of the sprites (leaving the edges at whatever pixel the floating-point-based 3D renderer happened to round them to, as well as in some cases obscuring those edges in shadow) made it harder to tell exactly where the platforms ended and where the character was in relation to them.
(* other than flat-shaded triangles with a SuperFX chip, which is not even close to the complexity of the DKC renders)