Dark Donald is one of the most notorious edits of Ronald McDonald made for Mugen, kickstarting the trend of making increasingly overpowered edits of Kishio's interpretation of the fast-food mascot. Notable changes include a drastic increase in attack speed, his projectile specials throwing out many times more projectiles, and the Z and C buttons serving a purpose, The Z button makes Dark Donald instantly teleport behind the opponent while the C button is a shortcut to his most notable special attacks, holding directional inputs changes the special used like in Super Smash Bros.
He also has several new specials and supers in his moveset such as Dark Turbo and McGhost Wave. Once trapped in a combo for long enough or having received too much damage in one hit, Dark Donald will burst out with giant hamburgers flooding the screen, basically guaranteeing a win against weaker characters. When less than 40% of his health remains, he gains access to a desperation super known as Element Master which has 8 possible outcomes, as well as a rare chance of summoning all 8 at once. Apart from this ability, he also can summon two powerful attacks to damage the enemy, they are not a part of the "Elemental Master" Statedef but they work in the same way. (Being summoned when Dark Donald is low on health.) His "Hanva-Ga-DA!" super which required you to have less than 50% health in Kishio's original can now be used at 80% health, along with a special winpose being added if the opponent is defeated with this move, further cementing the move being a copy of Dio Brando's "Road Roller DA". Dark Donald also has a 1/1000 chance of landing a critical hit dealing 100 additional damage in most palettes but is buffed to 9999 damage in Palette 12.
Possible Elemental Master Summons & Other Random Attacks[]
Dark Donald has the ability to summon 8 (9 if you count the "all-in-one" version) different helper-based attacks during the battle. This is triggered through a variable randomizer that chooses between 1-10 to determine an effect to be spawned on the stage (or all of them if it's set to 10.)
The black hole attack can be triggered manually through the "wtf" command.
Tornado Attack[]
Dark Donald will spawn a tornado that will move across the stage and pull every opponent towards itself. When opponents come into contact with the tornado, they will receive continuous medium damage and also will be launched into the sky. This attack is enough to kill a normal character.
"Cripsy" Attack[]
Dark Donald will summon fire covering the entire floor of the stage. The opponent will start to receive continuous medium/low damage when standing in the fire. After a while a fire pillar will rise beneath the opponent dealing continuous high damage to them. Like the previous attack, this one is also capable of killing a normal character on its own.
Lightning Attack[]
Dark Donald summons two lightning attacks that start to move towards each other. Any opponent that comes into contact with them will get stunned and receive low continuous damage.
Yukkuri Helper[]
Aside from offensive moves, Dark Donald is also capable of summoning a helper in the form of a Yukkuri of Reimu Hakurei. The helper will fall from the sky and after a short while, both the Yukkuri and Dark Donald will start to flash red. During this period Dark Donald will regenerate a lot of hp and also charge his power bar way faster. After few seconds the Yukkuri will despawn.
If Dark Donald KOs his opponent during the time he's being healed by the Yukkuri, the helper will display one of two unique winposes, one where she winks to the camera and another where she does a cheering pose while playing Cirno's theme from Touhou Hisoutensoku. During the latter winpose the round will not end automatically, and the user will have to press a button to force the game to progress. (Second Image)
Ice Blizzard Attack[]
Dark Donald will summon a blizzard across the entire stage. The opponent will barely receive any damage but will be frozen and incapable of moving instead.
Stone Attack[]
Dark Donald will disappear and start to summon falling boulders from the sky that shatter into smaller rocks upon hitting the ground or enemy. All of those can damage the opponent. After a shorter while red pillars from his McShake will also spawn for a brief moment before Dark Donald appears back on stage.
"Holy Judgment" Attack[]
Dark Donald will disappear and start to summon holy attacks that spawn across the entire stage and damage opponents. This attack is also very likely to KO a normal character on its own.
"Meteo" Attack[]
Dark Donald's strongest attack out of the Elemental Master kit. In this attack Dark Donald will disappear and summon a huge meteor from the top of the stage that will slowly head towards the ground. When the Meteor hits the ground the screen will briefly flash white and deal massive damage to the enemy, often resulting in an OHKO even against cheap characters.
"All in one" Attack[]
As the name states, Dark Donald simply summons every variant of Elemental Master during one use.
"BLACK JUDGMENT" Attack[]
During this attack Dark Donald will disappear while red beams rain from the sky dealing high damage to the opponent. This attack like many on this list is definitely capable of killing a normal character instantly.
"Black Hole" Attack[]
The strongest attack Dark Donald can use. While it usually only triggers if the "Meteo" attack is somehow attacked. It can also be manually triggered by the "wtf" command.
During this attack Dark Donald disappears while summoning a Darkja that deals massive damage to the enemies and most likely is a nuke tech, as it is capable of landing an OHKO on cheap characters including opposing versions of himself.
Trivia[]
This character comes with a config file which allows you to modify various settings, most notably is a setting to disable a randomized jump-scare at the start of round 2 inspired by The_None's Giygas. Other options are usually used to weaken the character, such as turning off helpers that help him avoid being grabbed aswell as turning off Elemental Master and "divine beams" that are present when he's hit in his 12th pallette.
When pitted against Oni-Miko Reimu, he will usually go into an endless dance as Caramelldensen plays in the background. He has no hurtboxes or hitboxes in this state. If Dark Donald is in his 12th palette against Oni-Miko Reimu, he will instead show NSFW artwork of Reimu before a portrait of Ronald with a lustful look makes a comment in Japanese before crashing the game.
In his 10th palette he along with the background are pitch black hiding himself from the enemy, this is ineffective against AI controlled characters as they are able to read their opponent's position.
His character select portrait is a reference to the cover of Aphex Twin's Richard D. James album A link to where Donalddesu most likely got the portrait from
Notable Edits[]
(this section mostly counts strict edits of dark donald that are a contribution to the character/general expansion of it, for this reason edits like dark evil donald and such will not be counted, same goes for characters like the will of darkness-r or excellent donald revenge style as they are not really an edit of dark donald.)
Sadist Donald[]
This edit of dark donald has the color changed to red aswell has a red palfx applied on all palletes, Released somewhere around 2013.
The most notable difference is that Sadist Donald features a BGM,is immune to superpause/timestop, has a improved custom state immunity (base dark donald only escapes custom states that are movetype H and arent states 5000-5999 and 120-160, plus if vars 57 or 58 aren't 1, although Sadist features the same two codes repeated 2 times in a row, it features a extra sysvar(2) selfstate for it, while there's actually two of them only the 16500 works due to it having priority over the selfstate of 12340, instead of making it random between the two), more stronger palettes (9p being the most resistent of them all due to it being forced into a selfstate every frame), and has a poison/life drain effect on his attacks. His hypers such as Darkja are way more spammy, Another thing to note is that the oni miko reimu and a few specific character codes have been removed from -2 and others besides the intro code (Most likely cause it wouldn't be needed as much as the original) even the option text file was removed by default. (This is because the 5900 state was replcaed with one featuring a null that doesn't trigger, which explains the reason why Sadist Donald doesn't play any intros by default)
Trivia[]
The edit features a "Donald9999.cns" file that takes up to 8 MB, the file contains bunch of nulls that are supposed to be used on 10p, but some of them have their respective selfstates commented on -2, The selfstates and some of the nulls look similar to those of "Debugger", whose can do directdeath and freeze the enemy, so 10p might've been intended to have directdeath via hitpausetime then freeze the opponent in the same way, but it didn't work out correctly.
While he has 75% of the exact same mechanics as the original Dark Donald, including the infamous NoKO minorly edited from the base Rare Akuma(alongside featuring extra ones to protect him against Declaration of Death), it doesn't work as well in here due to the original lifeadds and defencemulsets being removed (those are the codes that allowed the original dark donald to survive in such a way), thus the reason why he's "easier" to defeat (despite this claim clearly being untrue for the reasons listed above) although palettes that aren't 1 have a lifeadd that actually let Sadist Donald live longer ala original Dark Donald.
For whatever reason, there's states 170, 175, 180, 5000, 5030, 5100, 5110 and 5900 that have nothing but nulls which their triggers are 0, despite this these are overwritten by the default ones as they have priority over them. (except 175 and 5900, the latter being the reason why intros don't work by default)
A minor coding error prevents a helper called "SPSummon" to spawn, the triggeralls expect palnos to be 9 to 11, but there's a problem, one individual triggerall is expecting palno to be 7, despite the former triggerall, and such, it conflicts between the two, causing the helper to not spawn overall, the helper is one with a huge CLSN1 as wel as a reversal that triggers TargetLifeAdd every frame, and a targetstate on roundstates that aren't 2, simply put, this helper is a killer reversal, if it weren't for this coding error, Sadist Donald could've been more stronger, to the point that he could defeat even the orginal one. (by the way, there's just not one, or two, but TEN variants of spsummon in just Donald.cns, and as such, it's hard to point out which SPsummon is the original one, but the used ones are one that has the coding error, and one in a state numbered "4501", alongside featuring unused commented helpers & codes with weird triggers and a spsummon that has the id "30510" and "3052", spaghetti code much?)
Super Dark Donald[]
This edit's most known feature is that its way more resistant than dark donald (albeit a bit flawed due to the fact that the NoKO being outdated as it is from Dark Sanders's 12p minorly edited),aside from that it features other small changes such as the ability to charge his power,incresaed time of "hanva-ga-da", more jumpscare pictures and sounds, and the "unhappy set" attack breaking the opponent's block.
Trivia[]
Unlike the original, Super Dark Donald while facing ONI Miko Reimu will instantly go into the Carameldansen state (or the NSFW state if 12p) rather than waiting for roundstate 2, skipping over the intro against her.
Dark Donald ΑΡΓΥΦΕΟΣ / Dark Donald Silver[]
This one is a way more recent edit than the previous ones mentioned here, It features an entire overhaul to a gray/white silver-like theme and most of his sounds have an echo effect. Its defense and attack is greatly improved to the point of being stronger than super dark donald's. Aside from the base changes this edit features alot of new "fullscreen" attacks and visual tweaks during them such as lifebars moving to bottom of the screen.
Excellent Dark Donald[]
WIP (will be a seperate article soon.)