A new 3D platformer coming to us from the team behind Super Mario Odyssey is a big deal. Odyssey is arguably the greatest 3D platformer of all time, with boundless creativity and an abundance of mechanical perfection and player expression. What does a new game from this team even look like? How incredible would it be? Would it be better than Odyssey? Is that even a fair expectation to have?
Regardless of whether or not it’s fair, it’s clear it’s going to be the immediate comparison for many who play Donkey Kong Bananza, the first new 3D platformer from the Odyssey team since that game’s release almost eight years ago. And the more you play Bananza, the more it becomes evident that the developers understood this fact – and that they may have even taken it as a challenge upon themselves to deliver something even more wildly ambitious and impressive than that game.
Because Bananza takes upon Odyssey’s incredible framework and structure, and then builds on it, tweaks it, and even breaks it, to put its own stamp on the 3D platformer genre, and evolve it in altogether new ways. There is an argument to be made that Bananza is the greatest 3D platformer Nintendo has ever released – which is almost unrealistically, hyperbolically high praise.
And yet it is true. Donkey Kong Bananza is such a staggeringly inventive and incredible game, with such fantastic design where in spite of the endless capacity for nearly unrestrained player expression, it always feels like the developers anticipated and pre-empted your actions; it is a game that truly feels like the next generation of the collectathon platformer, responding to pretty much any player input with a permissive “yes”, and rewarding them for thinking outside the bounds of traditional 3D game design.
The signature mechanic to the game that characterizes this more than anything else is, of course, the destructibility. Pretty much everything that you see in the game can be grabbed, torn off, smashed, punched through, and destroyed in any number of ways. This leads to an incredibly unique 360º degree style of traversal and movement that most platformers, even 3D platformers, simply don’t have.
Platformers are defined by very strongly outlined limitations – how fast the character can go, how far they can jump, and so on. Bananza dispenses with this almost entirely, letting DK burrow into anything, anywhere. In combination with his ability to climb any surface without limitation – no stamina meter to keep track of – this means you can go almost anywhere within the 3D space of the levels, something the game anticipates and seems to outright expect, given how many rewards and collectibles are hidden in this manner that would feel almost impossibly out of the way in any other game.
This might sound like it undermines the deliberate design that one might expect from a good 3D platformer, but as mentioned, that never feels the case, and the game always seems to have anticipated how the player will engage with the world, and manages to nudge and guide them to a direction where their efforts and curiosity will be rewarded.
It also helps that the actual action of destruction is so versatile – you aren’t limited to just punching and smashing through things, but you can pick things up, throw and hurl them at other things or distant targets, swing broken chunks into enemies and obstacles, and even use it for all sorts of movement tech, including tearing off a chunk and using it as a makeshift platform to double jump off of, or using it to skateboard on, smashing into any enemies or obstacles along the way and causing even more destruction in your wake.
“Bananza uses excellent visual cues to guide the player’s eye.”
“Destruction” feels almost reductive as a descriptor here then, with how endlessly expressive this action seems to be. You can throw explosive things to cause explosions. You can punch through terrain, and how strong it is, and how strong your blow is, determines how much you destroy.
The verb of “destroying” therefore feels infinitely mutable, and allows for a kind of movement based level design that is unlike anything seen in a platformer yet. The fact that the actual feel of controlling DK through his heavy movements and smashing through everything is so immaculate and responsive to player input only serves to make the action feel even more enjoyable to engage with every chance you get.
Engaging with it is where the true genius of Bananza’s design comes into play. Even without destroying anything, Bananza gives players a fun sandbox with lots to discover and places to poke around in. But the more you destroy, the more you discover, with some of the best challenges and areas of the game hidden under the seemingly unassuming surface.
I say seemingly unassuming because Bananza uses excellent visual cues to guide the player’s eye. This can be something as simple as a slight crack or bump for you to investigate, but owing to the unique nature of Bananza’s design, you get more, including a “sonar” that highlights things hidden and buried in your immediate vicinity, and treasure maps that you can find frequently as you dig around, and which highlight the locations of valuable collectibles in the level.
All put together, then, the game creates this excellent, incredible loop where it’s leading the player along via visual cues, resulting in them destroying things, resulting in them getting rewards that then lead them to the next visual cue, and so on. You can lose literally hours to Donkey Kong Bananza and not even realize it. Even the earlier levels in the game are endlessly complex and stuffed with rewards for the enterprising player, and the later ones are ambitious and impressive, many of them could have gotten away with being entire games by themselves.
You’re not just destroying things either, as Donkey Kong Bananza is practically an action adventure game with how comprehensive and varied its gameplay outside of the core platforming tends to be. Exploring the various subterranean layers that you find yourself on leads to you finding not just rewards, but also currency, NPCs who give you quests, entire villages and settlements with different kinds of stores to buy helpful gear and items from.
“The story starts out simple, but the stakes escalate steadily through the game’s substantial campaign.”
Collecting the central collectible of the game, the Banandium Gems, which are the equivalent of Moons in Odyssey, has another benefit for the player, as collecting five of them nets you one skill point that can be used to unlock perks and skills from a skill tree. These can be as simple as levelling up your health and your attack, to unlocking entirely new skills and tech, such as the ability to surf over bodies of water on a chunk of stone.
The multiple different kinds of collectibles, as well as the central collectibles also feeding into a skill tree, dress the singular, core issue that many had with Mario Odyssey, and even other Nintendo titles such as Breath of the Wild – the fact that every action in the game led to the exact same kind of reward meant that many were disincentivized from engaging with parts of the game.
The fact that there are so many different kinds of rewards here, usually scaling to the degree of effort they required from the player, and able to be leveraged in other different ways – such as exchanging for gear, or upgrading your skills – means the game is a lot better at dangling the promise of a meaningful reward for the player than several other of Nintendo’s “make your own fun” school of design titles have done.
For players who do want more traditional platforming challenges, however, Bananza still delivers. Its sandboxes are littered with self-contained areas with themed challenges that you can take on for a reward. These are incredibly varied, and can involve everything from destruction, combat, traversal, to some good old fashioned hardcore platforming. There’s a near endless supply of these challenges in the world, and they always manage to surprise.
Those mini-challenge areas are framed in what become increasingly more elaborate and inventive sandbox levels the further down into the earth you burrow. Every level in the game is a whole new subterranean layer, and while things start out fairly vanilla in terms of theming, soon they go off the rails and lead to some truly out there and varied aesthetics and their implementation in gameplay mechanics.
“Bananza represents the next step for platformers.”
This, of course, should come as a surprise to no one – it’s something Nintendo in general has always been great at, and this team in particular flexed this skill hard with Super Mario Odyssey. Seeing it return here bigger and better tracks.
Bananza represents the next step for platformers not just in terms of mechanics and design, however – surprisingly enough, it is also the next step for Nintendo platformers narratively. Surprisingly enough, Bananza is a far more story focused game than not just any other Nintendo platformer to date, but most in-house Nintendo titles in general.
The story starts out simple, but the stakes escalate steadily through the game’s substantial campaign, with the finale and everything leading up to it in particular standing out as absolutely legendary. A lot of the game’s narrative heft comes not necessarily from the story as much as the focus on the characters and their pathos, particularly Donkey Kong and the talented young singer Pauline, whom he finds himself accompanying in her quest to get back home to the surface.
Mercifully enough, Nintendo has also, in recognition of the game’s heftier narrative, gone all in on the storytelling and production values. This is a fully voice acted game, although Pauline, as the only human character, is the only one who speaks a human language – everyone else is speaking some made up animal gibberish. That gibberish still sounds charming and emotive, although it is Pauline’s performance that steals the show here. To Nintendo’s credit, Pauline’s voice has been dubbed in every single language the game supports, which extends to not just her dialog but every the songs she sings as well.
DK and Pauline partnering in the story also leads to the game’s most surprising mechanic – the eponymous Bananzas. These are essentially time limited transformations for DK that occur when Pauline sings (yes, really), and enhance is physical prowess.
“At 1440p, it runs at a far higher resolution than anything on the previous generation Switch could manage.”
You unlock multiple different Bananzas as you play the game, and their abilities range from boosting your speed to giving you flight to letting you hit things a lot harder – and more. Bananzas can be activated anywhere with no limitation, and different kinds can be changed together with zero cooldown as well, allowing you to start chaining together some seriously impressive moves and movement tech. Bananzas can also be powered up on the skill tree, making the skill points you get via Banandium Gems that much more valuable.
Donkey Kong Bananza is one of the first games exclusive for the Nintendo Switch 2, and it does a pretty good job of showing off the system’s various capabilities and features. At 1440p, it runs at a far higher resolution than anything on the previous generation Switch could manage, and the game’s level density, geometry, and complexity is far beyond Super Mario Odyssey.
It runs at an impressive mostly locked 60 frames per second through all the mayhem (and there is so much mayhem) players wreak. Things generally look good, though the game’s stylized visuals is definitely not going to appeal to everyone, particularly when it comes to the character designs. It makes a good case for the system’s VRR ability (in portable mode), smoothing over those aforementioned drops when they do happen a lot better in handheld mode than in TV mode, shows off the mouse functionality of the Joycons extremely well in the new Mario Paint style sculpting toolkit it gives players, and even leverages the enhanced HD Rumble in the Switch 2 and its controllers with great haptic feedback as you smash your way through the levels.
One part of the game that merits a special shout is the camera. This is something that can feel almost off puttingly poor the first time players dig underground, particularly if you attempt to manipulate it the same way as the camera in any other game. However, the more you come to grips with it, the more it reveals itself to be an extremely smart camera that allows for full 360º movement in cramped quarters without letting the player lose sight of where DK is, and where the camera is framing things from.
“Designing a camera that works well in a game like Bananza can’t have been easy.”
Designing a camera that works well in a game like Bananza can’t have been easy – typically, you don’t get many third person games that focus on movement, allow 360º traversal, and take place in very cramped and confined quarters. Even something like Minecraft, which involve near free movement in cramped underground areas, are first person, meaning there is zero separation between controlling the character, and controlling the camera – something that isn’t true for a third person game like Bananza. It can definitely take a couple of hours to stop fighting the camera – but when you do, it becomes almost reflexive, and you can get it to do what you need it to do without even thinking about it.
Every now and then Nintendo releases a new game that shows off why, in spite of all the backlash the company can generate from its business decisions, it is considered one of the finest developers around; a title that demonstrates an immaculate understanding of the craft of making games, a game that has an innate, inherent knack to be compelling and engaging for the player almost effortlessly, to the degree that few other games or developers are able to exhibit.
Donkey Kong Bananza is such a game. Staggering in its scope and ambition, towering in its variety, and nearly immaculate in its execution, Bananza lays a credible claim to being the best platformer Nintendo has ever made, and arguably their best game this side of Breath of the Wild. The Switch 2 has its first killer app.
This game was reviewed on the Nintendo Switch 2.
