GAME CLEAR No. 298 -- Donkey Kong Bananza

Donkey Kong Bananza (2025, Switch 2)

Developer: Nintendo EPD
Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Version: Switch 2
Clear Platform: Switch 2
Clear Date: 5/26/26

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Why should I care?
Running around and breaking stuff makes me feel good.

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That’s why I love Nestlé Crunch

Despite purchasing a Switch 2 at launch (which this generation was somehow the money move), I’ve only finally gotten around to arguably the strongest of its few true exclusives. The Donkey Kong platformer had been on a 11-year hiatus, but the series has never been appointment playing for me. In fact, I think the original Donkey Kong Country series by Rare is one of video games’ most overrated. Retro’s admirable pair of DKC titles from the 2010s are significantly better but still nothing extraordinary. So, I was in no rush to hang out with DK again, but this one was met with pretty rave reviews, and its terraforming gameplay struck me as somewhat novel. And I have a Switch 2. So here we are. The game’s pretty good, and I think it’s title should be Super Mario Odyssey 2: Donkey Kong Banaza kinda like the first Yoshi’s Island.

The game was made by the Super Mario Odyssey folks, and the look and feel is immediately familiar. The good news is Super Mario Odyssey looked and felt pretty great. They adapted its engine pretty nicely to a game about smashing up a world made of rock.

That’s what Bananza is. Donkey Kong is a miner in this game, mining banana-shaped Banandium Gems. A mining company called VoidCo. wants them even more, though, and is on a journey to the center of the earth to the Banandium Root. At the start of the game, DK rescues a teenaged Pauline, who was reintroduced to our collective consciousness in Odyssey and who debuted as the damsel in distress in Donkey Kong (1981). She had just been kidnapped by VoidCo. leader Void Kong. The two pursue the evil Kong to put a stop to his surely nefarious plans involving the Root.

It’s good, then, that Donkey Kong’s fists are strong enough to basically demolish everything and punch his way to the planet’s core. This is the crux of the game. Three of the four face buttons on the controller are dedicated to punching in different directions (the other jumps). Others tear chunks of earth out from under DK or slap the ground to collect the various bits of collectible detritus that emerge from the ground as DK destroys it. His fists are also good at dispatching the various mooks found throughout the game. When punching doesn’t work (say, on an enemy made of spikes or fire), throwing rocks usually does.

Befitting his species, DK is also highly adept at scaling most any surface. Those that he can’t climb are there was part of the challenge. He clambers quickly, and dead ends can usually be resolved by creative digging. I really can’t stress enough that a large part of the appeal of this game is that it just feels good to move around as this guy.

As DK and Pauline descend down through the planet, they encounter layer after layer of huge worlds occupied by societies of animals. Each society is led by an elder, who possesses a Bananza power that they can confer to Donkey Kong, usually in exchange for his help in solving some local problem. These Bananzas temporarily transform him into the animal that lives at the given layer, granting him new and helpful abilities for his adventure (and for solving subsequent problems). They can also only be activated by a musical number performed with the help of aspiring musician Pauline. Convenient that she’s here! Also fun that the relevant songs are all bops.

When not waylaid by the needs of subterranean ostriches and the like, the two are challenged often by the underlings of Void Kong, Grumpy Kong and Poppy Kong. The former builds robots to fight DK, and the latter enters the fray herself with the help of her stealth perfume. Both operate on the typical Nintendo platformer ruleset: figure out their attack pattern and exploit their weakness three times to win. They’re functional foes but not particularly memorable.

Perhaps the way this game vexes me most is in the way it takes one of the major Mario Odyssey design decisions to its logical conclusion. Odyssey, like Mario 64, *Sunshine, and the Galaxy games before it, has the player collect a variety of celestial objects in order to proceed. Progress is gated by demanding an arbitrary but reasonable number thereof. The Odyssey predecessors kept the total number pretty reasonable too, making them reasonably fun to fully complete but also demanding a somewhat significant percentage be found in order to finish the games. The sought-after objects tended to also be found at the end of a bespoke level or subsection of a larger level. Finding it would constitute “beating” that level and would exit it. It’s a somewhat traditional form of platforming progression.

Odyssey pivoted to instead throwing an absolute fuckton of its Power Moons all over the place and making its levels large and open-ended. There is generally some sort of main event going on on each stage, but players are also given the freedom to run in whatever direction they choose to find the necessary Power Moons to keep going. Finding any single Moon isn’t given a ton of ceremony. Sometimes doing so can be by accident.

It was a fine enough system because the levels of Odyssey were pretty and full of cute characters and fun platforming ideas. Still, I yearned for the greater care and attention given to the platforming challenges of the previous games.

Bananza takes things a step further. The ostensible stand-in for the Stars and Moons of yore in this game is Banandium Gems. You encounter them often, the ones you collect are tracked, and they give you experience points you can use to upgrade DK’s skills (I cannot tell you how unthrilled I am about the idea of a skill tree in a Nintendo platformer but WHATEVER). Anyway, you don’t actually have to collect a single fucking one of them to beat the game. Not one!

Perhaps Nintendo’s philosophy here was that the Bananas should be their own advocates. If you see a path to one and you think the fundamental action of the game is fun, you should feel compelled to go get it. You gotta punch it three times to collect it, and that feels pretty good. A voice also says “OH! BANANA!” like back in Donkey Kong 64. Is that not reward enough??

Well, kind of. I collected hundreds of the fuckers. I just really expected the game to check on that at some point!

Obviously, I understand that the objective items in collectathon platformer has always been a kind of goofy, arbitrary thing. In the same way that a flagpole is in the old Mario games. But if you don’t even technically need them at all, it feels silly in some sense to have them at all. Just make me climb the tower to press the button that opens the door I gotta go through or whatever.

I express this frustration while at the same time fully acknowledging that I had a pretty fun time with the game. The punchiness and crunchiness of cracking the earth as DK is really excellent and well tuned. The vibration, the hitlag, the sound effects of exploding rock. All great. I just wish the game had the confidence to force the player to play more of it!

For a game I rather enjoyed, I’m ending on a pretty sour note. I just don’t have the juice today to write a very good post or fix this shit up I don’t think lol. I can’t lock in. I’m locked out. One of the pitfalls about writing about every game I finish, I suppose. Not every game is going to inspire me. It’s okay, though. I really liked the one I beat after this. I’ll do better with it.