I’m not surprised smashing stuff in Donkey Kong Bananza is enjoyable. In the tutorial alone, I, like many others, spent ages demolishing everything I could get my (giant gorilla) hands on, and it’s a given that something designed well enough to distract from the main attraction like that is still going to feel good 10 or 20 hours later. What surprised me about Bananza isn’t even how much Nintendo struggled to fit the usual trappings of a 3D platformer into a game about punching, to the point that its other features never get the chance to feel fully developed. What I didn’t expect was that, even when you’re staring these limitations in the face and can feel Nintendo making compromises in puzzle and challenge design, it rarely takes away from just how much fun Bananza is.
Plain and simple: Donkey Kong Bananza is a blast, even at its weakest points.
It seems like a bit of a mess initially, though, like a mismatched set of ideas stitched together and set loose, but the fantastical settings and occasionally odd story end up being its most coherent parts. After DK falls into a giant hole, he meets a rock who turns into a girl named Pauline, and they set off on an adventure to the planet core so she can make a wish to return home. As the pair travels further into the planet’s interior, they discover worlds so colorful and bizarre that it’s like they’re hardly underground. It’s basically the premise for Jules Verne’s classic sci-fi novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, just with talking monkeys instead of scientists. There are even textual excerpts in each layer chronicling the journey of sentient stones called Fractones as they travel to the center of the world, written in the journal-log style of Verne’s novel.
Bananza also has more than a hint of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in it. Nintendo’s vision of the planet’s interior is just as topsy-turvy as Carroll’s Wonderland, but instead of finding exaggerated versions of Victorian social customs, you find other flights of whimsy: zebras running a small frozen treat manufacturing empire, ostriches managing a luxury hotel, and wise snakes inventing new ways to make underground life better. Level themes become increasingly more unpredictable and, occasionally, bizarre as you go deeper underground. One, for example, is a giant disco party world. Another is just a rhino racing course that Diddy and Dixie Kong made after they went looking for DK. (Why stay here instead of looking for DK or going home instead? Bananza’s consistent, straightforward answer: “Why not?)
Like Wonderland, there’s a thread of internal logic that ties it all together so this world makes sense to itself and never quite teeters over into nonsense. It might sometimes get close, but free from the restriction of thinking that it should make a specific kind of sense, it’s much easier to appreciate the whimsy and creativity that went into creating these unusual little underground civilizations.
Then there’s the villain of the piece, Void Kong. Nintendo isn’t subtle about him at all. He travels through the planet, wrecking communities as he steals resources to fuel his own ambitions (literally, since Banandium Gems produce energy). His only concern is extracting as much wealth as possible while he digs further into the dirt, no matter who gets hurt and who has to go without. He’s burned through so many workers in the process that he has to press-gang creatures into his service and brainwash them to keep them there. If the Queen of Hearts was a caricature of Britain’s Queen Victoria in Carroll’s book, it’s not hard to imagine more than one person who Void Kong represents in our society.
Bananza‘s story might be unexpectedly well-thought-out for a 3D platformer, but its 16 levels and hundreds of collectibles are still the main focus here. It’s also where you start to see Nintendo struggling to decide what Bananza should be. The Super Mario Odyssey team was responsible for Bananza, but level design in Donkey Kong’s big adventure shares more with the likes of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom than it does with most recent Mario games. There is a main path through each level, but the environments are designed so you can almost always see at least one intriguing area that looks worth investigating. It’s nearly always worth exploring and, once you get there, offers a view of another worthwhile-looking point of interest, and off you go again.
Bananza feels more like an open-ended adventure compared to the curated and predictable selection of themed activities you often find in 3D platformers and collectathons. That sense of charting your own course and the excitement of wondering what’s behind the next wall (even if you know it’s going to be a banana) creates a strong drive to do as much as you can in each level. I rarely gather more than is necessary in a collecting game. In Bananza, I gladly went out of my way to get everything.
All told, it might be more accurate to call Bananza a 3D exploration game instead of a platformer, as the platforming is curiously light and often a bit wonky. DK is excellent at punching things, but, ironically given his genus, not so hot when it comes to climbing. It’s easy to fall off walls for no apparent reason while rounding corners and most of your movement is either on solid ground or under it. There also aren’t all that many traditional platforming challenges, and those that are in the game — at least in the first 75% of it — are more tests of speed than of good timing. Power matters more than precision Bananza, and DK has plenty of power.
Everything in Bananza is built around the act of punching and breaking everything. Watching levels erupt in a shower of dirt, stone, and gold is intensely satisfying, but not just from the subversive pleasure of breaking things, though that certainly has its appeal. Nintendo made some of the most enjoyable destruction and impact physics and audio for Donkey Kong Bananza, and it’s all big. There are no small responses in this game, and every action is a little conflict arc of tension and resolution in microcosm. You don’t just pull some earth up. You wrench it out by its roots. Glass doesn’t break in polite little tinkles. It explodes in a cascade of noise. A particular favorite effect of mine is the brief, cartoon-like pause in the second between DK punching an enemy and their body reacting to the force of the hit before flying off into the abyss or crashing into something else and exploding.
You’re essentially just using the same limited set of abilities in every layer, but all these tactile and audible pieces wrapped up with punching your way to the center of the planet prevent Bananza from losing its luster. By the end of the game, even if I didn’t go out of my way to bust through mountains or demolish levels as often as I did at the start, it nevertheless elicited a little rush of pleasure when I did do it.
Outside of punching, though, is where Bananza‘s identity crisis starts to feel more apparent. The downside of building the entire game around this single action is that it limits how complex Bananza‘s challenges can be and how much attention its other features get. Sure, some puzzles have multiple approaches. In one notable example in the Resort Layer, I set up a complicated structure where I lured a shark close to a floating island, punched it to make a special ore that lifts you into the air appear, and then turned into an ostrich at the last minute to glide to the island. (The actual solution is to just explode a nearby strawberry and use the barrel cannon inside.)
However, most puzzles don’t rely on convoluted strategies, leaving the lateral thinking to exploration instead. More than a few force you to use a specific method to progress and end up being Bananza‘s least enjoyable moments, like dealing with Forest Layer‘s thorns or having to use the Elephant Bananza transformation to clear lava in the Tempest Layer. These single-solution moments feel rote and clunky, like a chore you have to do just to get back to the good stuff.
Even fundamental concepts that appear to promise complexity end up disappointingly simplistic. Turf type, a system that grades the toughness and maneuverability of the ground. Despite the concept showing up in skill lists and every time you throw a chunk of terrain, has little significance outside of obvious things like hazardous material. Few scenarios exist where turf surfing — a traversal mechanic that lets DK ride a chunk like a surfboard — is useful for anything beyond getting around quickly, and with most secrets being buried underground, you have equally few opportunities to do anything with the turf stacking feature that lets you stick clumps of terrain together. It’s also only in the last few levels that you really need to use Bananza powers, where DK transforms into an animal and gains new abilities, in creative ways to get through some of the more difficult obstacles.
It gives you all these powers, but few reasons to use them. It wants to turn levels into tools instead of just areas to traverse through, but never quite pulls it off except in limited scenarios. And despite worlds being massive with multiple ways to get around, most collectibles require little effort to find and collect. There’s an ideal game where more complicated, multi-solution puzzles and a satisfying, easy-to-learn foundation can both exist in the same game. Donkey Kong Bananza just isn’t that game.
It helps that when you’re in the middle of a dull segment or one that feels half-baked, you know something more interesting is rarely more than half a minute away. Bananza moves at a fast clip, even if you’re trying to track everything down, and it also dishes out rewards big and small at an impressive pace. Banandium Gems, fossils, more gold than you’ll ever need for most of the game — most might not be hard to get, but finding them as a result of going off the beaten path or just messing around still feels rewarding. There’s just enough friction so that finding something nice feels like a payoff for your creativity or curiosity and not like Nintendo is being patronizing with easy rewards just to give you a quick rush.
Charm and joy cover a multitude of flaws, and Bananza has hoards of both, which tend to eclipse the game’s shortcomings most of the time. They’re in almost literally every part of the game — Pauline’s nighttime ruminations before going to sleep, the internet’s favorite sound clip (“Oh, Banana”), DK’s gleeful little laugh as he rockets into the air. Donkey Kong Bananza is — at its core, underneath the collectibles, the would-be platforming, the wonky timelines, and the animal powers — a happy game, one that celebrates the simple joy of discovery and creativity. Nintendo just needs to figure out how the other pieces fit into that next time.
