by Nick Ferro, Editor
Sitting down to both play and write a review for a video game makes me feel like an old grizzled (yet beloved) character from a movie franchise that is being brought back for a decades later reboot-qual. My mission was over, but they are pulling me back in for one last ride! And hey, if this works out, maybe I won’t pass the torch to the next generation and come back for the sequel too!
This year, Santa Claus was kind enough to visit my house and deliver my three children a Nintendo Switch 2. They had been strangely obsessed with getting one after seeing the debut of Mario Kart World, despite rarely playing anything other than Minecraft and Pokémon on their original Switch. But Santa knows best, because since Christmas day, I have barely had a chance to check it out myself since the three of them have been hogging it! Don’t they know dad likes playing video games too? Well, actually, no, they really wouldn’t because as a parent I rarely get to play while they are still members of the waking world (and even then I am too tired to sit down and play after 9pm). Despite being “out of the game” for many years, I still manage to log at least one game every year or two and this year I decided to give Donkey Kong Bananza a try.
Growing up, Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo was a game I didn’t own, but my friend did and I played it, at his house, as often as I could. It was one of my favorite games because the level design was simple yet challenging to “100%.” Compared to the Mario games I played on my NES the graphics were so polished and delightful that I couldn’t help but be obsessed. As video games evolved in the last 30 years, the 3D platformer became the big thing for Nintendo titles. Mario 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, and Odyssey all took each new console generation to the next level of mind-blowing entertainment. The GameCube gave us Metroid Prime; The Switch gave us Zelda Breath of the Wild and Kirby and the Forgotten Land. So, to learn that for the first time in thirty years Donkey Kong was going to be getting the “Next Gen” treatment was very exciting.
I sat down to play and for the first time in years I found myself not doing everything I could to leave the tutorial level. In fact, it took me three sit downs before I did, not because I wasn’t giving it the time it deserved, or because the game was too busy holding my hand. Quite the opposite. I wasn’t leaving because I was having too much fun!
A major component of Donkey Kong Bananza is DK’s ability to smash pretty much any asset the game has generated. So, when it opens up by dropping you in a cave the first thing I did was smash ‘B’ pounding the ground over and over and digging a hole until I hit the floor. Then what did I do? I started punching around in concentric circles to smash some more. And the reason I kept going in this way was because I was being instantly rewarded for my efforts. I was collecting an incredible amount of gold and glowing clock looking things. So many, in fact, that by the time I did get to the opening title sequence I had around 30,000 gold and 200 clocks. Something amazing about this game, for me as a 40-year-old with three kids and no time to grind, is that this game makes the “grind” fun and makes you feel rich with very little effort. After receiving the first power-up, which allows you to smash stuff even faster, collecting all the items was a breeze and the fun only increased. Oh no, your giant gorilla power-up ran out? No worries, the gold you collected from that rampage filled your bar up again, so reactivate it and have at it! Finding myself in a cave full of smashable items collecting gold, clocks, and treasure chests full of maps, which mark your map with fossil and bananas locations, left me with such a satisfying feeling. And then when you stop smashing things and actually play through the game’s quests and puzzles there is a whole new level of enjoyment waiting for you.
As you travel though these huge open worlds there are puzzles to solve that reward you with bananas (accompanied by a delightful music queue that had me chanting “BANANA” every time). Five bananas give you skill points to upgrade a customizable skill tree which allows you to choose what skills to upgrade to suit your own gaming style. You collect fossils to buy outfits and fur-dye that also gives you stat boosts which make the game even more fun. Each level also has a range of enemies that, for the most part, don’t pose a serious threat, but as you go deeper and deeper on your journey to the core, the game does deliver more challenging foes. However, if there is one knock I have on the game, it would be that it is too easy. The difficulty does scale, but it was only as I approached the final few stages of the game did I start to actually burn through my hearts. I would even go as far to say that I only did start to lose hearts more frequently was because the game had trained me to be more reckless with my strategy. So, by the time I needed to be more careful it felt like I was being punished for playing the game a certain way up till that point. I will say that the late game and more challenging puzzles to unlock everything had me struggling to retry certain puzzles and search endlessly for that one hidden banana. However, the game is designed to be played by a wide variety of skill sets and while I breezed through the game in two weeks, my 11-year-old is still traversing level two.
There is one level that I ended up hating and still have yet to complete it 100%. That is because I found it to be the one stage where I couldn’t play the game the same way I had been playing every other stage. This level was filled with poison water and spikes. Suddenly I was unable to punch through the ground to the bottom and then smash around for hours. I wasn’t finding chests with treasure maps so most of the fossils went unfound. I wasn’t able to collect as many apple juice jars to refill my health which caused me to play more cautiously. Despite having essentially unlimited resources I was having less fun on that particular stage, so I ended up just playing the main mission and getting the heck out of dodge. On one hand it was a traditional video game level that presented a new challenge that will eventually give me many hours of trial and error to complete. In fact, this was the type of level design and gameplay I was expecting when I sat down to play the game. However, after re-wiring my brain to simply enjoy the rush of having fun for fun’s sake, this level in particular, just wasn’t fun. As much as I love a challenge, when it starts to feel like work I stop wanting to play.
Despite the mechanics change and increased difficulty of one level though, I can’t believe how absolutely in love with this game I am! I’m actively annoyed that I am writing this review (which I don’t even have to be doing) rather than playing it right now. It isn’t just fun, it is also gorgeous to look at with it’s colorful scenery, it’s impeccable design, and its attention to detail. The graphics are so incredibly impressive. I won’t pretend to know what kind of power that the Switch 2 is sporting or how it compares to other “Next Gen” consoles, but as a successor to the original Switch, it is clearly an improvement. The level designs are all so different, filled with tons of different locations from a snowy ice cream village full of zebra people to a beach resort with giant fruit. And the load in time for these levels is next to nothing, you are playing within seconds of a location change.
I know that Donkey Kong Bananza will not be for everyone, but this game felt like they were making it specifically for me. I can’t stress enough that if you have a Switch 2 that this is a must own title. I haven’t had this much fun playing a game since Tears of the Kingdom and even then I don’t know if “fun” is the word I would use to describe that game. Donkey Kong Bananza is by far the most fun I have had in a long time, and I hope this is only a sign of things to come from Nintendo in the future!
Rating: Love It
Donkey Kong Bananza is currently available for purchase on the Nintendo Switch 2
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