Donkey Kong Bananza, the review of the Nintendo game

In today’s gaming, often criticized for the sequence of family iterations that are offered to us, Donkey Kong Bananza breaks in more than one way the customs of the genre of reference and most of the panorama. Forget the complex plots or deep narratives that try to justify every single pixel on the screen. Here, the introduction of a “Lore” for Pauline from Super Mario Odyssey is a pretext, a narrative jolly that vanishes as soon as the iconic Nintendo Gorilla takes the scene. The true value of Donkey Kong Bananza does not lure in its premises, but in its execution. It is an experience that reveals itself in all its madness in the exact moment in which you stop bringing questions and abandon yourself to the primordial instinct to destroy, explore and, above all, have fun. And it is based on a question that potentially overturns the conventions of the genre: what would happen to the very concept of 3D platform, if instead of climbing and acting in a path made of jumps up, we tried to destroy the environment to go down more and further down? Net of the Sophisms, that of Bananza is a crunchy gameplay, with the hands of Donkey Kong that look like popcorn bags ready to break out when they punch (literally) every possible level of the soil – or make it skip using explosives and other amenities. You will do so compulsively that it needs a break for your fingers from time to time, with all due respect to the carpal tunnel. The surprising thing is that each level has its own basic mechanics, some more successful than others, and ways of upsetting as it had been played until then.

the shaking

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Several times we had the impression that something did not return to us, that that fun was ephemeral, of the belly, that it did not work on the long term. We still seek a reason why to this feeling, to be presumably identified in the somewhat ruffled nature of platforming in the strict sense: opting for such a caciarone approach, it was moreover inevitable that something in terms of precision should be lost. The difference that is between Donkey Kong and the Game of the Year last year Astro Bot, which instead at that precision anelava, is a bit of the one that goes from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Starfield. The Sony platform is beautiful to die for and fun, both in the simple but very fluid gameplay and in extreme quotation; Nintendo allows you to change the construction of the levels in the foundations, splitting the rock to dug tunnels and get to your destination until it deeply alter the establishment of the game areas. A peculiarity that is used not only for the research, which becomes quickly obsessive, of the collectible, and not only for the platform, but also for some physical challenges that reveal an ingenuity not dissimilar from the one praised in the last Zelda. This is where another surprising similarity emerges: in Donkey Kong Bananza, climbing starts in an extremely natural way, without the pressure of keys, just as it happens in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Zelda’s legacy

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This fluid and intuitive movement, here for obvious reasons without the resistance constraints that would have made a climb based on the physical resistance of the Gorilla pretentious, contributes to the free flow of exploration. A flow that, sometimes, unfortunately clashes with a little messy shots, which can hinder the vision and make the understanding of the surrounding space less immediate. A small neo in an otherwise well thought out system. And precisely in Zelda the entire new project of the Super Mario Odyssey team seems to refer, sometimes clearly. By combining the best of these two worlds in a hilarious formula that crosses Semi-Open World and Puzzle Platform, Nintendo is confirmed as an authentic creativity factory, to put it with an oxymoron. The ideas are created engraved and distributed for all the main intellectual properties – that it is Splatoon that arises from a rib of Super Mario Sunshine, or the sacraries of Breath of the Wild re -proposed here in a lighter key, there is no single concept of game design that must be wasted, and possibly reused intelligently.

A difficult game?

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An aspect that deserves a special mention are Donkey Kong Bananza’s bosses. These are never excessively difficult or prolonged, but they are always extremely creative and satisfying to face. Each clash with a boss introduces unique mechanics, often linked to the destructive abilities of Donkey Kong or the manipulation of the environment, transforming battles into a real action puzzle. This creativity extends to the secondary challenges scattered in the game, which they mark mark a small big step forward for Nintendo: Kyoto’s house seems to have started to put behind the excessive ease that has characterized most of the First-Party titles for Switch 1, so even the most inventive, or more aesthetically captivating productions, ended up victims of boredom in the medium-long period. We are certainly not talking about a souls-like, but it is still a detail to keep an eye on for the future of a console that, randomness?, Many call maliciously “pro” Switch. In this regard, we do not know how much there was a need for a Switch 2 to make King Kong Bananza turn, given that the technical sector (some shots here and there, and a sometimes problematic frame, as already mentioned) and even the experience has even seemed so different. What is sure, however, is that the console launched in June now has its first killer application.

the verdict

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Probably, we are facing one of the most creative 3D platform ever, to begin as “descends” instead of “climbing”. It is strange that it is not of Mario perhaps, given that such a strong concept would have seen it work well adapted in some way to the mustache hydraulic, but this does nothing but increase the wait for its next great adventure.