Donkey Kong Bananza

2025-08-10
If you had told me I'd be having the most fun of the year playing a game where you listen to a guy say "Ooh Banana" over and over again as a hulked out monkey destroys entire worlds with his fists I would have called you a liar. If you had then told me it was made by Nintendo I'd say "Ok yeah that sounds about right." Leave it to Nintendo to figure out how to make a game where you can tunnel through a fully destructible environment while still keeping a core coherent structure to the levels and, more importantly, make the camera not completely fucked in the process.

At its core Bananza is a crackhead simulator. Donkey Kong is addicted to bananas and can and will destroy anything in his path to get his fix and hear the next OohBanana.mp3 play. I'm not even exaggerating that much. You can destroy the chair people are sitting on, the house they're living in, or their entire town. Or maybe you'll fuck up a guy's day who was just trying to fish (a tale in three acts: 1 - 2 - 3). You will enable DK's deviant behavior because it is incredibly fun to do so. Some of the best levels have you strip mining the map and the density of Bananas--your currency for upgrading the efficiency with which DK brings destruction--and other goodies means you are constantly finding something to collect or something to do. All of this will seem familiar to Super Mario Odyssey fans with the "something to do" involving little mini combat challenges or platforming-puzzle gauntlet levels. By the end the latter were by far my favorite part of the whole game.

Throughout the game you accrue more powers, often tied to a variety of cursed transformations that will likely give you nightmares. And their powers, a myriad of classic platforming power-ups mixed with terrain augmenting and deforming abilities, are at their best when the levels have been tightly designed to push these abilities to their limits. Simultaneously, and yet not in contradiction, they’re also at their best when liberally used to break a level's will and make it plead "Uncle". I imagine some people will decry the fact that you can side step a ton of challenges by soaring over them as Ostrich or vacuuming up half the map with Elephant but I think those people are boring. Just like with Tears of the Kingdom I can't see it as anything but a good thing when a game gives you the tools to solve puzzles "correctly" or to solve them in creatively low-IQ brute-force ways. This pleases my simian brain.

At the end of the day Donkey Kong Bananza is at its best when its showing you new things, whether that's a new level, a new hidden area under the ground, a new ability, or a new way to contextualize an old ability. The rub then is there are some levels that just feel too stingy with exciting sights and sounds. Which then might lead you to trying to absolutely rinse each level in a completionist manner, which is just about the worst mistake you could make. The only true path to boredom in Bananza is punching walls endlessly with no Bananas or challenge rooms in sight. Honestly the first three levels had me a little worried because it felt like that's what I should be doing. It doesn't help either that the soundtrack is merely fine. Despite featuring Pauline, the singer of the absolute all-timer banger "Jump Up, Superstar!", there's maybe two good songs. And ironically the songs featuring Pauline–the Bananza songs–are almost universally cheesy and terrible. Genuinely it sounds like something featured in a kid's cartoon.

Anyway my fists have done enough typing of words and now they need to do some punching of the walls of some people's houses. I think if I tear enough copper wiring from my neighbors’ walls I should be able to get three "Ooh Banana"s before I pass out in the bed that some Fractone hollowed out in a cliff face for me.