Welcome to the SWITCH 2! After a monster run of work I finally forced myself to sit down and crack open my brand new copy of Donkey Kong Bananza. Sometimes if I go through an extended period of time without grabbing a controller I can find it hard to get back into the groove of playing anything. I need to crack the ice again and get myself back into the habit. But I’m into it now, I’ve been playing on-and-off for a few weeks and I’ve been enjoying it.

Even as I played through the first few areas I couldn’t keep myself from saying “this game is crazy”. It’s very satisfying to smash through the rocks. I think they were really smart with how they made that first area because there was TONS of rock to destroy. I spent way too long in there digging around looking for secrets buried in the rocks. When breaking through the rocks you’ll occasionally find things like gold, bananas, coins or treasure chests. It took me way to long to realize that the treasure chests were procedurally generated; in a level towards the beginning you’re able to equip some clothes that increase the appearance rate of the chests.

I’ve gotten through the opener, the tutorial level and the first 2 big open areas as well. I feel as I continue to move through this game I appreciate the level design less and less. One of the “levels” was a big huge grassy field which wasn’t super exciting to smash around through. This area also had a bunch of water that you could swim around in. Each area has multiple sub-levels to it as you go further and further in the worlds core. The level I’m at right now also has water but this time… it’s water that hurts you! Which I hate. If you dig too deep, water-that-hurts-you comes out or you fall in. and it hurts you. It puts a pretty big damper on the fun I was having in the previous areas.

This area also has spiky vines and enemies you cannot bunch. That last point is really annoying because this game teaches you one thing really early on - if there is a puzzle or a problem or some kind of situation, the solution is to punch it. Once not enough? Punch it twice! Maybe just give it one more punch and see if that does it! Need to open a door? Punch it! Unlock a lock with a key??? Punch it! Just don’t punch these enemies, oh no, that won’t do at all. Oh god this area also turns you into this awful, horrible gorilla/bird hybrid thing and it’s fucking awful.

I’ve gotten to the third area of the poison bird world - hopefully I’m almost done with it and get the hell out of here. There was a choice to go to this crappy poison forest world inhabited by terrible birds or the ice world - maybe I’ll get through this and have more fun punching ice blocks and making snowballs.

Something I have been enjoying are the challenge levels. There are gateways you can find in each area that will take you to some kind of challenge - combat, platforming or puzzles. These have been fun! A few of them have played on scale and thrown you into a 2D world, maybe my favorite thing that games do. One of them was even Donkey Kong Country themed (the challenge was called “Nostalgia Country”)! Pretty cool stuff.

Sep 25, 2025 / 9:13 pm

I’m still noodling my way through this game. I’m having some trouble with it, though. There were two levels that I found so bad that it put me off coming back for a few weeks. I talked about this in my previous post but the poison-bird-level really sucked the fun out of this game. Small islands of land, surrounded by poison water you can’t touch, infested with both enemies and vines you can’t smash. This game is about two things, smashing shit and eating bananas. When you hamstring the primary mechanic I hope you’ve got some b & c mechanics to back it up and I don’t think it does. I keep earning these Elder Powers and they don’t exactly feel distinct enough to require an entire transformation. The gorilla is strong, the zebra (lol) is fast and light(?) and the ostrich (horrible, it’s so bad) can fly. That last one I understand, okay, sure you need to transform into this ungodly monster to allow you to glide through the air (terrible, btw).

My enjoyment of the game increased dramatically once I got past these two levels and went back to the earlier spaces and collected some random bananas (this was part of a plot point which makes me think they knew). I wish that there was more permanent transformations that permanently corrected the ills of the lands. Like I got rid of the poison spewing plants in the awful poison bird world yet water that kills you persists. With so much emphasis on persistant change, this blindsided me.

The best thing that’s happened in a while is the existence of the Resort Layer and it’s goo that makes you fly. This world has excellent design! And it’s colors don’t feel like a bad psychotic breakdown. It’s pretty and calm and relaxing and has excellent platforming and puzzle solving and oh it’s done? Oh okay nevermind. The smallest area from the beginning and now I’m in some kind of terrible storm world inhabited by those same crystal men and giant nerdy elephants. This area also introduces a new kind of lava? One that looks just like the gold that you smash through every 4 seconds, but you can’t touch this because it kills you. This area at least has had some good puzzles and platforming but now I can turn into an elephant that sucks up stuff in its path with one button and then spits that stuff out with the same button but only half the time. So I’m taking a break. The shake-up the formula that comes during each major area feels like a speedbump in a familiar neighborhood rather than an exciting new turn. I’ll keep going and I will finish this by the end of the year, but for now I’m going to take my time so I don’t full sour on it.

Nov 17, 2025 / 7:54 pm

Can you believe it? I’m STILL playing this game. I had completely forgotten about it when I went to put the new Hyrule Warriors into the Switch 2. The other morning I had some time before Catrena came home and I WANT to finish the game so I’ve been jumping in here or there.

And my god this game will never end. At some point Catrena came into the living room and asked me what was going on so I filled her in:

“Well the father teleporting eel got mad after I beat up the big monkey guy so it ate Pauline and I and when I woke up we were in jail.”

That level was actually fun. There was a new mechanic introduced where you hit a harp and it would switch one material (rubber) for another (gold). But the puzzles designed around this feel like they were “smash it” problems that just added this little layer in front of it, they didn’t feel necessary. That isn’t to say that any of this is necessary, but the mechanic felt like it solved a problem that didn’t exist. A lot of what goes on in this game feels the same way because they made something FUN - smashing the shit out of everything - and the core of the puzzles is taking away your ability to just the smash the shit out of everything. So the puzzles in this level generally still revolve around smashing the shit out of everything, but you are unable to do so until you hit the right switch at the right time. Unnecessary.

I really thought I was right at the tail end but now I’m in another food-themed snacking layer, the Feast Layer, and it DOES feel like an end-game area because I’m now being tasked to use all my weird animal powers to get through it. Hopefully it won’t be much longer now.

Nov 19, 2025 / 9:23 pm

I’m calling a wrap on Donkey Kong Bananza! After beating the boss and learning he was just a placeholder and then chasing the new and real boss through a bunch of hollow earth conspiracy levels and then fighting him 3 or 4 times, I can safely say I’ve seen all I need from this game. No, I did not get the full ending, apparently there is like… a bunch of backtracking you can do and spend some Banana Gems to open up some other levels which lets you earn more bananas and then you and Pauline can live out your domestic fantasy together. But unless it was specifically elephant based levels I don’t need it in my life. So I’m calling it done because I did get the real credits!

Final Thoughts

This was not my favorite game! I’m actually surprised at the turn I took because that opening area was so much fun! The idea that you can smash through any of the scenery and find gold and treasure maps and secret rooms was really appealing. It felt so fresh and new and those first few levels were maybe some of my favorite 3d platforming. When the levels are big and open with layers and floating islands and cavernous underground areas, it plays like no other game! “Hey what’s that over there” BAM SMASH CRASH BOOM you’ve pounded your way through a mount and popped out on the other side. Just incredible! My problem comes with the later levels where they start to strip back these things that I really found exciting. The bird/jungle level puts purple water you can’t touch around a bunch of islands and trees and also throws thorny barriers that you can’t smash through. Oh and don’t go too deep because that poison water? It’s underneath all the ground. They had me believe that a game about punching your way out of any problem or situation would revolve around letting me punch anything and then they kind of just took it away.

There are lots of puzzle types that get peppered in throughout, and they do a pretty some interesting things especially the goo that you punch that make other goo appear in another area. These are fun puzzles, and I like how they revolve around punching. Some puzzles are not punching focused and I didn’t like those as much.

There is also something about the visual style and art direction that I absolutely do not like. I think it has to do with the colors they chose. A lot of times you’ll have soft pastels across an entire landscape, like it was photographed with infrared film, and then clashing on top of that the worst primary colors you’ve ever seen. It hurts my brain to look at. I started to notice it during that horrendous jungle level (again, I know) and by the end of that I had decided that it was just too ugly for me. And I like color! But there is something about their choices that I find bad. This also rolls over to the “clothing” shops, because if I cannot handle these odd color schemes in the environment I certainly am NOT rushing to dye Donkey Kong’s fur neon green or bright blue. The amount of levels where they didn’t offer clothes at the shop and instead just had terrible fur dye colors was very disappointing.

I think the economy of the game was a mess. You have gold. Then there are also these coins. Plus each level/area also has 3 types of unique fossils. At the shops you use gold for items, but not for clothes, that’s reserved for fossils. But gold is also used to recharge your specials… but so is giant fruit? But that fruit doesn’t heal you, only apples do, and apples do not recharge your specials. The coins are used to exchange for banana gems (which you also eat but do not restore your special or health lol) with a guy in each area. Look - this is a silly complaint on my party when these games are literally referred to as “collectathons” but at a certain point it just feels like ideas stacked up on top of each other and nothing is working together.

Every bit of this game has something that makes me shake my fist or my head or that I want to critique because its so all over the place in such insane ways, I really wish that it went farther because then maybe I would be talking about these things that are annoying but they don’t matter because the game goes so hard in other areas that I can overlook them but it doesn’t! It was a constant mine-cart level of frustration from the surface down to the core! I also think as the development of this game went on, they realized the boss and characters they’ve created were not enough of a draw - Void and his cronies are barely a team and pose literally no threat! It feels like there was supposed to be much more of a story there, considering there is all this branding for Void & Co. and it doesn’t feel like he did… anything? And then at the end he shows up, gets his ass whooped by you and on his comeback, gets his ass whooped permanently by King K. Rool who comes out of left field and finally injects some REAL villainous peril into the game.

Have I enjoyed my time with Donkey Kong: Bananza? Mostly. Was it frustrating yet oddly addictive? Yes. I stuck with it because that’s how I play games (for the most part) and when it’s all working together it can be really fun and feel almost innovative. But with the weird puzzles, the odd controls, terrible camera - wait I haven’t talked about the camera have I? When you are underground the camera does this ant-farm thing where everything outside of that level goes dark. It ends up struggling to understand where you are at times - you become obscured, what you’re working towards is hard to see and more often than not it takes control of the camera preventing you from free moving it! It felt similar to how some PS2 games just getting started with free camera movement felt… frustrating!

I don’t want to continue to harp on things I don’t like so I’ll finish up with this: Donkey Kong and his little buddy Pauline were fun to be around, they had a cute relationship and they were never annoying. The colors and art style are not for me and I think a lot of the puzzle designs felt tacked on. Oh and the horrific, cronenberg-esque amalgamations of a gorilla + other animal, anthropomorphized into whatever-the-fuck they were thinking continously makes me shake my head because they are terrible. The zebra? The elephant? The fucking snake?? Okay, I’m going to stop now, I can’t keep talking about this game. My god.

DK CHALLENGE UPDATE

OKAY LOOK IT I’M BACK IN ON THIS FUCKING GAME ALRIGHT? I know it’s been about a year, but Nintendo dangled a peanut and I turned into an elephant and tried to suck the damned thing up. AND GUESS WHAT? On my second go around, with the possibility of real world reward in play, I’ve decided that my initial impression of this game was spot on, I hate it so much and I think it could be one of the worst games ever released by Nintendo. BUT that’s stopping me from tearing my hair out attempting some of the worst challenges ever put to video games ever. Just so much about this game was made to frustrate but again I’ve talked about the awful camera and disgusting color palate and the horrible cenobite Elder Power animal transformations so lets move on from this and talk about the DK Challenge program!

Achievements? On My Switch 2?

I think there was a leak at some point that proudly and loudly proclaimed “ACHIEVEMENTS ARE COMING TO THE SWITCH 2” and then the Nintendo Monkey Paw curled and the DK Challenge was born! We have received the opportunity to participate in a SPECIFIC set of achievement-styled challenges that you can access via red NSO … app? game? section? of the Switch’s home menu. It’s actually kind of an interesting idea that has a clunky implementation. There are 2 sides to the challenges, classic DK games and Bananza. I think when this was announced a lot of people thought these challenges were going to be similar to NES Remix - small “rom hacks” that have you do various things quickly or out-of-character for the game at large. But no, they are literally just “achievements”. Finish the minecart level in Donkey Country. They are extremely forgiving, too which I enjoyed, because I could knock them out quickly. You have the full capabilities of the Switch emulators at your disposal so feel free to rewind and start again.

On the other side of the coin, are DK Bananza achievements - finish this level, beat this boss, etc etc. I was actually just going to ignore this entire section because it came out way past the launch of the game for me to be bothered but then Nintendo dropped the bombshell announcement of the year. Complete all the challenges by September 1 and get a set of Donkey Kong Challenge Trading Cards. That’s all it takes for my shiny-object-monkey-brain to get triggered into torturing myself.

One of the positives of this challenge is that they triggered the achievements retroactively. When I first launched the game it popped up and informed me that I had earned some challenge cards! Pressing the home button will launch you straight into the NSO .. thing and show you which ones you got. I had actually completely 80% of these from first playthrough. The ones I had left were the timed challenges under the heading of “Time is of the Essence” along with the boss rush challenge and the final rehearsal. One of the timed challenges was to finish a bonus gold-collecting level with 6000+ gold and that took me HOURS to finish. Part of the reason it was so difficult was if you fail, you cannot restart. You have to leave the level and then come back. So you waste 5+ minutes each time restarting WHICH also affects your response time. Being able to jump back into a challenge helps reinforce necessary muscle memory especially for these older fingers that may not be as limber as they once were.

But whatever, those challenges are finished. The Boss rush suffers a similar problem. First you have to find the fucking thing, which is back in the first area where you talk to the evil gorilla guy you bested like 4 damned times and he charges you a bunch of money to build a gate that lets you do the boss rush. I cannot overstate how frustrated this game makes me. I’m not going into it, I don’t need to keep bringing up how when you swing a punch you lunge forward making some of the more precision platforming you need to do impossible, or how the motion controls are completely broken from top to bottom (in fact turning the motion controls off increased my enjoyment of the game by at least 3%). OH I’m forgetting something. You have to TURN OFF all skills for these last two challenges. The boss rush and the “final rehearsal” are both to be done with 3-hearts and no upgrades. Miserable. An olive branch of sorts is between each boss is a health refill and you are allowed to wear certain clothing (the letterman jacket Pauline wears will heal you slightly while in buff daddy animal mode). It’s just incredibly challenging and to top it off, it fees mostly unfair. A lot of this could be sour grapes from my part but if you look around the internet a lot of people think it’s crazy difficult. I’ve finished the boss rush, it took me a lot of tries! Like high double digit attempts. But it’s done. With my eye set on the final prize I realized I had no idea how to find the “final rehearsal”. It turns out there is a pretty meaty post-game to DK Bananza, one that I missed out on when I finished the game last year.

In order to unlock this final rehearsal, you first need complete the “Elder Rehearsal” for each of the 5 elder beasts. It’s trivial, its a chore! These 5 levels are like 30-45 minute obstacle courses you have to complete all at once. Some of these NEED to have skills unlocked to finish so I pumped up my guy before diving in and knocking these out. Now that they are done, I can strip myself of all skills again and head back to the core and talk to a bunch of crystal eels and then attempt this final rehearsal thing. I’ve watched some videos and my god I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get through this but I’m sure as shit going to try. This is my final challenge so lets get it done.

Update - Challenge Complete

I thought I came back to this post to follow-up with this. But I didn’t! And it turns out it took me about 20 tries on that final rehearsal to get through it and … god I hate to admit this - it was probably the most fun I had with the game so far. There is something exciting about a grand challenge, the most difficult achievements out there can be a way to reframe the context of a game. And in this instance, a first from Nintendo, they were able to reframe this as a real challenge. No longer was I just attempting to cross off banana locations on checklist, I was attempting something grand and impossible and the sum of all the skills I had up to now been ignoring! And I did it! But I still think this game stinks. I’ll be happy when I get those damned cards in my hand.