Despite how much playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cyberpunk 2077 on a Nintendo device wowed me, no game impressed me more 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:at my Switch 2 hands-on than 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Donkey Kong Bananza. When I first started playing, it was just some good old Nintendo fun. Look at the cute lil expressive ape. Oh, he jumping for bananas. Hey, I can wave the Joy-Con around and make him beat his chest, that's neat🏅. And so forth. But the more I played, the more it shifted from junk food enjoyment into technical wizardry.
The opening mine area exists mainly to teach you the fairly basic control scheme in a digestible way, and digest them I did. I refer you to my above reactions. It felt like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Yoshi's Crafted World or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Princess Peach: Showtime. Cute, but a cut below the big guns. Then I got to the first main area, and realised this might be the biggest gun Nin🦹tendo has ever shot.
No Game Demonstrates The Switch 2's Power Better Than Donkey Kong Bananza
Is that hyperbolic for a company who has reinvented the foundations of what it means to be a platform game several times over? Perhaps. But I want to be hyperbolic on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Donkey Kong's behalf because 168澳洲幸运5开奖🤡网:it seems content to 🌌hide away its own genius.
With fully destructible environments, it feels like each level of Donkey Kong Bananza is at least two levels in one. I was running around on the surface, still getting used to its mechanics, when I accidentally started burrowing and found another level beneath me. At the start, these were mainly mazes with coins an🍬d hidden bananas, but deeper into the game they will become more complex and important.
Donkey Kong Definitely Knows He's Naked In Mario Kart World
꧑Nintendo has turned a beloved ape into a sick pervert.
That's before you get into the other flourishes too. The levels are rocky islands, and since you can clamber around walls, that means you can traverse around every edge to find new areas you can't platform to via typical running and jumping. You can also surf on rocks, rip them out of the wall as makeshift weapons, and tunnel under the water to form a plug hole effect that drains the lake. This is incredibly impressive, highly technical genius, in the same vein as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom's boundless creativity but far harder to demonstrate without le🤪tting you get your hands on it yourself.
However, if you look close enough, it's still there. That's something. What's not there,𒁃 as is a long-standing Nintendo tradition, is the name of the developer. In general, I don't like this practice. It creates an amorphous idea of 'Nintendo' as some goddess deity who, with only the aid of a handful of humans whose faces appear across each Direct, simply gives birth to video games that we proclaim as mana from Heaven.
However, I recognise that my feelings on this represent someone too plugged into gamiജng as an industry, and most people do not know or care what it means that their game wasn't actually developed by Nintendo, but by Good-Fee𓄧l, or HAL Laboratory, or Acquire. But in the specific case of Donkey Kong Bananza, I think Nintendo might be missing a trick by keeping us in the dark.
Who Is Developing Donkey Kong Bananza
Having played Donkey Kong Bananza and experienced the way it moves, as well as seeing its graphics, in-game items, and cartoonish font up close, I am fairly certain the game was developed by Nintendo EPD - more specifically, the team at the internal EPD who helped the deity conceive and deliver 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario Odyssey. With 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario nowhere to be 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:seen at the Switch 2 launch - apart from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:his side hustle driving go-karts - this lends a lot of credence to this theory. Surely that all-star team isn't sitting ou🌊t this launch.
Nintendo EPD is less of a concrete studio than HAL, but more of an internal group of many developers. However, they still have clearly defined teams, and it feels🎶 like the Odyssey team's fingerprints are all over these bananas.
If that's true, Nintendo is missing a major marketing opportunity. This is not just a case of someone too involved in video games having a specific appreciation for the craft of a single video game, either. Super Mario Odyssey has become a shorthand for platforming perfection. Just look at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the reviews for Astro Bot - when the superlatives fell short, critics reached for the highest praise possible: that it was level with, or almost level with, Sup⭕er Mario Odyssey.
Having a team that is known for making the best example of a genre, and then having them make that genre again on more powerful hardware, but not telling people it's that team doing it feels counterproductive. Even without knowing how highly regarded Odyssey ജis, there will be casual gamers looking at the Switch 2 launch line-up and wondering why there's not a proper Mario. If you can tell them 'this is a 3D platformer from the Mario guys' you're offering a perfect replacement.
Ultimately, Donkey Kong Bananza will sell itself (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:tariffs permitting) because it looks excellent, Donkey Kong is iconic on his own, and it's a major title for people lookin🎐g to test out their funky new Switch 2. Nintendo is a little bit like Coca-Cola or McDonald's - you wonder why it spends any money on marketing at all when everyone already knows about it. But it seems wild to me that a team who can legitimately claim 'we made the single best game ever to grace our genre' doesn't get to tell you it's made a new game until you've already beaten it and see its name in the credits.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Donkey Kong Bananza
- Released
- July 17, 2025
- ESRB
- Everyo𝕴ne 10+ // Fantasy Violence
- Developer(s)
- Nintendo
- Publisher(s)
- Nintendo
- Number of Players
- Single-player
- Nintendo Switch 2 Release Date
- July 17, 2025
