How Donkey Kong Bananza Improves on Both Super Mario Odyssey and Donkey Kong 64

By Marc Normandin | July 23, 2025 | 10:30am

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How Donkey Kong Bananza Improves on Both Super Mario Odyssey and Donkey Kong 64

When it was confirmed that the team behind 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey was responsible for Switch 2 exclusive Donkey Kong Bananza, the resulting vibes were positive. Odyssey was universally beloved—or as close as a game from a massive studio like Nintendo can get these days, anyway—and seeing what else the developers behind it could cook up on the Switch 2’s more powerful hardware had an obvious intrigue.

What jumped out at me about this confirmation, however, was what I didn’t enjoy about Odyssey. At least, relative to others. 3D Mario games have regularly been about doing something completely new, something innovative and so tightly designed that it’s impossible to imagine it appearing anywhere else—ideas entire games could be designed around introduced and discarded with reckless abandon, excellent feel whether you’re talking about casual or high-level play, and sometimes ambition so lofty (hello, Super Mario Sunshine) that people still can’t figure out whether the resulting title was worth said ambition or if Nintendo had flown a little too close to the sun.

Odyssey, though, was very much designed around existing ideas presented in a new—and admittedly more effective—manner. What was Cappy, the hat that allowed Mario to possess enemies to allow for progression in a given level, but a throwback to the Nintendo-published and n-Space developed Geist, in which you are dead and can only interact with the environment through possession of what was contained within it—a mechanic suggested by Shigeru Miyamoto himself? What was the emphasis on collecting more Stuff than you’d ever had to collect in a Mario game before other than a pull from Rare’s own work on Nintendo systems, occasionally published by Nintendo, like Banjo-Kazooie? Those games, by the way, also heavily utilized a transformation mechanic to make your platforming progress.

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As I wrote about Odyssey years back and stand by now, its levels are “a lot more straightforward, constrained a little more by environmental logic and uniformity in order to ensure the mini sandboxes you play in make some measure of sense.” This isn’t a full-throated criticism, however, as I continued on to say that Odyssey (as well as Bowser’s Fury) “have done a wonderful job of rehabilitating an era of platformers I was mostly happy to leave in the past. They show that there is real promise in the idea of going back to some of those designs and philosophies, and applying what’s been learned since and the leaps in technology to them, in order to create something that’s not quite as ‘new’ as, say, a Mario Galaxy game was at the time of their release, but is still joyous and worthwhile in its own right.”

It’s a preference thing: Mario games should be more about sheer inventiveness than Odyssey was, about creating something unlike anything that’s come before—or as close as you can get this far into the project that is video games, anyway—rather than refining existing concepts and structures that had little to do with Mario itself. Sure, there’s a lot of refinement of the Super Mario 64 concept in Odyssey in the same way that Breath of the Wild is a nod to the original The Legend of Zelda from three decades prior, but no one has ever said that Super Mario 64 would have been better if only it were more like Banjo-Kazooie.

So, combine all of this with the idea that the character and franchise of the Odyssey team’s major launch-window exclusive was Donkey Kong, the one for whom identity crisis is, in fact, his identity? Baby, we had a potential stew going. Donkey Kong, by virtue of slotting into whatever role Nintendo needs him to, did not carry the same kind of expectational baggage as Mario. And, in fact, if making collecting a significant part of the process was a thing that the Odyssey team was going to explore full-time rather than as a one-off, then Donkey Kong was the better fit, anyway, given not just the still-absurd and inexcusable volume of things to collect in Donkey Kong 64, but also the Donkey Kong Country games, wherein hidden secrets and collectibles were as significant to the experience as the pre-rendered graphics, music, and general difficulty.

Speaking of Donkey Kong 64: it is basically the worst of that era of Rare’s excesses shoved into one game, and this is being said by someone with a documented appreciation for that studio whose editor is no small fan of their work himself. It was beloved at the time for many of the same reasons it was reappraised and found lacking later on: there sure was a lot of it. Too much. Too much to collect—more than any other game, both then and now—without systems that felt good enough to justify all of the effort it took to acquire it all. Throw in the issues inherent to the early days of the genre with these excesses, and it has aged significantly worse than Banjo-Kazooie has, which is saying something.

Which meant that Donkey Kong Bananza had two kinds of pressure on it, from where I sat. It was potentially a better vehicle for the kind of game that Odyssey’s team wanted to make, and it had the chance to be—as just the second-ever 3D Donkey Kong title—the kind of game that Donkey Kong 64 was not, which is to say one befitting a legendarily important character like DK.

What is a Donkey Kong platformer? Whatever its development team needs it to be. And in this case, the developers at Nintendo EPD needed Donkey Kong Bananza to be a launch window showstopper. To do that, they made it an extension of some of the design philosophies of Super Mario Odyssey, yes—transformations play a significant role in Bananza, too, while the open-world is even more open in a number of ways—and tied to Donkey Kong’s own 3D past on the Nintendo 64 in the same way that Odyssey was to Super Mario 64. There are additional layers to peel back, however. Or, in the case of Bananza, smash on through.

Because of the open-world design, there are subtle and not so subtle nods to other Nintendo EPD works. Coursing through Bananza are the same kind of “hmm, I wonder what’s over there” vibes that drove discovery and exploration in Breath of the Wild. It shares aesthetic choices and campaign design decisions with the Splatoon games, as Hayes Madsen already went into detail on. And, of course, plenty of influence can be found in Donkey Kong games that predate the existence of EPD or were never touched by Rare, but were made by the studios that eventually were reorganized into EPD, such as Nintendo R&D1 and EAD and EAD Tokyo. Donkey Kong Bananza essentially works as a unified theory of Donkey Kong, the first title to truly bring in its many disparate elements and make them work together as one, to the point that even the series’ history and relationship with music is always at the forefront.

What kind of ties the room all together, though, is a design philosophy pulled from a non-Nintendo, non-Donkey Kong series, but which still feels right at home.

The joke going around was that Donkey Kong Bananza was “Red Faction Gorilla,” a nod to Volition’s classic, Red Faction Guerilla. It was a bit born from trailers rather than first-hand experience with the game, but the delightful little gag ended up being on the nose. The thing that makes Donkey Kong Bananza work the most, the thing that separates it from Super Mario Odyssey in a number of ways, is its environmental destruction. And while the joke was Red Faction Guerilla because of the wordplay involved, what it reminds me of just as much is the original Red Faction, in which Volition introduced the world to its “Geo-Mod” concept.

Geo-Mod is short for Geometry Modification, and it allows you to essentially create your own doors, windows, escapes, and paths throughout the first-person world of Red Faction, by way of explosives. There are explosives in Bananza, too, but you’ll mostly be breaking everything around you with balled up Kong fists. Now, the concept was not fully fleshed out back in 2001 on Playstation 2 or Windows, where it was first released, but the idea was a brilliant one, and its intent clear: you could play Red Faction in a fairly straightforward manner and find nothing particularly special about its level design, or you could lean in to deciding it was way more fun to essentially burrow in behind obstacles or enemies who were waiting to kill you, and then take them out from a safer vantage point or avoid them altogether. To dig and dig until you unearthed secrets you would never find otherwise. Donkey Kong Bananza is a massive expansion of that design philosophy, applied to a 3D platformer with collectathon sensibilities, that works as that style of game specifically because of that kind of choose-your-own-adventure design.

Whereas collecting was a chore in Donkey Kong 64, in Bananza it feels like a treat and a natural extension of the gameplay instead of just the runtime. You’ll find plenty without meaning to, and little of it outright required: exploration is its own reward, the various collectibles—outside of the bananas that replace Odyssey’s moons—more of a treat or helpful item for which there’s an infinite supply of buried here and there and everywhere. And by scaling back on the numbers of possible transformations, too, everything you do unlock feels more vital and capable of keeping the proceedings fresh even if you decide to commit yourself to, say, finding every fossil in every sublevel.

Odyssey made the stylings of Banjo-Kazooie and its ilk palatable in the present, but Donkey Kong Bananza took on the much more difficult dual assignment of following up Odyssey while rehabilitating Donkey Kong 64. It works because it’s just an excellent game made by excellent designers, but also because it’s a far better fit for the kind of game this team at EPD wants to make than Mario was for Odyssey. Which means that if you had zero issues with Odyssey, then you’re in for a treat here, but if you were in the camp like me where something wasn’t quite as good as you’d hoped it would be, or Mario’s various powers weren’t quite as useful or applicable as you’d thought they might be, then Bananza is going to be a revelation.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin.