Sorry, Donkey Kong Bananza, But Ocarina of Time Still Has the Best Music-Playing Mechanic

By Maddy Myers | August 12, 2025 | 12:30pm

Video Games Features donkey kong bananza

Sorry, Donkey Kong Bananza, But Ocarina of Time Still Has the Best Music-Playing Mechanic

Donkey Kong Bananza is the latest in a long tradition of video games in which music is literally magical, the means by which the player unlocks new abilities. These unlocking sequences are some of the game’s most memorable. They involve Donkey Kong and his 13-year-old sidekick Pauline getting thrown in front of a crowd of people (well, technically, a crowd of anthropomorphic animals) who are expectantly waiting for the duo to perform a magical piece of music. Pauline’s singing voice has the power to bring out the music’s magic, but she also has a chronic case of stage fright, so it’s up to Donkey Kong to motivate her to perform; he does this by rhythmically beating his chest like a drum. In order to kick off this chest-beating, the player has to hold down the L and R shoulder buttons—but that’s it. After that, it’s just a cutscene of a concert.

I do love these cutscenes; the songs are fun to listen to, and Pauline’s larger journey towards overcoming her stage fright is adorable, even if it’s very straightforward. It’s extra-cute to watch DK be the one to snap her out of it every time by serving as “the drummer,” and I appreciate that the player gets to participate in that by instigating the moment that DK starts up the beat. But these sequences are such an important part of the game’s story and mechanics that it’s kind of surprising to me that the player is barely a part of them.

I wasn’t sure what was missing until I just so happened to start up a replay of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which may be one of the most innovative uses of magical music that I’ve ever seen in a video game. The same mechanic carries over in its direct sequel, Majora’s Mask, but subsequent Zelda games—even ones that feature Link playing an instrument—haven’t really matched this concept. And although I’ve played a lot of other games in which music has magical powers, very few of them have been as interactive, and therefore as magical-seeming, as Link’s ocarina.

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Here’s how it works: relatively early on in Ocarina of Time, Link gets an ocarina that can only play a handful of notes. Specifically, it can play the notes D, F, A, B, and D again (up an octave). Link ends up learning twelve songs over the course of Ocarina of Time, and each of those songs has to begin with a melodic phrase that only uses those five notes; Link will play that opening phrase, and then the game’s orchestral score will come in and “complete” the rest of the song.

First of all, this reflects the masterful composition skills of Koji Kondo, who had to come up with melodies that were memorable and yet also distinctive. Somehow, even though all 12 of the ocarina’s songs must begin with melodies only using those five notes, they end up sounding so different from one another that the player is still able to remember them and distinguish the specific contexts in which they should appear. (For more on the music theory behind the songs’ composition, I recommend YouTuber Cadence Hira’s detailed analysis of each tune.)

The second thing that really impresses me about the design of the in-game ocarina, though, is that the player actually has to play it along with Link—by which I mean, each of the five notes is assigned to five different buttons. The game helpfully includes some super-basic sheet music that Link (and the player) can refer to in order to remember the notes for each tune, but the songs are all simple enough that the player can play them “by ear,” simply by remembering how the melodies go and picking them out based on which button corresponds to which note. It’s fine if you don’t get the rhythm exactly correct; you just have to play the notes in sequence, and the sweeping orchestral score (and magical effects) will carry you and Link the rest of the way.

Basically, Ocarina of Time forces the player to very literally learn how to play songs in order to achieve various in-game ends. It could easily have been tedious, but the songs aren’t long enough—or at least, the phrases that the player has to learn aren’t long enough to become tiresome. It also helps that the songs are good. They’re still some of the most famous and beloved Zelda songs ever composed, although of course some of them—like “Zelda’s Lullaby”—first appeared earlier and were simply adapted for the ocarina’s purposes.

It’s weird to me that so few games have done anything like this. There are a couple of other examples, some highlighted by Cadence Hira in the video I linked earlier, such as Loom, a PC game with a magic staff that plays a C scale when the player hits the number keys 1-8, and Animal Well, which has a flute with notes that correspond to directional buttons. Similar to Ocarina, these are games that make the player tap out simple tunes in order to unlock secrets or progression routes, but in my opinion, these sequences don’t really mimic the importance and the joy of playing music. The tunes feel more like inert passkeys rather than intentionally composed music; in Loom, the songs are actually randomly generated at the outset of each game, rather than created specifically to be memorable and powerful. In Ocarina of Time, seeing Link’s expression of confoundment and shock upon learning a new song is hilarious and sweet, and it’s a reflection of the music’s in-game power.

I don’t think it would have been that hard for Donkey Kong Bananza to include a bit more participatory button-pressing for the player to engage in, helping to illustrate the magical power of the in-game music. For example, DK could get a set of bongos made out of magical rocks (which are everywhere in this game) and have each of the rocks play slightly different tones, or something. Each area could have a different tune with notes for DK to learn, as opposed to him collecting pieces of a record and just letting it play. Learning and truly performing a song as DK alongside Pauline would have made these moments a lot more special, even if the player’s inputs were dead simple.

Leaving aside Bananza, it’s surprising to me that so few other modern games have incorporated something like Link’s ocarina. Sure, The Last of Us Part 2 has a complex guitar minigame, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has a piano minigame, but neither of these has anything to do with beating the game (also worth noting that music doesn’t have magic powers in either of those games). And of course there are games like Resident Evil and Undertale that require the player to pick out a piano tune in order to complete a puzzle. None of this really approaches what Ocarina of Time and, later, Majora’s Mask are doing with the ocarina, though.

I do recognize the ludicrousness of my saying that games with magical music elements should simply be as amazing as Ocarina of Time. Easier said than done. But ultimately, what we’re doing when we play a game is pressing buttons, and that’s what we’re doing when we play an instrument, too. And the few times that games have made that comparison more literal have been pretty damn cool. I just wish it happened more often.

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.