Super Mario Odyssey's director is a producer on Donkey Kong Bananza, and has revealed that Bananza's core mechanic actually came from an experiment in Odyssey.
Last week the gaming world was shocked by one of the biggest and unexpected reveals of all time when Nintendo confirmed that Donkey Kong Bananza is being made by the Super Mario Odyssey team. Obviously, after everyone figured it out the second the game was revealed, this confirmation from Nintendo was mindblowing. Now, Nintendo has revealed some new info on the development team of the game, including that Odyssey's director Kenta Motokura is a producer on the game, and that Kazuya Takahashi – a relative newcomer to Nintendo with a history developing open world games – is taking the director's chair.
This was revealed in an interview with IGN where the duo were asked about the conception of DK Bananza. "The very original impetus for the development of Donkey Kong Bananza was when my boss, Mr. [Yoshiaki] Koizumi, approached our team and asked us to consider working on a 3D Donkey Kong game" Motokura says, adding: "We realized we really needed to know more about Donkey Kong."
Motokura recounts meeting with Shigeru Miyamoto who spoke of DK's "unique actions" like the hand slap, and Koizumi, who directed Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, felt that Donkey Kong's "longer, stronger arms" served to set him apart from other characters like Mario himself.
"We took all of these distinctive features of Donkey Kong as a character and tried to think about how we could bring them to play in a new game," Motokura recalls, adding: "Around the same time, we had a programmer who was experimenting with voxel technology," which was implemented in Super Mario Odyssey in areas like the Snow Kingdom and the Luncheon Kingdom's cheese. "So this programmer was engaging in various technical experiments where you might even throw voxels or make a hole having done so."
Motokura explains: "When we realized the compatibility of Donkey Kong's distinctive characteristics, being strong and having these large long arms, and the possibility of Voxel Technology, we saw that this was a good match that led us to the idea of pursuing destruction as core gameplay in this title."
Later in the interview, Takahashi adds that "because a lot of team members also worked on Super Mario Odyssey, there are some similarities in terms of how they think about the setting of the characters for both games," so players can also expect some familiarity there. Motokura believes, however, that the focus on voxel technology this time around is "the biggest difference" between the two games.
Donkey Kong Bananza started as a Switch 1 game, but bringing it to Switch 2 enabled "very large scale" destruction Nintendo couldn't pull off before.
