Donkey Kong Bananza takes notes from the best Mario and Zelda games: it has its own shrines, you can totally destroy levels, transform into animals, and dive into the underground

Nintendo hosted a livestream diving into Donkey Kong Bananza and its features today, and it looks like the exciting Switch 2 game carries many of the company's past titles' best parts.

From beloved Super Mario classics, to more recent Legend of Zelda games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, the inspiration from some of Nintendo's greatest releases of all time is evident in Donkey Kong Bananza – and today's stream proves as much. Players can destroy and shape levels in true sandbox-esque fashion, turn into animals like Mario does for unique abilities, and even complete "ancient ruins."

The Ancient Ruins, much like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom's own shrines, are varying levels players can enter to earn special "banandium gems." They're not all the same, with some ruins' challenge courses featuring time-limited combat and others requiring more clever solutions – much like puzzles (especially those in Zelda shrines) do. There are side-scrolling stages to complete, too, mixing up the ruins.

Donkey Kong Bananza Direct – 18/06/2025 - YouTube

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In true Super Mario Bros. Wonder fashion, players are able to transform Donkey Kong into animals as well. They can turn the titular character into a zebra for extra speed and the ability to run on water, or across crumbling paths, or they can even turn DK into a flying ostrich to use updrafts and drop eggs on enemies below. While the transformations don't last forever, they're a fun nod to the animal shapeshifting ability found in other Nintendo gems.

Donkey Kong Bananza also shares other similarities with past Nintendo titles, like its underground world, which feels adjacent to The Depths in Tears of the Kingdom.

So far, Donkey Kong Bananza looks like a beautiful, chaotic mashup of games, genres, and features that fans familiar with the developer's classics might recognize. Of all the upcoming Switch 2 games on the radar, Bananza might just prove to be one of the biggest.

Donkey Kong Bananza features a young Pauline, immediately raising lore implications and many questions about the very serious DK timeline