Loving bananas and wanting to wreck everything in sight aren't the only things that make Donkey Kong a relatable icon. He's also self-conscious about his posterior - or, rather, Nintendo was, which is why Donkey Kong Bananza's hero isn't totally naked this time around.
You might have noticed that Donkey Kong has a whole new look in the Switch 2 era, ushered in by Mario Kart World. He's now even more adorably animated and squishy-looking, but that redesign actually originated during the development of Donkey Kong Bananza.
Donkey Kong Bananza producer Kenta Motokura recently explained, in the newest Ask the Developer blog, that the team at Nintendo "were also conscious of how Donkey Kong would look from the back while he's moving" since players tend to stare at a character's backside a lot in third-person games.
Donkey Kong's behind in his old design apparently just looked like "a mass of brown fur," which wasn't a problem for the predominantly 2D platformers that he had previously headlined, but for a next-gen 3D platformer, Nintendo needed to upgrade his butt.
"That inspired us to make some creative adjustments to his outfit, such as giving him britches and suspenders," Motokura explained. As we saw pre-release, DK and Pauline also have Mario Odyssey-style outfits to unlock. Of course, at one point in the game, our big ape also loses his newfound clothes, so Nintendo was sure to make him "look rich and thick." His fur, I mean - Nintendo made his fur "look rich and thick"
Elsewhere in the blog, we also learned that Nintendo originally tested Bananza's wild destruction tech by giving a goomba hands, of all things, and the team wanted to establish "two separate branches" for DK just as they had done for Super Mario's 2D and 3D games.
For now, check out our Donkey Kong Bananza review before you go diving in to find all Donkey Kong Bananza Bananzas.
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