I was having a lovely time with Donkey Kong Bananza, smashing everything in sight and chowing down on enough bananas to get a lethal dose of potassium, until I reached the Forest Layer – a dreaded poison swamp level. While Nintendo is no stranger to the allure of malignant muck, I found Donkey Kong Bananza's Forest Layer so aggravatingly toxic that I truly think I had a better time navigating the bowels of Blighttown and the rotted landscape of Caelid in Dark Souls and Elden Ring respectively.
At least I expect FromSoftware's games to be difficult. Donkey Kong Bananza's active encouragement of all-out destruction gets radically flipped on its head when you arrive at this sublayer. Punch downward too much or take an accidental dip and DK's health is shredded by the purple goop, hurting more than anything else that early in the game.
Top it all off with red thorns abruptly spiking up through the ground to block your path, and even enemies covered in them, and the Forest Layer is one of the most gruelling levels in Donkey Kong Bananza. But I think its biggest sin is that it made me realise that the titular Bananzas – the beastly transformations that grant DK special powers – aren't that special after all.
Monkey puzzled
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If you play the Forest Layer after the Freezer Layer, you'll arrive in the jungle with the speedy Zebra Bananza ready to go – so fast that it allows DK to run on fragile surfaces before they collapse and even hotfoot it across water. While you can hoof it across the poison that pervades most of the Forest Layer, it's not advisable as you'll still take massive amounts of damage as the Zebra Bananza's hooves are presumably melting away.
However, get the Surf Surf upgrade and DK's chunk-riding Turf Surf ability can be used to cross any liquid surface unharmed. So, that's one of the Zebra Bananza's main benefits largely replaced by an unlockable skill. But I'm sure those collapsing surfaces will come up later, along with the air vents that feature later in the Forest Layer after unlocking the Ostrich Bananza. Right?
By the time I got to the end of Donkey Kong Bananza, I realized quite how underutilized some of the Bananza transformations are. Save for certain challenge levels, the odd platforming puzzle, and a few boss fights, I felt little need to use all five of them, with the hyper-destructive Kong and Elephant transformations being by far my most used.
Since finishing the game, even wrapping up the Donkey Kong Bananza post-game, I've been baffled at the fact that the Bananzas feel so loosely incorporated into the game. Few sublayers have collapsing terrain for the Zebra to run on, and even fewer have puzzles that need to be slowed down with the Snake's glare because it's unlocked so late in the game. The Ostrich's flight is certainly useful for skipping troublesome paths with as-the-crow-flies routes, but its egg bombs are more of a novelty than a useful tool.
The most annoying part is that, for all their obvious flaws, the Bananzas, and how they mix with the destruction, are easily my favorite aspect of Donkey Kong Bananza. Given they're the namesake of the game, pack their own features, and have some excellent tunes to boot, I expected most sublayers to have substantial sections built around at least one Bananza, with the later levels testing your ability to combine them.
Apes of Wrath
Unfortunately, Donkey Kong Bananza's well-implemented and satisfying destruction mechanics spoil most of the fun of the Bananza transformations for me. The freedom to destroy most parts of any level means that anything that doesn't facilitate that gets sidelined. That's why the Kong and Elephant Bananzas are by far the most exciting – they're the most destructive! Why would I want to situationally sprint as the Zebra or jump high and occasionally slow time as the Snake when I could inhale an entire level as the Elephant?
Playing through the post-game Rehearsal levels – which are mostly made up of indestructible Neptunite and are therefore designed almost entirely around the abilities of their respective Bananza rather than destructive freedom – really hammered this point home for me. They provide a small glimpse into what the game could have been if every trick in DK's book had been given enough attention.
In that respect, Donkey Kong Bananza feels like two games slightly awkwardly smashed together, with one very much taking priority over the other. To express it in other Nintendo terms, it would be like if Cappy could possess only a handful of things throughout Super Mario Odyssey and if Mario had Link's ability to climb anything from Breath of the Wild, letting him freely explore levels anyway.
Don't get me wrong, the version of Donkey Kong Bananza that we have is still a banger, subverting my expectations of a more standard Metroidvania-style game with a platformer that embraces player freedom (levelling layers with your bare fists and other beastly demolition tools is rarely a bad time).
But I can't stop thinking about the alternate-universe version of Donkey Kong Bananza where it's the frighteningly buff Zebra, Ostrich, and the rest of the Bananza transformations that are the focal point for level design. And if a poison swamp got me thinking about all of this, maybe they aren't so bad after all.
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