nex3
BACKER
reviewed
Donkey Kong Bananza
I miss 3D exploration platformers. I grew up on
Banjo Kazooie and
Donkey Kong 64 captured my childhood
imagination like nothing else. These are both deeply
flawed games, of course, and I would struggle to bring
myself to call either one "good" today. But to my young
sensibilities, they held the promise of intricate and
captivating spaces full of things to do and goodies to
obtain.
The peak of this evocation of the joy of exploration—and this one I will stand by even as an adult—was Super Mario Sunshine. The worlds in that game were vibrant and alive, each completely distinctive and full of personality that was elaborated on as they subtly shifted form from one shine challenge to the next. And then they never made another game like it again. Super Mario Odyssey comes closest, but while kingdoms like New Donk City were just what I wanted, others like Sand Kingdom felt like mere open world content grids. Still, I was excited to see what this team would do to iterate on the concept.
Sadly, Bananza went in just the opposite direction. The core concept, a landscape made of almost totally destructive material, produces a design that is by its nature at odds with the intricate and captivating spaces that I still yearn for. When you can smash through any wall, there's no room for secret passageways or bespoke assets. Even the notion of "rooms" itself is barely relevant for the worlds you actually move through. The designers have can avoid this when they choose with an unbreakable metal material that forms the foundation of every world and is occasionally used for proper walls, but it's clear they resist the urge to do so because they feel (rightly!) that using it more than sparingly would undermine the core principle of the game.
The result is exploration that doesn't feel like moving through an intricate, meticulously designed space. Instead, it feels muddy. The form of a space doesn't matter, because it's made to be unmade. To a large extent (although mercifully less as the game goes on and develops more interesting nouns) you can just blast through terrain at random and find bananas just... there. Not in a location with an interesting design, not through a challenge, just buried under some largely undifferentiated Substance.
To be fair, there are actually six or so materials in each world. But this is part of the muddiness: nearly everything in every world is made out of some combination of rock, dirt, metal, gold, or a couple world-specific materials. Unlike Odyssey's rich worlds full of bespoke assets, every place in Bananza looks more or less the same. This makes it very difficult to navigate, but worse than that it means the different places within a given layer don't feel distinct, and so even layers that have a lot of interesting verticality to them leave me with the same impression as an open world content grid. When movement within a space feels trivial, the space itself feels trivial.
The titular Bananza mechanic reinforces this sense of triviality. This mechanic is harmful to the game even beyond its own bounds, because it provides the player with a dilemma at all times. Most challenges in the game will be absolutely trivialized by activating Bananza. The early layers are full of concrete walls that can't be broken by DK's normal fists. They can instead be broken either by throwing explosive blocks at them, and so they present a lock-and-key mechanism that forms the foundation of a number of cleverly designed challenges and puzzles. But once you've activated Bananza, you can just punch through them like any other material.
But at the same time, there are challenges that absolutely, unavoidably require a Bananza. And the distinction are never clear: some bosses can't be beaten without Bananza, some are only remotely interesting if you avoid using it. Most puzzles are trivialized by gaining a bunch of extra powers, but a few can't be solved without those powers. So if you're staring at a puzzle, wracking your brain for a solution, there's always a chance that the only legitimate answer is "you should cheat" and also always a chance that cheating will totally deprive you of the fun of actually figuring it out.
The fundamentals on which this game is built are flawed. They misunderstand what's fun about the exploratory promise of the genre (although I suppose I have to admit that others may be looking for different things from the genre than I am given the game's average rating). But I will say this: the level design itself speaks to a huge amount of skill from the designers. They took a flawed premise and did the best they could with it, and the result is still pretty impressive considering the raw material. Some of the challenges, like finding the lost Fractone pieces by sculpting the terrain so they have a flat path to walk to their parent, speak to a way of engaging with the terrain that almost makes the premise seem worthwhile. But even that tremendous skill wasn't enough to make me want to reliably pick this up and keep playing.
The peak of this evocation of the joy of exploration—and this one I will stand by even as an adult—was Super Mario Sunshine. The worlds in that game were vibrant and alive, each completely distinctive and full of personality that was elaborated on as they subtly shifted form from one shine challenge to the next. And then they never made another game like it again. Super Mario Odyssey comes closest, but while kingdoms like New Donk City were just what I wanted, others like Sand Kingdom felt like mere open world content grids. Still, I was excited to see what this team would do to iterate on the concept.
Sadly, Bananza went in just the opposite direction. The core concept, a landscape made of almost totally destructive material, produces a design that is by its nature at odds with the intricate and captivating spaces that I still yearn for. When you can smash through any wall, there's no room for secret passageways or bespoke assets. Even the notion of "rooms" itself is barely relevant for the worlds you actually move through. The designers have can avoid this when they choose with an unbreakable metal material that forms the foundation of every world and is occasionally used for proper walls, but it's clear they resist the urge to do so because they feel (rightly!) that using it more than sparingly would undermine the core principle of the game.
The result is exploration that doesn't feel like moving through an intricate, meticulously designed space. Instead, it feels muddy. The form of a space doesn't matter, because it's made to be unmade. To a large extent (although mercifully less as the game goes on and develops more interesting nouns) you can just blast through terrain at random and find bananas just... there. Not in a location with an interesting design, not through a challenge, just buried under some largely undifferentiated Substance.
To be fair, there are actually six or so materials in each world. But this is part of the muddiness: nearly everything in every world is made out of some combination of rock, dirt, metal, gold, or a couple world-specific materials. Unlike Odyssey's rich worlds full of bespoke assets, every place in Bananza looks more or less the same. This makes it very difficult to navigate, but worse than that it means the different places within a given layer don't feel distinct, and so even layers that have a lot of interesting verticality to them leave me with the same impression as an open world content grid. When movement within a space feels trivial, the space itself feels trivial.
The titular Bananza mechanic reinforces this sense of triviality. This mechanic is harmful to the game even beyond its own bounds, because it provides the player with a dilemma at all times. Most challenges in the game will be absolutely trivialized by activating Bananza. The early layers are full of concrete walls that can't be broken by DK's normal fists. They can instead be broken either by throwing explosive blocks at them, and so they present a lock-and-key mechanism that forms the foundation of a number of cleverly designed challenges and puzzles. But once you've activated Bananza, you can just punch through them like any other material.
But at the same time, there are challenges that absolutely, unavoidably require a Bananza. And the distinction are never clear: some bosses can't be beaten without Bananza, some are only remotely interesting if you avoid using it. Most puzzles are trivialized by gaining a bunch of extra powers, but a few can't be solved without those powers. So if you're staring at a puzzle, wracking your brain for a solution, there's always a chance that the only legitimate answer is "you should cheat" and also always a chance that cheating will totally deprive you of the fun of actually figuring it out.
The fundamentals on which this game is built are flawed. They misunderstand what's fun about the exploratory promise of the genre (although I suppose I have to admit that others may be looking for different things from the genre than I am given the game's average rating). But I will say this: the level design itself speaks to a huge amount of skill from the designers. They took a flawed premise and did the best they could with it, and the result is still pretty impressive considering the raw material. Some of the challenges, like finding the lost Fractone pieces by sculpting the terrain so they have a flat path to walk to their parent, speak to a way of engaging with the terrain that almost makes the premise seem worthwhile. But even that tremendous skill wasn't enough to make me want to reliably pick this up and keep playing.