Donkey Kong Bananza just came out. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. Punch your way through this thread and tell me how it is!
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wish the one thing that speaks in real language just didn’t do that, nothing new there. continue to enjoy the reinvigoration of the donkey kong arcade neon pink/blue steel as stylized flourish into 3d space, which odyssey touched on too of course. worried that there’s been some internal nintendo protocol that says it’s fine if zoomed out map views run at different framerates than everything else. as expected of odyssey gaiden i am very enthused about the movement/navigation options so far. i have played for about 20 minutes (and skipped like half the first level by climbing around)
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Getting the reward for a challenge without finding the challenge because you punched through a wall is cool
As is punching through the wall til you fall off the stage
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i really like Donkey Kong’s redesign he looks a lot more like classic arcade DK like from the machine art. way cuter and more expressive than the Rare derivative. that’s all i got to say i don’t own a switch²
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Only thing I find offputting about new DK is how big his tongue is. It’s almost like it’s the work of whoever redesigned the Boos in the GameCube era to have giant flicky tongues. Other than that, it’s fine as a middle-ground between both previous designs.
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i like giant tongues 
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I just got to the part where you free Pauline. I respect how long they postponed that reveal. I wish they hadn’t put it in all the trailers! My partner didn’t know about it though and her reaction was pretty priceless.
This game rules so far! Though they really should have hired David Wise, I like the music. So far I’ve mostly just heard a lot of the first real level’s music, which fits squarely in the “chipper Nintendo tropical starting area” genre, but it’s a very solid example of the form.
Aesthetically this is a pretty decent melding of recent Dreamworks-wannabe Nintendo with old weird passion project Nintendo… Didn’t think I’d be seeing much of the latter so I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s charming!
The way they handled the camera when you’re underground tunneling feels innovative to me – extremely intuitive and cool looking, gives the vibe of like a 90’s children’s book’s cross section of a mole tunnel.
I think people are really going to like this one. I enjoyed Astro Bot a lot, but this has more charm in 10 minutes than that entire game.
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How do you unlock his smash up b
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second column of the skill tree at the bottom iirc
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10/10
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I accidentally skipped a chunk of a layer by tunneling through the ground like an idiot, popping out the side of the world, climbing up a wall and ending up behind the boss, whom I had to run by twice for the game to trigger
This is as probably as raw id Nintendo could ever manage because a large majority of the game is just punching the shit out of the environment or enemies
Every combat encounter seems to be 50% hit stop by volume and I’m here for it
The zebra music
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How the skill tree progression meant to work with the Odyssey level of available moon bananas?
And why wouldn’t you pump everything into wall smashing and sonar?
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the dark secret of the game is that the bananas are seemingly there just for skill points so you could theoretically ignore them and just play the game with no skill upgrades
speedruns of this game are going to either be wild, stupid or both
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last boss i fought was a lady wearing white who challenged me to a duel in a field of flowers and spent the whole fight laughing at me while camouflaged and periodically dashing out to cqc me
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Is the game too easy, like some reviews are pointing out? And, if so, does that spoil the experience?
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ehhh
yeah
it’s probably too easy, especially the bosses. it’s got a real exuberant, compelling quality about running around and punching through the world though, kind of like they felt DK needed something else to punch other than the ground. the part of me that thinks it’s too easy is too busy being ignored by the part having fun just playing like an idiot
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I’ll also say unless your issue is that Pauline should have gotten the same kind of generic grunts and mumblings all the other characters get, they dubbed her into 14 languages. you can probably find a Pauline you won’t mind listening to
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i maintain that nobody should speak in non-mumble. i was briefly amused at the thought that pauline is the only non-mumble character in odyssey and bananza but i’m pretty sure peach has some throwaways
fwiw tbh i don’t really reckon it’s meaningfully easier than odyssey so far (not that odyssey is very hard)
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Maybe this is whiny of me, but I feel like making a game set underground and then making the areas floating islands and bright cheery artificial skies feels, ehh, like a lack of faith in the central theming. Similar to how like every second galaxy in Mario Galaxy had a sunny blue sky atmosphere inexplicably.
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