Somehow both ugly and pretty.
3 Likes
After collecting 1000 banana gems you get three stars next to your name which is also my rating of the game.
2 Likes
I think part of why I’m vibing with this one so relatively much is that I’ve felt similarly about a lot of recent “really good but by no means essential” switch games (which is like everything after breath of the wild, I think I’m becoming a “modern Nintendo peaked on the Wii U and has been riding it since” lunatic) in that imo they’re all kind of monotonous and facile but this one has like, an even lower effort floor, you just do exactly what’s in front of you kind of sloppily and it feels great. most games feel worse when played kind of badly, this one feels great.
6 Likes
I think this solves the problem Mario odyssey had which is when you’ve exhausted every movement permutations there’s nothing left to do while this let’s you Keep On Punching so you always feel rewarded even if it’s just digging up the ground.
1 Like
imo Mario Odyssey was a good bit worse than either this or 3D World was, because the density of its ideas was not very good overall, the things it gave you to do were alternately too immediate or too arbitrary and it coasted in part on the consistent weirdness of its setting. Donkey Kong succeeds a lot more at mechanical pacing, the interesting stuff is always just close enough at hand to string you along in the right ways.
3 Likes
It is refreshing how broken DK is as a playable character.
1 Like
oh yeah, I have avoided looking ahead in youtube videos for this one more than for most games I have played in years, just because unlocking stuff like the ostrich transformation is so profoundly silly
I also think it’s funny that the two games I am playing right now are Donkey Kong and Robocop because they are essentially the same character
4 Likes
Donkey Cop
4 Likes
I mean why are there bananas made of gold and why are they edible? I still have so many questions.
3 Likes
This can’t really be a Wario game because Wario’s main characteristic isn’t brute strength, but resilience, weight and inertia. He can ram his elbow through walls, but he can’t just plow through a mountainside without a running start or a downward slope. He can throw pillars, but needs to spin them around first.
Also golden bananas (edible) were the main items in DK64, c’mon
I forgot almost everything about DK64 even though I reached the final boss back when it came out.
‘The Golden Banana first appears in the Donkey Kong Country animated series, during the episode “Raiders of the Lost Banana”, the debuting of the character Inka Dinka Doo.’
I feel like I’m missing crucial lore. Certainly no DK rap expert and no member of this exclusive society. But Wario could probably dig through dirt and smash through rocks given enough garlic.
2 Likes
Probably the most prominent feature of Wario’s main character debut was:
(This was my first game btw. I loved how getting rich actually made sense, unlike in all the other Mario games.)
4 Likes
The Bananza tech would also be great for the 3D Super Metroid sequel I’ve been waiting for since Minecraft. But that’s of course never going to happen because people want another Prime instead.
1 Like
is this better than odyssey. i guess i don’t quite think so. in some ways it’s more interesting. pretty compelling as a duology. if they do another one in eight more years i’ll be there
…although, ok, i really like the moon bit in odyssey but everything in bananza from the deepest layer to the end is just great, blows the end of odyssey out of the water, hard to imagine a better megabudget 3d platformer spectacle gauntlet really. last boss is terrific. postgame freak obstacle courses are all pretty great too (i didn’t really care about the difficulty the whole way through, but when i did those i admit i wished a little of the regular game had been that hard)
i don’t really think of myself as someone who gives half a shit about dkc but boy howdy every time they invoke it via its 30-year-old audio (and i don’t even just mean music!) it’s clear it still has some kind of juice
yeah that’s right, i’m 777 bananas. never bent the knee to extending my health bar. what, you think i didn’t get 880 moons on a fresh mario odyssey save in the three weeks before this came out too. wake up. damn i can’t wait to go back to playing old jrpgs again
16 Likes
I’m all for another one in 8 years, unless they put another cooking-themed lava world at exactly 75% into the main quest. Then I’ll start asking questions.
1 Like
Now that I’m 10 hours in and I’ve upgraded my monkey sonar I get how this might be tempting / not entirely insane.
At some point I also learned you could roll off a cliff, jump in air, and roll again, which is a lot of fast forward movement that feels pretty good. Spamming claps in between makes me feel like a speedrunner.
2 Likes
wait until you start Incorporating A Chunk (usually more trouble than it’s worth actually lol (and that’s why we do it))
2 Likes
yeah I love how all the triple jumps are weird technicalities that you almost never need and are hard to control
how many people are out there trying to completely eliminate all destructible terrain from stages?