Brace for Impact!
Minutes into Donkey Kong Bananza, you encounter a barrel. The kind that shoots you sky-high and ratchets between three positions to launch from. Here, a network of these barrels snakes up a sheer cliffside, and a path of collectible gold zags between them. The right launch will send Donkey Kong on a gilded path of barrel-to-barrel transit — you’ll reach your destination and be a little richer. But I launched wrong, and plowed through the packed dirt between the other barrels, and the gold, in a straight shot to the top. That worked too.
But it wouldn’t have in Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, whose constellations of barrel cannons demand precision. If you misfire, you die. You try again until you get it right. Every corner of DK Island punishes moves that come too soon or too late. Notably, Nintendo didn’t make any of the Country games internally — the first three were made by Rareware and the modern duo were made by Retro Studios. Donkey Kong Bananza was the first in-house DK game in decades (made by EPD Group 8), the last being 2004’s Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (also EPD 8, then known as EAD Tokyo).
Jungle Beat is best played with the DK Bongos, which are gleefully loud and imprecise. As you sloppily hammer on their tacky rubber pads, Donkey Kong trundles left and right. Clap over their speaker, and DK jumps — unless it’s contextually appropriate to snag a bunch of bananas or bonk a bad guy instead. The game hinges on raw feeling, as frenzied sessions sting your hands and send DK pinballing through a jungle arranged around forward momentum.
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Helpful monkeys hide in clusters of leaves, waiting to grab DK’s hand and swing him along. Grasslands slope for his ease of movement, missed jumps often just shift DK to a new track. Flowers like skyscrapers bend as he scampers their stalks, slingshotting him towards the goal when they snap back to attention. Stages are festooned with ribbons of bananas that arc along his jump and encourage a clap at its apex. Regular enemies pop like balloons; bosses plant their feet and take their beatings. In Jungle Beat, DK feels unstoppable.
And in Bananza, he can’t throw a wrong punch. Nothing is load-bearing — the roof of a Zebra’s ice cream parlor occupies the same space even when Donkey Kong turns the walls beneath it to pulp. The environment only meekly protests its destruction. A lattice of thorns is easily pulverized. Oceans of lava are effortlessly surfed over. The few unbreakable trusses that undergird each Layer rarely get in his way. Donkey Kong doesn’t have to overcome his environment, it has to withstand him.
When I play in Bananza’s rugged sandboxes that rarely put up a fight, my attention shifts to Donkey Kong himself. His goofy mannerisms, his rough-and-tumble readiness. His raw power that turns the game to spectacle. A hunk of earth he dislodges and slams into another erupts in a cacophony of particulates and treasure. All the while, DK harrumphs with satisfaction as the landscape is sculpted by his actions. This, too, is the fantasy of Jungle Beat, when a slap of the DK Bongos sends a tremor to the flora and fauna that DK charges through, as bananas and baddies are obliterated with splendid aplomb while the score counter ticks up — a numerical account of the chaos DK causes around him.
In Tropical Freeze, it’s not the way DK moves through the world that sticks in my memory, but a place like Fruity Factory itself, with its gelatinous platforms made of vivid pink and blue jellies. Or the fire-scorched savannah with its procession of precarious safari-themed obstacles. In the hands of other teams, my attention is on the world. Donkey Kong is reduced to interchangeable platforming avatar.
But to play Nintendo-made Donkey Kong games is to cinch up my tie and enjoy the rapturous spectacle of joyful destruction. To embody a character so powerful that his landscapes must relent and let him run wild. Perhaps Donkey Kong was redesigned for Bananza, but underneath a new pair of eyes and a doofy personality is the same Kong that Nintendo bends worlds for.
