OK.  Technically I have played Donkey Kong games before.  To be very precise, I have played Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, and Donkey Kong 3.

Donkey King 3 was released to arcades 43 years ago.

I understand there have been one or two since then.  First, during the years when Nintendo was keeping a 16-bit system afloat while the world moved to bigger and better things and then continuing through their subsequent systems.  They even keep getting remastered and re-released, so the character must have some fans.

I’ve never really been tempted to get caught up with the Kong mythos.  Truth be told, I can’t get over the instinctive revulsion I have to the character.  He’s ugly as heck, his supporting cast of smaller monkeys are even uglier, and his character traits are “dumb but strong” with a strong side order of  “thinks with his stomach”.

Not exactly a looker, and you can make him even more unappealing by buying alternate fur colors to turn him into a purple gorilla or something cotton-candy themed:

He gets even worse when you start getting various transformations to turn him into bizarre hybrids of gorillas and other animals.

It is possible that I am not being fair and that the character just isn’t for me.

However, pickings for native Switch 2 games have been pretty slim so far – especially compared to the launch year of the original Switch.  Most of what I’ve used my Switch 2 for has been playing Switch games that take advantage of the dramatically improved performance of the new system.

That’s a pretty poor use of money, all things considered.

So, when I was in Japan a few months ago I took advantage of the exchange rate to buy Bananza.  And quite a few other games, yes, but Bananza had the reputation for being the real showcase game for the Switch 2 in 2025 so it was high on my list to get to.

And it is, ignoring the grotesque main character, a genuinely pretty game.  You can tell that Nintendo’s developers really enjoyed having the new hardware to play with, and the level designers got pretty imaginative with the sorts of levels they could build.  Sure, you have the requisite ice level and the requisite magma level, but you also get stuff like a level themed entirely around a giant burger.

I will admit, though, that bashing my way through the burger was enough to turn a lesser person vegetarian.  They really managed to make the meat textures look very… meaty.

Oh.  Right.  Bashing through.  I didn’t know much – really, I didn’t know anything about the game before going into it so I wasn’t expecting the degree to which you can more or less tunnel through all of the terrain.  You’ll occasionally get blocked by unbreakable walls or terrain like lava or thorns that will kill you, but otherwise you’re free to strip mine the very pretty environments for a seemingly endless variety of collectibles.

I’m told that the game is full of fun cameos and in-jokes for fans.  Not knowing anything about what the Kongs have been up to for the last forty-odd years, they pretty much all just flew over my head.  I did at least recognize that some of the characters had shown up in other games, even if I personally only knew them from Smash Brothers.

And, hey – now I  know that at least one of the characters in Smash Brothers that I didn’t know the origins of was a Donkey Kong supporting character.  So that was educational.

In the end, I took about 20 hours to roll credits, and the last third of that was really very good.  Once you get all of the various transformations and have unlocked your skill tree a bit, the game really starts throwing some inventive challenges at you.

There’s some post game stuff but it’s locked behind collecting up to 600 of the game’s 777 bananas.  By the end of my time with Bananza, I had gathered a whopping 215, and I felt I was done.

DK:B was the only game I’ve actually managed to see the end of in since wrapping up Resident Evil 9 back on March 2nd.  I’m going to blame that on playing two “service games” (World of Warcraft and Genshin Impact) which eat a lot of my gaming time.  At least I’ve managed to more or less put Blue Archive and Nikke down for the time being – when I was trying to play three mobile games at the same time it was pretty challenging to keep on top of all of them.

Next up? I dunno.  Pragmata maybe?  Capcom has been on my good list lately.   But then there’s also the Fatal Frame II remake, and I stumbled across a good deal on Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and I like me a good Soulslike…