Donkey Kong may have been Nintendo’s first breakout star, but for decades, the character was more commonly associated with other developers than he was with his creators. While numerous studios have put out Donkey Kong titles over the years, the simian really came into his own under the stewardship of Rare, who reinvented the character with 1994’s seminal Donkey Kong Country. Though it hasn’t been involved with the series since the early 2000s, Rare’s work was so beloved that it effectively defined Donkey Kong for the next two decades–and that influence can still be felt throughout the newly released Donkey Kong Bananza.
It’s surprising how much of Rare’s DK survived in Bananza. Despite some visual references to past Donkey Kong titles, everything Nintendo had shown off leading up to the game’s launch suggested it would be a complete reboot of the series. Even beyond the lore implications of Donkey Kong teaming up with an inexplicably young Pauline, Bananza’s freewheeling, destructive gameplay and subterranean setting are a marked departure from the Donkey Kong Country of old, giving the game a flavor and identity that’s wholly distinct from every DK title before it.
This first impression is not entirely off the mark; right from the outset, Bananza feels like a new direction not just for the character, but the series as a whole. While the game boasts plenty of platforming challenges to overcome, its core loop revolves around smashing your way through dense environments, using DK’s mighty strength to carve up the terrain and unearth hidden collectibles. It makes for a decidedly different gameplay experience than previous Donkey Kong titles. And yet, despite this stark change in direction, Bananza still retains a number of elements that Rare’s Donkey Kong games pioneered.
You can see vestiges of the studio’s influence all over the game design. Many of the elements that have become hallmarks of Rare’s Donkey Kong reappear in Bananza. Balloons, initially your life counter in the Donkey Kong Country series, return in a similar role, ferrying you back to safety when you plummet into a bottomless abyss. DKC mainstays like Cranky, Diddy, and Dixie Kong make recurring cameos throughout the adventure, cropping up in unexpected places as you make your way to the planet’s core. Even the soundtrack pays homage to Rare’s games, interspersing iconic songs like DK Island Swing and the DK Rap amongst all the new tracks.
Rare’s lingering influence is even more prominent in Bananza’s challenge levels. Battle arenas, which task you with defeating a specific number of enemies against a time limit, take obvious inspiration from similar challenges in Donkey Kong 64, right down to their staging. Some of the platforming courses that DK encounters on his quest, like the fittingly named Nostalgia Country, are even more overt callbacks, playing out like traditional side-scrolling levels with iconic backdrops from DKC. These stages have the same impact as the 8-bit sections in Super Mario Odyssey, offering a pleasant, nostalgia-stirring surprise for longtime fans that lovingly harkens back to the series’ roots.
Bananza shares many other similarities with Odyssey, having been developed by the same team, but both games’ freeform structure was, in part, shaped by Rare. Though Super Mario 64 established the template that other 3D platformers would follow, Rare built upon it in novel ways with Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64. Whereas Mario 64 divided up its courses into different “episodes” that each focused on a specific objective, the levels in Rare’s games were proper sandboxes, with all of their collectibles available right from the outset. Not all of them were immediately obtainable; some could only be acquired after returning with the appropriate skill. But players had the freedom to explore a stage and pick up as many collectibles as they could without immediately being kicked back to the hub area, which fundamentally changed the experience–and became the approach Nintendo would eventually adopt with Odyssey and Bananza.
Even ideas that initially seem unique to Bananza can be traced back to Rare’s Donkey Kong games. Bananza’s emphasis on music in particular owes a debt to Donkey Kong 64, which likewise incorporated music as a core component of its gameplay. Partway through the Nintendo 64 adventure, each Kong would add a different musical instrument to their repertoire of skills; DK, for instance, would get his (soon-to-be signature) pair of bongos, while Diddy would acquire an electric guitar. When the Kongs played these instruments in the appropriate spot, they’d send out a devastating shockwave attack that would destroy nearby enemies and activate something around the stage, often leading to a Golden Banana.
It’s easy to draw a throughline from DK64’s instruments to Pauline’s powerful vocal cords, which similarly serve multiple purposes in Bananza. On top of triggering the Bananza transformations, Pauline’s singing can disperse Void seals, opening up new parts of the level to explore. She can also launch powerful vocal blasts in co-op mode, which will destroy any terrain and enemies in their path.
For all the ways Bananza charts a fresh new direction for the series, the game is very much indebted to its past. In reclaiming the character, Nintendo could very well have wiped the slate clean and cast aside all traces of Rare’s Donkey Kong, making the character wholly its own. But by preserving so many hallmarks from Rare’s DK games, Nintendo has tacitly acknowledged that Bananza would not feel like a proper Donkey Kong title without them–that many of the elements Rare introduced have since become core to Donkey Kong’s identity.
With a rumored Donkey Kong movie on the horizon, Nintendo will likely lean heavily on the series moving forward. But regardless of where DK goes from here, there will always be bits of Rare in his DNA.
