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The creation of Donkey Kong Bananza started with destruction.
“What we were really going for was this gameplay experience that comes from destruction,” Bananza director Kazuya Takahashi says in an interview with The Verge. From that simple premise, Bananza’s creators have built an entire game about breaking stuff.
Bananza is the second major Switch 2 exclusive from Nintendo, and it’s made by the same developers that worked on Super Mario Odyssey, one of the games that came out during the launch window of the original Switch. According to the developers on Bananza, Donkey Kong’s appetite for destruction didn’t start with his beloved bananas, as one might expect, but with cheese.
“We had used voxel technology in Super Mario Odyssey,” says Bananza producer Kenta Motokura. “For example, in the luncheon kingdom, you can dig through large piles of cheese, and in the snow kingdom, can plow your way through snow.”
Voxels, simply put, are the chunks that make up a digital world. The same way a pixel represents the smallest unit of a flat digital image, a voxel is like the smallest unit of a 3D object, and a technology Nintendo was working with way back in the days of the original Switch. In fact, much like Mario Kart World before it, Bananza was originally planned to be an OG Switch title.
“We had in mind all of these possibilities using voxel technology,” says Motokura. “But we realized when we learned about Switch 2 that there were even greater possibilities to explore.”
Those greater possibilities were twofold: variety in the kinds of materials DK could smash and the ability to make that destruction persist. “With the Switch 2, we found that we could create lots of different kinds of destructible objects,” says Takahashi. “This created a very diverse experience of destruction within the game.”
In Bananza, there’s very little DK can’t break, smashing through layers of rocks, mud, snow, thorns, and molten chocolate masquerading as lava. They fracture in different ways and make different sounds when hit. And rather than having a destroyed chunk of material reappear after some time, as some games with destructible environments do, the damage you do sticks.
This ain’t gonna buff out. Image: Nintendo
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