Donkey Kong enters the Nintendo-craft Era

The next big Switch 2 game continues a remarkable evolution of Nintendo game design, as the company makes creativity-focused adventures that feel a bit more like Minecraft.

Donkey Kong Bananza. Screenshot: Nintendo, captured by Game File

The most exciting thing about this month’s Donkey Kong Bananza is that you can ignore whatever the game is asking you to do, pick up an explosive rock, chuck it far across the game’s map and cause part of the game world to crumble.

Like this:

(Watch the above clip on YouTube, if you prefer.)

Last week, I played Bananza, a soon-to-be-released Switch 2 exclusive, for two hours. Nintendo is sufficiently high on the game that it deviated from its recent silence about who is making its upcoming games to divulge that this one’s from the team that developed the remarkable 2017 Switch adventure Super Mario Odyssey (About that….I have a Captain Toad theory that I’ll share below!)

I spent a lot of my Bananza time last week doing what you saw in the clip above. I was throwing and breaking things instead of whatever I was '“supposed” to be doing.

I wasn’t going to be able to keep the copy of the game that I played under Nintendo’s supervision, not even the save file. That’s standard for a game preview and, in Bananza’s case, totally fine. The game didn’t feel like one I’d most enjoy by following its script. Rather, it feels designed for ignoring the urge to move forward, for making mischief instead and to create your own fun.

So, sure, Donkey Kong Bananza appears to be a dense, deep 3D action-adventure game in which Kong and his buddy, the musically-powered Pauline, romp through layers of allegedly subterranean environments (don’t mind what looks like the sky hanging above many of these levels), as the big ape punches rocks, collects gold, hoards banana crystals, buys new ties, transforms into more powerful beasts and battles bosses.

But it’s also a game where you can ignore all of that and just smash the levels to bits. Or, in some cases, because Bananza’s levels are composed of different virtual materials—stone, metal, sand, grass, etc—which interact with other materials differently when they’re smashed into each other, you can also, at times, build, simple new structures in the level.

Here’s a clip of me discovering Bananza’s build options, a little awkwardly, as I played last week:

(Watch the above clip on YouTube, if you prefer.)

In that video, I’m creating the simplest of bridges out of clumps of leaves.

In a later level, I began doing the same with clumps of sand that I directed into position as I controlled Pauline, via the game’s optional co-op mode. In what I was shown, Pauline clings to Donkey Kong’s back and can shout physically-rendered words into the game world. (She can also copy different material types to change the composition of these words; just as you might use a virtual eye dropper to select a color in an painting program).

These gameplay options are all about player agency—giving the person holding the controller more abilities to shape their experience.

They’re also about player creativity stuff—giving that person with the controller a game that’s as much about what was designed for them to do as it is about what players might do in it.

This is where Nintendo seems to be going with several of its most interesting games these days. I’m thinking we could call this the Nintendo-craft era. Maybe?

And it got me thinking about the one time I asked two of Nintendo’s top designers about Minecraft.