A Full Dig Into Donkey Kong Bananza

We reported earlier this week that Nintendo‘s June Direct would be about just one game, and we wondered if that would be enough. Apparently so! Donkey Kong Bananza is one packed game, filled with features and content. We barely have enough room to discuss it all.

First off, yes, the leaks were accurate — Donkey Kong’s sidekick in this game is not a talking rock, but a kid version of Pauline who was trapped inside that rock. And Pauline talks — in a rarely seen move for Nintendo, she has fully spoken lines of dialogue. All the other characters in the game talk in grunts while lines of text appear below them.

DK has abilities beyond what we saw in previous videos…in addition to pounding and punching, he can do a “dive punch” from a great height to create an instant pit, and surf on boulders he yanks out of the wall. He can also enter “Kong Bananza” mode to take on a fearsome, unstoppable form for a limited amount of time. He doesn’t have to be JUST a gorilla in this form — he can become a zebra that can run across water, or an ostrich that can fly and dive-bomb enemies with explosive eggs.

Pauline can do several different things as well…she can sing to power up DK, and in the two-player mode, she serves as the second player and can sing giant stone-word projectiles into being that explode on contact. The two-player mode can be played online, or locally with just one copy of the game — and get this, GameShare is even possible if the second player just has a Switch, not a Switch 2.

If you need a break from the game, there’s a wholly separate mode called “DK Artist” that lets you sculpt rocks to create any 3D object you can dream up. This could’ve have been its own entirely separate product, and we can see ourselves losing hours to just this.

Donkey Kong Bananza will also have something we haven’t seen from Nintendo in a while: amiibo support. Any amiibo will summon giant boulders of different colors that DK can throw. A Donkey Kong series amiibo, any kind, will make big stone “KONG” tiles appear that explode when thrown. There will be a special Bananza amiibo depicting Pauline riding DK, and it unlocks a Mario Odyssey outfit for her. The amiibo looks nice, but at $29.99 and with no real function in the game it’s a hard sell.

Donkey Kong Bananza will be released July 17 for Nintendo Switch 2.