The same team at Nintendo that brought us Super Mario Odyssey also developed Donkey Kong Bananza, and while there are some obvious similarities between the two games, they both offer very distinct flavors of 3D platforming. That’s by design, as Nintendo wants to be sure the games each feel unique from one another.
As producer Kenta Motokura tells GamesRadar+ in an interview at the Game Developers Conference, part of how Nintendo approached Donkey Kong Bananza’s destruction mechanics was “motivated by us thinking about, ‘Well, what sort of things can a human not do? What sort of things could Mario not do? What scale of destruction would you see only from Donkey Kong as he’s punching rocks and that sort of thing?'”
Early in Bananza’s development, Motokura and the team went to Shigeru Miyamoto and long-time Mario producer Yoshiaki Koizumi “so that we could discuss what were the particular characteristics of Donkey Kong as a character.” Those discussions “started to lead into ideas for gameplay and also the types of technology that we might use to bring that to life.”
“This comparison with Mario versus DK” was something that the dev team was very conscious of, “in terms of what sort of a player do they appeal to. Is there perhaps a slightly different kind of person that might prefer one character over the other?” Accentuating the appeal of DK’s big, tough character gets us to a game where you can punch entire levels to pieces.
“Certainly, you can have really fun experiences in Mario games and really fun experiences in Donkey Kong games,” Motokura concludes. “But we want to find the differences between those two IPs, and really bring that out, as variety for people to enjoy. And that goes to the style of play as well.”
Donkey Kong Bananza devs admit the blatantly OP elephant transformation “probably went too far,” but “it’s fun” and “that’s what matters most”
