Some ideas from Donkey Kong Bananza” may inform Nintendo’s next big project, producer says, but “the standard is really what will feel fresh to a player in a new title

Donkey Kong Bananza is the premiere Nintendo platformer for the time being, having been built by the A-team that delivered Super Mario Odyssey back in 2017. There’s clear connective tissue between the two games, even if they ended up becoming wildly different games, and producer Kenta Motokura believes a similar sort of lineage is likely to build for the team’s next game.

“Probably, we’ll see the same sort of phenomenon as we did when going from Super Mario Odyssey to Donkey Kong Bananza, where there were some ideas and development that acted as hints for the future development of Donkey Kong Bananza,” Motokura tells GamesRadar+ in an interview at the Game Developers Conference. “I do expect that will be the case where some ideas from Donkey Kong Bananza provide future hints for our next project, as well.”

In an official interview ahead of launch last year, Motokura previously noted that Bananza “will come to symbolize 3D Donkey Kong.” You could interpret that to mean that future 3D Donkey Kong games will be similarly focused on destruction, but Motokura suggests that offering something fresh is more central to the team’s ambition to set new standards.

“As far as, ‘what is the standard,’ I think the standard is really what will feel fresh to a player in a new title,” he tells us. “So for example, when we were developing Super Mario Odyssey, we were thinking about Mario transformations that no one had seen up to that point. That’s always a goal in mind when working on a project.”

We asked Nintendo point-blank about Donkey Kong Bananza’s biggest mystery: They wouldn’t tell us who Pauline really is.