One of the biggest challenges facing Nintendo with the development of last year’s Donkey Kong Bananza was how the developers could meaningfully differentiate it from the same team’s previous game, Super Mario Odyssey. In an interview with GamesRadar, producer Kenta Motokura spoke about how this led to the development of the game’s destruction mechanics, and how it 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?’”
To that end, long-time Mario producer Yoshiaki Koizumi and prolific game designer Shigeru Miyamoto were also consulted early on during development “so that we could discuss what were the particular characteristics of Donkey Kong as a character.” This would end up being quite fruitful, since the 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 an important factor for the development team, according to Motokura, “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?” While both franchises offer plenty of fun, however, Motokura wanted to continue focusing on differentiating both of the IPs and offer players more gameplay variety.
“Certainly, you can have really fun experiences in Mario games and really fun experiences in Donkey Kong games,” Motokura explained. “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.”
Back in July, Motokura had spoken about how the development of Donkey Kong Bananza had largely happened due to Koizumi approaching the team for a 3D game after work had been completed on Super Mario Odyssey.
“Because Nintendo does have a lot of characters to choose from, we’re always considering what would be good timing to create a new game with a certain character to most pleased customers,” said Motokura. “But of course, that’s just my best guess. You’d really have to ask Mr. Koizumi for the real answer.”
The decision to focus on the sheer strength of Donkey Kong in gameplay terms happened thanks to a discussion with Miyamoto. “For [Miyamoto], a lot of things that came up were the unique actions that a really strong character like Donkey Kong can engage in, things like the hand slap or blowing his breath,” he continued.
“And I also spoke to Mr. Koizumi who had served as the director on Jungle Beat. And for him, one thing that was a really important distinguishing characteristic from a character like, say, Mario, is that Donkey Kong has these longer, stronger arms. So we took all of these distinctive features of Donkey Kong as a character and tried to think about how we could bring them to play in a new game.”
Donkey Kong Bananza is available exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2. For more details, check out our review.
