Donkey Kong Bananza is everything I wanted it to be and more, so much so that I have no qualms about saying that this game is justification enough for buying a Switch 2. I have not had such an immediate and strong attachment to a game since I played first played Breath of the Wild back in 2017. Even as much as I love playing Final Fantasy 14, my first month with the game was full of fits and starts where I was not sure that I’d grow to love it as anything more than something I played with my friends. With Donkey Kong Bananza, I was hooked from the first instant I got control of DK and my time with the game has only increased this attachment. I’ve had a whole weekend to play this game (I planned to write this a week before posting it but time got away from me (which has nevertheless worked out the best for this review)) and I can firmly say that you will not regret your time with this game. You also don’t need to have any particular attachment to the franchise, knowledge of the history of Donkey Kong, or even gaming experience to enjoy this game. This could be your first video game ever and you’d probably have an incredible time with it, assuming you enjoy this kind of open-ish world collectathon adventure experience. That’s the one caveat about this game: you need to like collecting things to really enjoy this game. If you dislike or feel stressed by collecting things, there really isn’t a lot of other stuff in this game for you. You’d probably still have fun, but the way that collection drives so much of the experience would probably repel you. If you’re indifferent to or neutral on collecting things, then I think you would still have a great time with this game. You don’t need to be a “Collecting Things” sicko like me to have a good time with Donkey Kong Bananza, but it certainly helps.

The game starts off more smoothly than any game I can remember playing. You start controlling DK after the premise is established and the first area introduces all of the game’s major mechanics to you with minimal active instruction. There’s text bubbles and indications on screen for the people who need them, but none of them require starting a dialogue with an NPC, so you’re free to pause and read or just blast on through after taking in the quick graphic depiction of what a particular button press or combo does. There’s visual hints about where to go and how to proceed, mostly baked into the level design or by the way the game introduces mechanics, but there’s also nothing stopping you from going off book if that’s what you want. There are boundaries, but you’re generally only going to find them if you go looking for them. There will be more eventually, but the game does such a good job of communicating them to you, visually and mechanically, that you’ll probably never do more than quickly bounce off them. Or float up after falling off of one.

Despite being the sort of person who hates having a game talk down to me or slow-roll the tutorial, I didn’t mind the way this game handled it. Rather than explain things to the player, the game is focused on presenting opportunities for specific kinds of exploration that use a mechanic, rewarding that exploration, and doing nothing to prevent you from bypassing it entirely if you don’t need to be taught how to climb or break things because you spent the first five minutes of the game figuring out how the physics engine responds to your inputs. To be honest, I didn’t even realize how sneaky the game was being at first. Once I’d done my initial exploration, I pushed foward with the path the game clearly wanted me to follow (and carefully wouldn’t let me NOT follow despite never actually putting anything in my way that felt like something for me to push back against) and zoomed through all the little tutorial areas, enjoying the fact that I wasn’t bogged down by text windows I had to click through in order to slap the ground or roll through obstacles. it was only later, once I was through all the explicit tutorials and almost finished with the subtextual tutorials that I realized the game was doing it.

Carefully, with text-based NPCs for those who wanted to talk (me included) and clearly-communicated level design and user experience for those who didn’t want to slow down, the game introduced not just the mechanical in-world stuff you’d be interacting with (how to clear the strange metal substance the villain spread that stopped you from progressing) but also how to think about the world and the kinds of puzzles you’d run into in the game. Rather than have an NPC or pop-up explain this stuff to you, they put some interesting features around the first level that were meant to draw the eye and that, once they brought you over, forced you to ineract with the world in specific ways in order to get a clear reward they’d set out for you. A lot of this involved making you consider lumpy terrain, objects that don’t seem to be a natural part of their environment, things That Stick Out as being intentional draws for your attention, and how the game indicates a climable surface versus an unclimbable surface. It was all so smooth and subtle that I only realized it was happening when the clearly-marked puzzle taught me to spin my camera around and literally approach things from every angle, right before I finished the area up.

Every single lesson the game teaches you in this early tutorial has been the foundation I’ve built on to play through every set of levels since then. While the plot is fairly simplistic and doesn’t have much in the way of depth that I’ve encountered (and I’m just about to unlock the third transformation power), it never pretends otherwise and the brushes you have with important NPCs and in-game events are light enough that they never take you away from the smooth gameplay loop of hunting for various collectibles, destroying terrain, and the constant reward of there always being something when you go looking just about anywhere. The only time this starts to break down is when you’re hunting for the final few major collectibles on any level and the game accounts for that by putting shops on each level that let you spend the copious gold that you can infinitely collect to buy maps that show the locations of something you’ve missed. Thanks to the solid foundation that all of the puzzles are built on, the only time I wasn’t able to quickly and easily figure out what I needed to do to get the collectible I was missing was when I’d previously destroyed the terrain too much for the NPC I needed to interact with to appear. This was solved by leaving and returning to the area, but there’s also the option to “restore” the terrain you’ve destroyed, which is a very useful tool since destroying a lot of the terrain is another way to get the maps that show you were the missing collectibles are. Aside from this one instance, no amount of terrain destruction on my part locked me out of collecting anything and even then, I was able to figure out what had happened pretty quickly.

This game was carrying a lot of baggage for me going into it, so much so that I hesitated to start playing it last week. Donkey Kong 64, the last 3D Donkey Kong game, came out in 1999 and was a foundational part of what pleasant memories I have from my childhood. It was a lovely, fun moment during a part of my life that I’ve done my best to forget, so I was worried that Bananza wouldn’t be able to measure up to the nostalgia I felt. I was also a little concerned because it was made by the same team that did Super Mario Odyssey and while that was a pretty fun game with a good gameplay loop, it will probably forever be one of those games I never finished because it was so reliant on the “dual, separate joycon” control style that I struggled to play it. Outside of a controller or the actual Switch itself, I struggle to hold the original Switch’s joycons for any length of time due to their small size, so it was a furstrating to be forced to play in smaller bursts or struggle through with controllers that limited my ability to perform the motion-oriented actions. This experience turned what might have been a very fun experience with Odysessy into a game I’ve never felt like finishing, but they appear to have learned from this mistake (it’s clear everyone did, since there aren’t a lot of these kinds of very specific motion controls in most Switch games, thank goodness) and even further simplified. The controls of Donkey Kong tripped me up a little bit from time to time, but this is the first game I’m playing on the Switch 2 that actually uses the full controller and I have pretty much exclusively played the game starting at times I should have been going to bed–which is to say I think the problem is me, since it was only a few times and each happened right when I decided it was probably time for bed.

Beyond all that, it has just been fun to play. It stratches the clever and destructive itches perfectly, doing so in a way that the relative lack of challenge to combat doesn’t really register as a detriment. While I’ve been able to blast through pretty much every fight in seconds–or slightly longer but without injury–I’ve never once felt like this was a problem. While there are a few small cutscenes for boss fights, they’re quick and you’re back to playing pretty much immediately, so there’s never a point where you’re bogged down. Even as quick as the fights have been, none of them have kept me locked in unskippable cutscenes longer than the actual fight took (which happens sometimes in other games where you can wind up with way more skills than you’re expected to have due to playing the hell out of the game) and every single time I’m back to playing through the exploration and collecting portions of the game before I’ve had the time to really register that I had to stop.

What all this amounts to is what might be the first gaming experience I’ve ever had without negative friction. I have never once been frustrated by this game as a result of its mechanics or systems. I’ve never once been held back from trying something because of limitations on the game’s part. Every failure is my own lack of imagination in regards to specific puzzles or a lack of awareness that I’m walking right past something. Any friction I’ve experience has either been the game deliberately slowing me down to teach me something in a way that I barely even felt or the actual effort required for me to solve the various puzzles of the game, most of which has faded in time as I’ve gotten a more and more intuitive grasp on how to do just that. They even managed to avoid this getting boring by introducing new mechanics and variations on old ones for each level, so there’s always some new element to explore and try mixing into my toolbox. It’s a really reward and enriching experience that is just genuinely delightful to play through. I cannot recommend this game highly enough and I want to emphasize that I absolutely meant what I said at the start of this review. This game is all the justification you need to buy a Switch 2 and for the Switch 2 to exist in the first place. I can’t imagine playing a game like this on the more limited hardware capability of the original Switch.