I do not think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve been faked out about the actual end of the game as many times as Donkey Kong Banaza has done to me. There was the ending the game told me was coming from the very beginning, there was the ending I expected from not long after the start of the game, there was the ending after that which I didn’t really expect but thought was kind of fun, there was the ending immediately after that which was exciting and a little over-the-top (in a fun way that very much fit with the game up to that point) and now there’s a new ending I’ve yet to reach that might just be setup for the DLC? I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell what this ending might be other than a pretense in order to let you continue playing the game [this is exactly what it was]. I don’t really know. I’ve got more game left to play, after all, and the story for this part is thinner than ever so I can’t really guess at anything beyond the clearly stated reason everything is continuing to happen. It’s a wild, silly experience that hasn’t damped my fun at any point. The entire series of sequential endings was a joy. The only downside to all that was how much more time I spent playing the game before I finally went to bed. I did expect to be done with the game after a single night, though, so now I’ve clearly got at least a couple more nights of it to go yet. Then I can do the Kirby DLC and, after that, finally start Final Fantasy Tactics. Or whatever other game has come out that feels more urgent.

I don’t really mind the delay, though. Donkey Kong Banaza is fun to play, even if the game doesn’t really have a lot of depth. The “post-game” has actually been a lot of fun, with some interesting challenges to tackle that actually took real effort on my part. Part of that post-game stuff is a pair of challenges: thirteen battle games in a row, each one allowing you only thirty seconds to complete it with enemies that often have strange gimmicks that can ruin your entire run since there’s no checkpoints, and a boss rush that doesn’t have a timer but that pits you against old bosses in more difficult circumstances. Both of these were a lot of fun and though I was able to beat the Boss Rush in a single attempt, it actually took some strategy, planning, and skill to do. The thirteen-battle challenge actually took several attempts since even one little slip-up would force me to start over. I finished more than one of those battles with less than a second on the clock and lost some of them simply because I didn’t know what was going on from the very start or because I messed up an action and didn’t have room for mistakes. I enjoyed these challenges, of course, since I like doing difficult things just to prove that I can, but I was surprised they were there at all given the incredibly low amount of skill required for most of the game.

Part of what has made this game such an interesting experience is incredibly low amount of skill required to be competent at the game but the ridiculous height of the skill ceiling the game allows you to hit with some of the more difficult challenges and puzzles. Sometimes, you’re doing a boss fight and just have to live long enough for the boss to make itself vulnerable. Sure, you can speed that up if you play well, but all that’s necessary to succeed is to react to the clearly telegraphed attacks from the boss long enough to whittle its health down. Other times, you know there’s something nearby but the game refuses to show you how to get to it, forcing you to slowly and methodically try every possible approach until you find the right mixture of creativity and skill. Sometimes a banaza is right out in the open, requiring only that you turn your camera the right way to see it. Other times there is no clear indication that there’s anything to be found nearby, but subtle hints in the environment tell you, based on your experiences playing other games, that there must be something there. There’s enough of a mix that I never felt like I wasn’t sufficiently challenged by the game and all the low-hanging fruit meant that only the toughest puzzles interrupted the game’s flow of collecting things. I imagine, now in the post-game with almost 1000 banandium gems (or bananas as both I and the game usually call them), that there’s probably enough of the easier ones for even the freshest player to be able to advance with a decent number of skills, which makes this a game with a very broad appeal, an important factor given that there’s no difficulty settings. There’s just challenges of varying complexity and tools at your disposal that can lower the difficulty for specific tasks as long as you’ve got enough in-game gold to buy them.

Except for the final challenges of the game, anyway. Those all require a decent amount of skill to pass and passing them with enough of a lead to get the bonus rewards was an actual challenge for me. It was fun, of course, to be forced to engage with all of the powers Donkey Kong had unlocked in a way I’d avoided up to that point. You can solve or circumvent most problems with a few of those powers, so clever or lateral thinking can remove the need to rely on some of the (in my opinion) less fun powers, meaning that I had a couple specific cases where I had to use some of them for very specific puzzles and then never used them in any other situation until the very end, when I was doing all the power-specific challenges. The Zebra one, my least favorite, was a trial. One I eventually passed with flying colors, but it definitely took me the most tries out of anything, even that thirty-second battle chain. And none of these challenges are required to enjoy or “complete” the game. They’re just extra challenges put in the game to give you a reason to keep collecting things with a paper-thin plot wrapped around them to give you a plausible reason for Pauline to return to the adventure after you finally get her home in the core portion of the game. All of which is fine by me. I’m just here to have fun and this game is fun to play. I don’t need a narrative justification to keep going until I’ve collected every possible banana, unlocked every power, and so on. That’s reward enough in itself.