Donkey Kong Bananza Was Originally Envisioned for the Switch 1 – Producer

Donkey Kong Bananza producer Kenta Motokura has revealed that the upcoming 3D platformer was originally envisioned as a Switch game before ultimately being made for the Nintendo Switch 2. In an interview with IGN, Motokura spoke about how the voxel technology used by Donkey Kong Bananza was proving to be too much for the original Switch to handle.

This largely comes down to the fact that, according to Motokura, quite a bit of the gameplay in Donkey Kong Bananza revolves around environmental destruction that players can cause. In what the producer referred to as “continuity of destruction”, players would be led from destroyed parts of the environment to new areas which can be further destroyed for more rewards. This, Motokura noted, could be expanded on further thanks to the hardware in the Switch 2.

“This allowed us to engage in creating a really extremely rich variety of materials and very large scale changes in the environment on that new hardware,” he explained. “And when destruction is your core gameplay, one really important moment that we wanted to preserve was when a player looks at a part of the terrain and thinks, can I break this? Because that creates a very important surprise that has a lot of impact for them and that was something that was best done on Switch 2.”

Motokura also noted that other features of the Switch 2 were also quite appealing to the developers of Donkey Kong Bananza. He specifically mentioned the ability to use a Joy-Con 2 controller as a mouse, which could then be used for co-op gameplay, allowing a second player to take part in more interesting ways.

“But it’s not really even just the processing power of the Switch 2 that I think attracted us and gave us some interesting possibilities. There was also the device itself that offered things like mouse control, which you can use in co-op play for a second player to control Pauline’s vocal blasts or DK Artist, a mode where you can sculpt a large set of voxels.”

Back in May, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa had spoken about how Donkey Kong Bananza could not have been “realised” on the original Switch. When asked about whether the company’s newest console was just a stopgap release between the Switch and another console down the line, Furukawa answered by saying that the console was released to offer new gameplay experiences.

“Over the course of these eight years and counting, it has become necessary to increase hardware processing performance in order for software developers to realize one of Nintendo’s most valued tenets: offering new gameplay experiences.” Furukawa said. “Thus, this time we decided to design the hardware with enhanced processing capability. We believe that Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza offer new gameplay experiences that could not be realized on Nintendo Switch.”

Donkey Kong Bananza is coming to the Switch on July 17, and will feature the return of Pauline from her last appearance in Super Mario Odyssey, among other things. Check out details about how the same development team as Odyssey worked on Donkey Kong Bananza.