Last year's launch-window Donkey Kong Bananza for the Nintendo Switch 2 was a fantastic platformer and a nice way to take advantage of the new hardware, but it also was an interestingly experimental project that dealt with terrain, destruction, and world navigation in whole new ways. That set it apart from EAD Tokyo's tried and tested 3D Mario formula, but it turns out that one of its biggest inspirations goes back to where it all began: the plumber's very first side-scroller.
We knew about the first-person experiments they had ran with the Super Mario Odyssey engine, but what the Bananza devs hadn't shared until now (at this week's GDC in San Francisco) was how they used the possibility to break pretty much everything on Super Mario Bros' World 1-2 as a reference, as in the underground level destroying the blocks served two purposes: to feel great and to create new paths to secrets.
Producer Kenta Motokura and software engineer Tatsuya Kurihara shared this with fellow developers attending the conference in a talk.
"I've loved this scene since I was a kid," Motokura-san recalled, as reported by Kotaku. "You can interact with almost everything on the screen, and depending on how you go about that, there are multiple ways to proceed."
In fact, the many additional abilities or power-ups DK gets in this adventure compared to previous games were also inspired by SMB1's Fire Flower.
The whole idea behind Donkey Kong Bananza was not only to let players destroy the environment, but to make that process especially satisfying. "It's more fun to destroy something that doesn't look like it can be destroyed," Kurihara-san added. "It is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful."
Have you played Donkey Kong Bananza yet? And what do you think of the destruction mechanics and the world design?