Donkey Kong Bananza launches on July 17 for the Nintendo Switch 2, but that wasn’t always the plan. In a new interview, producer Kenta Motokura and game director Kazuya Takahashi revealed that the game started out as an original Nintendo Switch title.
Speaking with IGN, Motokura said that as development on the game moved forward, the team realized that the mechanics used were better suited for newer hardware. Takahaski added that destroying the environment was a big part of the game that they couldn’t hold back on. As he put it, destruction is “core gameplay”.
“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,” Takahasi told IGN. “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.
“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.”
Along with the first 3D Donkey Kong game in over 25 years , Mario Kart World also began as a Switch 1 game early in its development. With the features planned for the latest in the racer, however, plans changed to move it to the new console.
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Mike has been covering the gaming industry since 2012, and has reported on some of the largest events in the industry while also working as an investigative reporter. Outside of…
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Boo! Missed opportunity. They need to confirm this is a prequel and then do a Yoshi game like this with a kid Mario.