Nintendo promised earlier this week that a 15 minute presentation will be broadcast live, June 18th. Well it did, and here are all the details. This game looks...well...I won't say that yet.
The presentation opens with Donkey Kong and a character named Oddrock. Then, at the very top of the presentation, Donkey Kong beats his chest so hard that the vibrations crack Oddrock open to reveal that it's Pauline! And Pauline will be joining Donkey Kong on an adventure that looks to be absolutely...bananas. There, I said it.
Donkey Kong Bananza is set up around the premise that Pauline has been captured by a group of evil Kongs called the Void Company. With DK's help, Pauline is wanting to escape her captors, and get back to the surface, so she can become a singer, and you get hints of her music throughout the trailer. She's come a long way since being just known as "Lady" back in the day, and as cool as it was for her to be in Super Mario Odyssey, it's really cool to see her new look here. She's got freckles, y'all.
Donkey Kong has so many attacks at the ready, but it's hard not to refer to him as someone who smashes through things. He can punch, dive punch, or do a destructive roll for basic attacks. He has hand slap to collect items, and tear off rocks to throw them at enemies. He can also swing those same rocks, and use them to double jump. Donkey Kong can even surf on them after he throws them. They showed something off where if he picked up something softer, these objects can be built into bridges. What is this game?
You can go anywhere, and smash through anything. Make your way down, or up through practically anything. There are Ancient Ruins, which are essentially side quests. Finding gold builds Bananergy. You can find maps, to give you a lay of the land. There's even a Skill Tree?!
Pauline can get special powers from the Elders of the game, and transform into the more powerful Kong Bananza. There were two more transformations shown, Ostrich Bananza, and Zebra Bananza, where the latter walked on water. and the former dropped eggs from above. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This game looks smooth like a banana smoothie. And now I want a banana smoothie.
Without getting too much into this, because yes, we don't want to spoil the "a-peel" of the game, you'll have to watch more below, so you can see details about sonar leading to banana gems, Eelevators, and Teeleportation, which are not misspellings, and even a 2-player mode, where the second player controls Pauline, and can sing our destructive notes. She can even change the power of her notes, and you can do this locally, or through gameshare. There were even Amiibo announced.
This presentation was much better than the one we got for Mario Kart World. I think you should take a look at it, so you can look in awe like I did. I would also advise you to not try to figure out where this fits in the ol' storyline. You canon folks can sure make yourselves mad for no reason. Play the game. Donkey Kong Bananza releases July 17th. Preorders are live. The game will be on the card, for those of you who care about that sort of thing, and the Amiibo with DK and Pauline will be released the same day.
