April 9th, 2025

(I apologize for this post going up late and being a bit shorter – I intended to make a longer breakdown post of the entire Switch 2 Direct. However, due to some life circumstances, I had to take a step back and make this post shorter and a little last minute. I appreciate everyone who checks out my blog weekly immensely!)

The Switch 2 Direct has now came and went. Many thoughts have been shared about the direct and the information we received after the fact. Some of it’s positive, some of it’s negative, but people have a lot of thoughts. I want to throw my hat in this discussion ring, as I have an important thing I want to bring up – Donkey Kong Bananza looks INCREDIBLE.

Rumors have been swirling for quite some time that the team behind Super Mario Odyssey (or another one of Nintendo’s internal teams) was working on a 3D Donkey Kong game as their next project. I had always been excited by this premise and thought it made a lot of sense – between DK’s appearance in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, his own movie on the horizon, and an entire dedicated theme park land at two Universal Studios parks, it made a lot of sense that Nintendo would want to push him. Sure enough, the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct ended with a glimpse of gameplay for this title.

I’d really recommend checking out the Nintendo Treehouse Live segments surrounding this game, as I feel like words and the original trailer don’t do the game justice. Donkey Kong Bananza looks completely fresh, original, and huge. DK has so many movement and combat options and basically everything in the world is destructible. The world looks incredible and everything shines with amazing details – especially DK’s hilarious facial animations.

This game seems to capture a lot of the magic that made Super Mario Odyssey so special to a lot of people. While there were some other standout games (The Duskbloods anyone??), this game stood above everything else. I am incredibly hyped for this game.