Donkey Kong Bananza

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⭐ 8/10

This game was not helped by the fact that I played it a single day, then played Silksong followed by Hades 2 in their entirety before returning to it. It took my a long time to get into this game. I found the first couple worlds kind of boring, and it was only in the back half that it felt like things got interesting.

This is an insane collectathon, with so much stuff to find as you pummel your way through everything. Breath of the Wild is perfect with its openness, Mario Odyssey is open but with tons to do and find, and then this is the extreme end of this scale, with so much stuff crammed in with no room to breathe. It suffers because of it, with discoveries becoming completely predictable. Nothing is really hiding with your little sonar pound move, which I actually love and makes 100%ing a game like this do-able without much internet assistance. Even without the internet you can pay to get pins on your map for fossils or bananas, so I do appreciate how completionist friendly this is. But again, just way too much crammed in here.

In the back half there were a couple worlds that I actually did love, worlds that were more focused on platforming and less on destroying everything you see. They were spacious, and not coincidentally also had the fewest amount of collectables! They would have been completely at home in Odyssey, which explains why I loved them so much, but they also would introduce new mechanics in the different materials you can pull from the ground and use. Some clever stuff.

But the next complaint is that this game is just too easy. Only a couple bananas took multiple tries, but when they do its even more frustrating because you expect everything to be easy now! You bash through everything, including some fun bosses, and while that can feel good I love a challenge, especially after the games I had just played. I will say the post game content here was amazing, introduced some great challenges that made you use every mechanic at your disposal - so why not do more of that in the game! These challenges were a bit BOTW shrine-ish, and I would love to see more of those mind benders in the open world, but that's fine. Have faith that not everyone playing is a child!

The final couple bananas were hell and involved farming gold, which I was grabbing all the time up to that point, but then also a pixel-perfect platforming challenge 100x more difficult than anything that came before it. It made me want to scream, I know I wanted a challenge but the game isn't built to be this precise, its all about brute strength. So a rough finish to my 100% run, even though the post game content was overall my favourite.

Sad we didn't get Odyssey 2. Definitely don't buy a Switch 2 just for this.

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