Many players will likely spend a good deal of Donkey Kong Bananza’s opening testing just how far the Switch 2 game will let them go. Much of Bananza is made up of destructible voxels, and DK can crumble this merry world with the abandon of a toddler playing with its food. Eventually, though, most of us will get back to the objective: there are bananas to find, fossils to collect, and challenges to beat. Then there are the players who are barely progressing at all, because they’re spending all their time clearing out levels in full.
On social media, these simian deviants are spending time boasting (and bemoaning) about the deranged way they’re traversing through the game. “You play the game as intended at a normal pace,” reads one Reddit post. “I spend hours removing every pixel of destructible terrain…We are not the same.” Based on a handful of posts, many people got stuck clearing out the initial area of the game, when Bananza places DK inside of a mine. Most of us probably spent some time in this area, but some people definitely went way farther than others. Some screenshots show areas that have been wiped clean, with no destructible terrain in sight:
For some, the game’s destruction mechanics are triggering an obsessive part of their brain that simply can’t leave things unfinished. In one thread where a player wonders if this game will give them OCD, another fan commiserates by explaining why they need to progress through the game this way.
“I can’t even enjoy it yet as I feel the need to smash everything,” they write. “I’m still in the opening stages, so hopefully I move away from this. It’s the same reason I struggle with open world games. I get overwhelmed with having to do everything and then stop playing.”
In one post where someone says they still aren’t out of the first area, a fan notes that part of what’s fueling this approach to Bananza is the fact the game has a wild number of collectibles. Some players might feel the urge to find everything, and when Bananza randomly generates things like chests, it’s easy to feel like you need to approach it as meticulously as possible.
“I had ~33K gold, 500 banandium chips, and all the bananas + fossils by the time I finally moved on from the Lagoon Layer,” one player remarked. “Also some ~690000m3 of smashed stuff total.“
Though it may seem gauche to liken a playstyle to a mental health condition, a noteworthy number of people who say they’re approaching the game with such diligence note that they do, in fact, have obsessive compulsive disorder. “This game is a mind f- for ocd,” one player wrote in a thread with a handful of other people who claim they have the condition.
Others are spending ages destroying and rebuilding for the love of the game. Though it may seem excessive, it’s obvious Nintendo intended for players to get at least a little carried away. Here’s developer Naoto Kubo, from Donkey Kong Bananza’s entertainment planning and development department, describing how Nintendo made the game’s destruction into such a tactile delight:
We also poured a lot of effort into the sound effects to make the sense of destruction feel satisfying and responsive. It wasn’t just about using loud or dramatic sounds. For instance, players will hear the sound of basic materials like rocks breaking thousands of times during play. So, we aimed for sounds that are pleasant to the ears without being tiring or repetitive. To that end, we recorded sound effects by hand, capturing the textures of materials like rock and sand. Recording everyday sounds like this is often referred to as Foley. We recorded lots of variations so the sound would vary depending on how the material was destroyed, instead of always sounding the same. We also added subtle randomness through programming and fine-tuned the sounds to make sure they weren’t too loud or high-pitched. Meanwhile, for special objects that show up later in the game, we emphasized fun and flashy sounds. We hope players will find them satisfying. We recorded all kinds of material sounds using Foley techniques, including those of fruits. There’s even a dedicated sound for hitting a watermelon. It was about more than just making it sound hard or soft. When players hit it, we wanted it to sound delicious!
To be sure, Donkey Kong Bananza does have some safety measures to ensure the player can’t fully break the game. Some of this is narrative: Monkeys will cheer you on as you whack things, or they’ll need help that, coincidentally, only DK’s fists can provide. Some measures are more forceful, like placing important things on metal ground that cannot be destroyed. Other times, the game shrugs and lets you do whatever you want — some NPCs can regenerate after you destroy them.
Still, it’s a surprise to see just how amenable Bananza is to the player’s potential annihilation. Here’s one Japanese player in utter disbelief that the platformer allows you to break apart what is otherwise a beautiful area as the NPC watches helplessly:
But just because the game won’t stop an endless rampage doesn’t mean the behavior won’t raise eyebrows.
“Are you okay?” asks one fan in a thread where the player shows a screenshot of the intro area that’s been rendered bare. “Send bananas,” the OP quips.
