Donkey Kong Bananza makes you feel as powerful and reckless as a massive, silly ape with bananas on the brain. This world is meant to be breakable. The denizens of the game’s 17 main underground layers are happy for you to smash through their homes, break their furniture, or even break them (don’t worry, those lovable, bright-eyed “Fractones” grow back). It would be a mindless escape if it weren’t for young Pauline riding on your back. She offers encouragement and direction. In the game’s rare quiet moments, Pauline shares her fears with her mum ape companion. She’s afraid of many things, like most kids are—spiders, poison, and heights. But she finds comfort in the fact that DK’s there. It’s like you’re leading a child hand-in-hand through a beautiful adventure. She feels safe with you, and as the player, I wanted to make sure I deserved that trust.

To say Donkey Kong Bananza hooked me is an understatement. Still, I know its flaws well. The camera sometimes cannot keep up with players going underground or into DK-shaped holes in walls. There are rare points in the game where the number of objects flying across the screen is too much for the Switch 2 to handle, which leads to frame drops. DK climbs with such speed he can be difficult to control, especially when you try to swap from one plane onto another. Many deaths felt earned; I was going full ape and spilled myself off a cliff. Other deaths left me sighing in exasperation as I watched my gold counter go down. I was never left bereft of gold, but as an obsessive completionist, I hurt to leave a single nugget uncollected.

If there’s one big complaint I have, it’s that Nintendo didn’t take advantage of all the new control options available. The only instance of the Joy-Con 2 mouse controls is in two-player mode. A second controller controls Pauline, who can aim around the screen and shoot out words like a back-mounted monkey turret. It’s not a difficult game. Out of all the bosses in all the kilometers deep underground, whether they’re giant monsters or one of the three main nemeses—three kongs of The Void Company headed up by the maniacal Void Kong—I died only a few times, and normally because I had already turned my brain off while reveling in the latest crater I put into the ground. Exploring requires only an ounce more brainpower as you hunt for various Banandium gems to improve Donkey Kong’s capabilities or fossils to fuel your ever-present need to dress DK and Pauline in swankier garb.

A week after launch is time enough to think about the place Donkey Kong has in Nintendo’s lexicon. Games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey on the original Switch set the tone for what players could expect. Both were incredible games that felt all the better because they could make use of what made the console unique. The OG Switch was a low-power device, and despite that, we would not find another mass-market game that offered the same sense of exploration as BoTW until Elden Ring. Sony took more than seven years to find a studio that could make a game as imaginative as Odyssey in the form of the delightful Astro Bot.

Now Nintendo has a whole new console that’s much more powerful than before. No, it’s not as strong as an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5. It doesn’t need to be, when the developers inside Nintendo’s various teams are this good at crafting games built with the hardware in mind. In a Q&A posted by Nintendo, Bananza’s developers (many of whom worked on Odyssey) said the game originated as an original Switch title—similar to how Mario Kart World began its development. The team settled on using voxel technology to build out the game world’s destructible terrain. Imagine if a pixel could exist on a three-dimensional grid, and you’ll get close to what this looks like in programming terms. It’s the same technology used in games like Deep Rock Galactic to help your space dwarves dig through mountains of rock.

In Bananza, even the enemies are made of voxels. While some levels in Odyssey used voxel technology, it was in limited quantities and on certain levels. The Switch 2 has more RAM available—12GB compared to 4GB on the OG handheld. Of the Switch 2 RAM, 3GB of the total is dedicated to running the system’s base software. With only 9GB of RAM available and improved CPU capabilities, Nintendo’s devs crafted a wholly destructible world where there can be a cavalcade of distinct physics objects moving on screen and still maintain a stable 60 fps frame rate, at least most of the time. Nintendo’s strongest asset has been crafting games to fit the hardware. Bananza is what happens when you give the dev teams more resources to push what’s possible.

You can’t put Donkey Kong in a basket (he’d probably just punch his way out and leave a 5-foot hole in your wall in the process). It’s a collect-a-thon that shares so much of the same DNA as Super Mario Odyssey. It’s a cathartic action game. It’s a game about discovery, exploration, and player expression. But at its heart, it’s a physics-based puzzle-action title. You didn’t get many of those on the original Switch, especially toward the end of its lifespan. That makes sense, as the system simply didn’t have the memory nor CPU power necessary to handle a multitude of physics simulations for dozens of objects at once.

The game is chock-full of optional battle arenas and puzzle environments. Most of them rely on a specific mechanic introduced for each level, but they sometimes feel like Nintendo is flexing its muscles for where it can push the Switch 2. One memorable level in the Freezer Layer asks players to smack a path through snow to let dozens of small ice crystals fill a bucket—like a large pachinko snow cone machine.

That’s not to say the Switch 2 is somehow a secret console powerhouse. We know what’s going on inside, but it makes what Donkey Kong Bananza is able to achieve that much more impressive. The world of Bananza’s underground environs is painterly, almost pastel in both the look and colors of each underground map. The hairy ape that’s always at the center of the screen is more detailed than the rest of the environment. All media is an illusion to some degree, but Nintendo hides the fault lines better than most companies, especially when it has more room to push game detail.

What will be interesting to see with the rest of Nintendo’s first-year Switch 2 titles will be if it can keep up this pedigree. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told investors earlier this month that longer development cycles are “unavoidable,” especially if players keep expecting more from their games. Video game industry analyst Joost van Dreunen reported that Nintendo’s full-time employee count has ballooned to 8,205 in 2025, at least based on company financials. Nintendo will need to keep up the pace to meet player expectations. If future titles are as good and innovative as Donkey Kong Bananza, we won’t have much to worry about.