Donkey Kong Bananza director is a Nintendo newbie

A lengthy Donkey Kong Bananza interview reveals surprising details about its director and how the game first came to be.

During our hands-on preview with Donkey Kong Bananza, we asked Nintendo who was actually developing it, to which we were told it was, as many predicted, the Super Mario Odyssey team.

This was not as unambiguous an answer as it seems, as Nintendo’s main internal studio, Nintendo EPD, has many different organisational groups and they specifically refused to say whether Super Mario Odyssey’s director, Kenta Motokura, was also in charge of Bananza.

Thanks to a new interview, we now know that Motokura is working on Donkey Kong Bananza, but that the director’s seat been passed to someone else, someone who is a relative newbie at Nintendo.

According to IGN, Motokura, who has been with Nintendo since the early 2000s, is serving as producer on Donkey Kong Bananza.

The game’s director is instead Kazuya Takahashi, who only joined the company in 2020 and is said to have a background in open world game design, which is perfect for something like Donkey Kong Bananza.

No other information has been provided and unfortunately his name is very common but this may be him on MobyGames. Whether it is or not it’s very surprising to see Nintendo give such an important role to a relative unknown.

Not only is this the Nintendo Switch 2’s second major exclusive after Mario Kart World, it’s the first new Donkey Kong game in 11 years, and the first of its kind to be developed in-house at Nintendo since 2004, rather than by a third party or a Nintendo subsidiary.

It’s also a key part of Nintendo’s efforts to elevate the franchise’s profile to the same level as something like Super Mario or The Legend Of Zelda.

This has been apparent for a while as evidenced by DK’s new design, his prominence in the Super Mario Bros. movie, and the dedicated theme park expansion at Super Nintendo World.

According to Motokura, the concept for a new 3D DK platformer came from one of Nintendo’s top executives, Yoshiaki Koizumi, who’s credited as general producer for the original Switch console and who you’ll recognise as the host of recent Nintendo Directs.

When asked for the reasoning behind the decision to make a new Donkey Kong game, Motokura could only say, ‘Because Nintendo does have a lot of characters to choose from, we’re always considering what would be good timing to create a new game with a certain character to most pleased customers.

‘But of course, that’s just my best guess. You’d really have to ask Mr Koizumi for the real answer.’

One thing Motokura could share was that, just like Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza began as a Switch 1 game. Since the team wanted to make use of voxel technology (something they had also used for certain parts of Super Mario Odyssey) for the game’s destruction effects, they figured they’d be able to get more out of it by moving development to the Switch 2.

Takahashi described the main philosophy of Donkey Kong Bananza as ‘the continuity of destruction,’ where destroying part of the environment would not only yield a reward for the player, but also reveal a new area with its own reward.

‘That [philosophy] was something that we could expand on and have a longer continuous play experience with that kind of concept on Nintendo Switch 2,’ explained Takahashi.

‘So this allowed us to engage in creating really extremely rich variety of materials and very large scale changes in the environment on that new hardware. And when destruction is your core gameplay, one really important moment that we wanted to preserve was when a player looks at a part of the terrain and thinks, can I break this?

‘Because that creates a very important surprise that has a lot of impact for them and that was something that was best done on Switch 2.’

While the Switch 2’s improved processing power was a contributing factor, Takahashi also pointed to the new mouse controls, which are being used for the game’s co-op feature and the Mario Paint-esque DK Artist mode.

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