IGN has published an extensive interview with Donkey Kong Bananza producer Kenta Motokura and director Kazuya Takahashi. One of the things which caught people’s attention is the fact that like Mario Kart World and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, the game originally started life on the original Nintendo Switch system before the introduction of the significantly more powerful Nintendo Switch 2.
Why was this game best suited to release on Nintendo Switch 2 as opposed to Nintendo Switch or both?
Motokura: So this game originally began its development cycle on Nintendo Switch 1 and at the time, we were still using voxel technology and thinking of lots of different ideas for applications. But when we learned about the Switch 2 development, we realized that the best implementation of these ideas and technology would be on Nintendo Switch 2.
Takahashi: And when I was previously talking about the importance of the continuity of destruction, that was something that we could expand on and have a longer continuous play experience with that kind of concept on Nintendo Switch 2. 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. But it’s not really even just the processing power of the Switch 2 that I think attracted us and gave us some interesting possibilities. There was also the device itself that offered things like mouse control, which you can use in co-op play for a second player to control Pauline’s vocal blasts or DK Artist, a mode where you can sculpt a large set of voxels.
Thanks to Greatsong1 for sending in the news tip!
