Donkey Kong's Frightening Bananza

I've been playing a lot of Donkey Kong Bananza lately. The great feeling of unstoppable power the game gives you by allowing you to transform into a bigger monkey and smash almost everything in sight feels engineered to make a toddler throw up. It's so frenetic that the game's camera can't keep up, desperately trying to follow Kong as he tunnels madly into another mountain, ending up squashed pathetically against the rock face. And the player doesn't care, drunk on rock-pummelling, enjoying it maybe even more because the rock is up against your face and you can't see a thing.

It's a weird game in many respects. The other animals dear Donkey Kong can become are deeply ugly and mostly not that helpful, not as much as Big Monkey who can Smash. The 'Bananza State' is presented as a special form that helps Donkey Kong in times of need, when he needs to access a unique ability, but in reality, you're never really leaving Bananza mode. Why would I be a small monkey when I could be a big monkey with a huge, juicy ass?

Last night as I write this, I obtained Donkey Kong's elephant form, which can suck up vast amounts of rocks, and even dangerous and frightening lava. Elephants can do that sort of thing. There's an exhilaration to be had here, sucking up the walls around you, eating that lava, formerly dangerous, now yummy. The elephant's domain is a rainy one, beset by storms, and the elephants you speak to wear raincoats. They're probably the most appealing NPC animals in the game - and the raincoats are a big part of that. I love the way they speak, in gibberish, but with theatrically lilting voices. They feel very much like talking to the most dramatic freaks of Breath of the Wild.

And there is, overall, an interesting Breath-of-the-Wild quality to this game. Not just in the explicit references, like when Donkey Kong falls into very familiar Tears of the Kingdom style terrain, but in the way the game unfolds. We visit layers that have some kind of disgusting problem going on, they're filled with poison juice or weird mud, and you have to have to solve the area nastiness - just like in Tears. The smashing itself evokes those mounds of explodable or smashable rock Link occasionally has to deal with. I'm feeling like, hmm... what if I opened up Punished Hyrule again? But then again, Link can't smash everything. More's the pity.

In any case, I like being Donkey Kong, fists out and ready to destroy the whole world. There seems to be almost no use for his zebra form, but I don't mind. That thing is hideous.