Retronauts - 718: Episode 718 Preview: Donkey Kong Bananza

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

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Hey everybody, what you're about to hear is a free preview of a podcast on our $5 exclusive episodes tier at patreon.com slash retronauts. And if you want to hear the whole thing, please go to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up at the $5 exclusive episodes tier. Once you do that, you'll get access to all of our previous exclusive episodes and our future ones as well, as long as you remain a patron, and our exclusive episodes will launch every other Friday. Again, that is the Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts, and I'll let you get to this free preview of one of our exclusive episodes. So the team developed some gameplay ideas while goofing around with Mario Odyssey technology. So you can watch this video of this prototype on the Ask the Developer feature. So one programmer took the giant hands from the boss, Nuclotech from Mario Odyssey, this kind of like Aztec or Mayan boss with floating hands.

He attached them to a Gumba and made a gameplay demo where you play as a Gumba, and you can break off pieces of geometry from the environment and throw them and like punch holes in the environment and they thought okay this is interesting this is fun to play with let's build the Donkey Kong game

out of this idea entirely so it's all coming from Mario Odyssey that's the platform from which this game is launching I'm still sad that we don't have a Mario Odyssey 2 almost a decade now but this grew out of that is the next best thing everything is made out of voxels

right we talked about that earlier Instead of creating a level out of geometry, adding texture maps, they're creating everything out of voxels that have their own properties. What did they sound like? What did they look like? How soft and hard are they? So it requires different demands from developers than just having an idea for the layout level and kind of building it out of polygon.

So this is new for the team. And a lot of time is actually spent on Foley to make everything sound the way it should. They're doing a lot of in-house fully. They want the watermelon to sound like you're squishing a watermelon. and they don't want you to hear the same smashing noises over and over again. So they're really mixing it up and spending a lot of time on that aspect of the game. No, that's all. I mean, I think of the tactfulness and how cool it feels to smash things. But yeah, if it was just like four different sounds for smashing things the whole game, it would, I wouldn't notice it.

But subconsciously, it wouldn't be as satisfying. And the noise never got on my nerves, if I'm being honest, considering how noisy this game is, it is wild that like, my brain never wanted to tune it out. Yeah, yeah. I was worried about that after hearing, ooh, banana for the 200th time. But all the noises Donkey Kong makes, all the smashing noises,

all the gold collecting noises, they are varied enough that it's not annoying. I guess the closest thing that comes to annoying is maybe Pauline sometimes. I was getting tired of hearing her go, ooh, a banana. I can see it's right there. But that's a gameplay helping element.

Drew, sorry. No, no, no. I get, I'm sorry. I was interrupting. But it's like, it's right in front of me. Of course I see it. I realized there's like, she's programmed to do that. But like, I'm not going to miss the giant banana that's right in front of me.

Thank you. Yeah, the game isn't very handholdy, but it does have a lot of prompts that I find a little patronizing. But ultimately, I think it is a game for children, so I'm willing to forgive it. But it's often telling you like, here's, remember how to do this move? Here's how you do it. And like little prompts at the bottom of the screen. And I'm thinking, is there a way to turn this off? I know what I'm doing here.

And yeah, Bonanza was going to come out for the original switch. They switched platforms in 2021. and this made it so they could play around with Voxes a lot more and have the game run at 60 frames per second and the better frame rate makes the destruction feel more satisfying than the 30 frames per second it probably would have launched at for the Switch

and frankly the end of the Switch was crazy there were too many games there was a new Mario game, a new Zelda game a new Pickman, a new Fire Emblem it was just everything was coming out all in the last two years so I'm glad that they waited for the launch of the Switch to put it out and give us a better experience of it

Yeah. I wouldn't have mind it if they had wait, if two of the games that just have Switch 2 upgrades had just not come out until the Switch 2, I think I would have been fine with it. I wish this would have been the Switch 2 launch game because we had to suffer through a month of Mario Kart World. You know, it was a good weekend.

It was a good weekend of Mario Kart World. It was a good five hours of playing every track and being like, I don't want to collect stickers. Yeah. Or costumes. If frigging Paulina D.K. barely have any costumes in it. That's BS. Yeah, yeah. Again, by tomorrow, we might know why.

Yeah, yeah. Hey, maybe like Mario Kart World is getting the, we made a good edition. Yeah. They're announcing that tomorrow, tomorrow morning. So yes, Pauline comes around later as a visual element, but also to push the theme of music in the game a little more. And the music in this game is great. There's so much of it. And in every stage, the music changes based on what transformation you take. It's very subtle, but it's there, and that required an immense amount of work. So kudos to Nintendo for really drilling down on this aspect, too. Wait, so the music changes more than just Pauline singing the background music of like zebra, zebra, yes, yes, the actual tune of the Bonanza theme will change based on the background music

of the stage. I didn't realize this until I watched a video on it. Yeah, I didn't know what either. yeah and well and i love that you're if you need her to show you where to go next it's whistling it's her singing a song to create the you know pathway for you to find the next objective it's a very elegant like waypoint system i feel i i'm so glad i almost wish it hadn't been spoiled uh that pauline is in the game but like they're gonna sell an amebo of her like it's gonna get spoiled so but i wish the game did start with you having like the little rocky thing that she looks like at the start that is perfectly acceptable to be a mario sidekick type guy that you're going to hang around with the whole game yeah uh and i the the reveal that it's pauline is so

awesome that it would have been a great like surprise but it can't be so i know we have the pauline history thing i did uh later in the notes but i want to point out now that uh In ways that I think people may not realize that vocalization has always been central to Pauline's character, and this game is like the culmination of things that we didn't necessarily get. Like back in the day when they were doing the original Donkey Kong, she was supposed to have an audio sample that said help, but they cut it because it sounded like kelp. They just couldn't get it to sound okay. But that notion of her having a voice has been like bubbling under the surface, and they're always trying to find ways to make it happen. And it didn't really happen until Odyssey, and now it's part of a central gameplay, kind of in the same way that she was always supposed to be a playable character.

And it never happened. And there's a lot of aborted Nintendo games where she was supposed to be the player to Mario before Luigi came around. And this is finally it happening for the first time, which is kind of awesome. It's one of many examples of Nintendo never throwing away an idea and just finding the right moment to use it. And that's because they don't lay everyone off after every game is produced. Yes. When you look at this game and you walk away from after 15,

finishing it, you think the game is this good because of all the institutional knowledge that has not been lost because they keep people employed. And hey, maybe that's why games should be more expensive if they're of this level of quality and people don't lose their jobs immediately after finishing a project. But Bob, consider if a number went

slightly down for a quarter. Like, that institutional knowledge is not worth half as much as that. That's true. I had fun, but I'm not thinking of the shareholders in their own level of enjoyment. How many speedboats can they buy? I also love about the addition of Pauline is that

technically this is another like surrogate daughter dad game like say the last of us except it's the Nintendo version of it that's just silly fun yeah and like Donkey Kong doesn't kill someone and say I'm a murderer now these hands will never be clean

I have to make such complicated choices how will I save Pauline in this horrible world as he like snaps the neck of another of the ghouly eye monsters. Yeah, they're not trying to turn it into an HBO prestige drama, which is great. Thank you.