Donkey Kong Banaza Direct June 18, 2025 (and Summer Game Fest): Information and Reactions

Nintendo Switch 2 is finally out! Mario Kart is fun, Cyberpunk is an apparent work of technical wizardry, and for all of the many weird issues and minor controversies about the console, it’s really good. Crackerjack device. That being said, it could stand to have a meaty, single player, story-driven, fully exclusive game. Fortunately, we already knew that Donkey Kong Banaza was coming out on July 17th. This conspicuously Mario Odyssey-esque 3D platformer was the coolest upcoming Switch 2 game, and this morning, Nintendo released a dedicated Direct for D.K.’s latest adventure. At less than eighteen minutes long, it managed to pack in a lot, far more than the largely simple Mario Kart World Direct from last month. It’s revealed a poorly-kept secret of the narrative, shown the wildly destructive gameplay in more detail, and hinted that this is going to be even more like Odyssey than it initially looked. Let’s start.

Information. Note that some of this was already confirmed in either the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct or the subsequent Nintendo Treehouse Live streams.

As confirmed by the original trailer, the core of the game is Donkey Kong’s unprecedented destructive capabilities, allowing him to destroy almost everything with various punches in search of Banandium Gems—giant golden bananas that are comparable to the Stars, Shines, and especially Moons from Super Mario.
Basic (and less basic) actions:
- Alongside the ability to Punch terrain into oblivion piece by piece, DK can also Tear Off chunks, Swing as a weapon, Throw them at objects either during normal movement or through dedicated aiming, Chunk Jump off them as a midair jump, or Turf Surf using them as impromptu skateboards.
- If “Punch” isn’t enough, there’s also “Dive Punch,” whose efficacy for digging is dependent on the terrain.
- Each piece’s functionality (and seeming durability) is determined by its material, so stone lasts longer and does more damage, especially against hardened dirt or a lava coating, while Boom Rock and Gold explode. An intriguing rainbow material even acts as a rocket propelling DK upward as long as he holds it. The fast travel map screen also seems to imply that the terrain will get harder over time with the later sandboxes.
- You can also somehow stick softer materials onto each other, almost like the GLOO Cannon from Prey or blocks in Minecraft. It’s not clear if, or to what extent, this will be used for more dedicated problem solving, but it’s very cool as a back of the box feature.
- There are even rocklike enemies whose frames can be dynamically ripped apart mid-battle. One fight shows an enemy having its lower torso exploded from under them, dropping its top half down.
- DK’s classic Roll can also cause environmental destruction, albeit in a very mild, “showing off the greater detailing of Switch 2” form. It can be combined with jumps and attacks, making it a more dynamic part of the character’s moveset.
- Donkey Kong can climb seemingly any environment, though unlike in Breath of the Wild it’s a cinch to scale each wall.
- Hand Slap now can be used to collect items around you and detect others close by.
Destruction is very extensive, and can also come from a chain reaction of multiple objects and material interacting with each other.
- Although only shown in Nintendo Treehouse Live, you can also press a button to restore the level to its original state, kind of like reset buttons in modern puzzle games.
You find Banandium through exploration, puzzles, fights, and Ancient Ruins and Challenge Course runs that are effectively Super Mario Odyssey’s side rooms. Their challenges include Mine Cart rides, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Country-inspired 2D sections, racing sections with Diddy and Dixie Kong, and bits whose solutions require destroying the terrain in very specific ways.
As confirmed by an accidental art asset release by Nintendo of Korea, Donkey’s Kong’s sidekick Odd Rock is actually a child version of Pauline, the original Donkey Kong damsel turned New Donk City Mayor. Pauline’s singing has puzzle-solving abilities and can be used as a dynamic guide
Pauline can also make DK go “Bananza” for a short time, making him a powerful Kong, a super-fast Zebra, or a flying bomber Ostrich. These aren’t restricted by level but by a depleting meter, which you can refill after the transformation ends by collecting Gold. You can also swap between them mid-transformation, with at least some puzzles built around that.
The world of the game is the massive underground below Ingot Isle, a mining operation run by various monkeys. Each new level is a sandbox set underneath the last, with increasingly implausible environmental conditions like a snowscape or beach.

Image: Nintendo. The absolutely gorgeous Donkey Kong Bananza.

Cranky Kong and Rambi are here, alongside the standard eccentric Nintendo NCPs (some of whom are regenerating rocks you can smash to pieces with no consequence). These include the Giant Elders, who very clearly seem tied to those Bananza powers and will probably be the centerpieces of the main quests.
The villains, the Void Company, are a team of three monkeys racing to the core of the planet to collect the “Banandium Root.” There’s the large military-focused Grumpy Kong, the surveilling Poppy Kong, and the tiny leader Void Kong. DK and Pauline are chasing them in the hopes that the treasure at the bottom will send Pauline home. They’re responsible for the seals blocking the entrances to every sandbox, as well as the bosses like the giant cephalopodic tree wall thing Peekabruiser.
Boo, there’s a skill tree. It gives you new moves on top of augmenting your existing kit, like letting you use terrain as a surfboard. Thankfully, it seems fairly straightforward.
Again like Mario Odyssey, there’s a shop. You have Fossils tied to costumes, Banandium Chips that can be traded for Banandium Gems, and the Gold you normally collect for things like juice that let you go Bananza without a full meter.
Unlike Odyssey, “almost every article of clothing” has actual gameplay changes.
Treasure maps can be found inside of treasure chests hidden in the world; they put the location of specific Gems or Fossils on your map.
There’s an in-game sound test found in relaxing Getaway safe houses, and the individual songs—including a “D.K. Rap” remix—are found throughout the game.
Fast travel comes from being eaten by a giant eel. It’s called “Teeleport,” and it reminds me of being swallowed by the Primordial Serpent in Dark Souls, so that’s very fun.
There’s also a Photo Mode, and like Odyssey and Mario Kart World, it comes with various optional filters.
In the 2 Player Co-Op mode, the second player plays as Pauline in a third person shooter. Using the Joy-Con 2’s mouse mode (though I don’t think it’s exclusively mouse mode, see below), you aim and fire vocal blasts at enemies. You can also appropriate the properties of specific terrain in your attacks, such as copying a gold object so your attacks have gold’s explosive properties. It seems a lot more fun than playing as Cappy, for whatever it’s worth.
GameShare enabled! It even lets players on Nintendo Switch 1 play!? I guess playing as just Pauline or it being streamed from the GameShare player helps?
Odyssey’s Assist Mode is back; it gives you a wispy musical bar to highlight the next main objective, as well as double the defense.
DK Artist, a wild mini-game reminiscent of Mario Paint and the Mario 64 start screen, lets you sculpt a bust—or a pizza, or whatever—by destroying or adding terrain.
There’s another song??? Maybe two songs? That Pauline sings live to unlock the Bananza powers?
A new Donkey Kong and Pauline amiibo is coming. It’ll unlock a “Diva Dress” inspired by Pauline’s standard outfit in the modern Mario games; that seems to make it easier to find CDs for the Music Player, so I assume you just find those randomly during normal gameplay. It releases the same day as the game: July 17.
Scanning any other Donkey Kong-themed amiibo will give you access to giant, explosive KONG Tiles.
Every other amiibo is compatible, giving you access to a giant sphere you can use as a one-off attack.

In addition, here’s Switch and Switch 2 news from Summer Games Fest and related events:

Mouse: P.I. for Hire, the Cuphead-esque Fleischer Bros.-style FPS, will star the increasingly oversaturating Troy Baker.
After various leaks indicating that it would feature characters from outside the Sonic Universe (particularly Nickelodeon, whose characters are currently MIA), Sonic Racing Crossworlds revealed that its roster will include Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s Ichiban Kasuga, and Persona 5’s Joker. It will also feature a Minecraft character in Steve, which the leaks named.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion will feature She-Hulk and Rocket Racoon.
LEGO Voyagers, published by Annapurna following its mass staff exodus, is a charming-looking co-op game. Like It Takes Two and Split Fiction, you can play with someone online if only one of you has a copy. Coming to Switch 1, with no release date.
Alongside it is LEGO Party, a Mario Party clone. Expected to release this year.
Nicktoons & the Dice of Destiny is a rather unattractive little brawler by GameMill, which is to say it seems to involve the creative team behind Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl but is also under the auspices of the publisher of notorious licensed trash like Kong: Skull Island and Avatar: The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance. Releases on Switch this fall.
Years after its initial announcement, Yacht Club Games’ Mina the Hollower got a release date for PC: October 31. Presumably, a Switch port will not be far behind, assuming it won’t be announced for the same date in the future.
A decade-plus later sequel to Scott Pilgrim Versus the World was announced: Scott Pilgrim EX. Features collaborations with people who worked on the property, including a story co-written by original comic creator Bryan Lee O’Malley and music by Anamanaguchi, who scored the original Scott Pilgrim game. Planned for release “early 2026.”
Hitman: World of Assassination will be having a crossover with 007 to promote IO Interactive’s upcoming James Bond game (see below), as Le Chiffre from Casino Royale—played by his film actor Mads Mikkelsen—will be a time sensitive Elusive Target. At the eighty-three minute mark of this show, SGF organizer Geoff Keighley invited Mikkelsen onstage to promote this update for a four-year-old game.
Speaking of conspicuous celebrities, wrestling’s most beloved gamer Kenny Omega was also on hand in top cosplay form to announce that Alex, Crimson Viper, Ingrid, and Sagat will be coming as yet more characters in Street Fighter VI’s substantial postlaunch life. Tentatively, Sagat is planned for summer, Viper for autumn, and Alex and Ingrid at some point in spring 2026.
Although it was not announced for Switch 2, I do expect it to come to the system in some form, so I’d be remiss to not mention Resident Evil Requiem, the actual Resident Evil 9 releasing on the 30th anniversary of the franchise. The final show of the event, it was the most exciting of the barely any interesting announcements or updates, despite showing all of its unique content in demos after the event ended.

Other news:

Planet of Lana 2 was announced at the Xbox Show, coming to Switch.
- Just in general, also, I would also assume as a general rule that most things announced at Xbox will be coming to Switch 2 at some point. Especially the ones made by Xbox.
The long-rumored and leaked Final Fantasy Tactics remake was announced at Sony’s State of Play; it will be coming to Switch and Switch 2.
Also at the State of Play, IO Interactive’s James Bond game, which had been announced for Switch 2, was formally revealed as 007 First Light and got its first trailer.

Wolfman’s Soapbox: Okay, let’s get Bananza out of the way. It looks great! This is exactly what I was hoping for, and while I don’t mind waiting a month, it’ll be really nice having a big, wild story-driven exclusive on Switch 2. Perhaps more useful here is that it was also just a good Direct. It moved fast, featured a lot of very pretty “DK destroys things in 4K” energy, and the majority of its information was both new and interesting. I think you have to contrast it to the Mario Kart World Direct, which did have things but not that much. To pull back the curtain, I was planning to write that one up but gave up halfway through. This one, though? It was packed for all seventeen minutes. Very strong marketing from Nintendo, even if I’d have really liked to see a full fat summer Direct. Give us a better idea of what the Switch 2’s life is gonna be past a quarter or two.

But, again, at least it was fun and informative, unlike… Christ alive, someone wearing a “Make FPS Great Again” hat at SGF?

Yeah, let’s get into this. I am not a fan of Summer Games Fest. It’s less wildly destructive and unhealthy than E3; that’s literally why it was able to usurp it. I think Keighley, a respected journalist whose genuine enthusiasm for gaming culture radiates borders on the insufferable, is a better host for these things. But I’m also older, and the summer Nintendo Directs just do more for me than these massive events and gigantic venues. Short, fast paced, forty minute videos, not giant, two hour processions. You know the myth of how Prometheus taught man animal sacrifice? That he offered Zeus an ugly animal hide covering delicious meat or juicy fat covering inedible bone, and that’s why the ancient Greeks could eat the flesh of the animals whose skeletons they burnt? Nintendo Direct is the skin over the meat, something that can be a bit shaggy but always has stuff (though they’ve also gotten more and more slick since the days of the 3DS). SGF is the fat over the bone, all pretty visuals and big talking that hide how empty these Triple-A games can be.

Not that we got many of those this year. Studios across the industry are struggling, and the big ones no less than any other. Most of the big companies didn’t have things to show because development time just takes longer than it used to. Many of them are also dealing with mass layoffs, the threat of full-on closure, the aftershocks of mass acquisitions, and a pivot to live services. Instead of, say, doing a shorter press conference, or breaking it up a bit more, Keighley instead marched forward. He put more time than usual into propping up the importance of smaller indie teams (which, while noble, often made them feel like human shields protecting him from vitriolic, blockbuster-obsessed gamers) and updates for upcoming live services. Like, say, the not particularly handsome MindsEye, which got a plumb showing at the show and is currently being trashed in reviews. At other times, genre saturation was palpable with several indistinguishable Soulslikes, several indistinguishable Genshin Impact-inspired projects, and a Death Stranding 2 trailer that might be the least interesting marketing I’ve ever seen from Hideo Kojima. Goddamn GameMill, the Skull Island publisher, gets a plumb slot? Even from someone who’s already disinclined to this show, the vibes were bad, and I’m not the only one who noticed. While the PlayStation show was generally good, and the Xbox one pretty full, this had next to nothing in an absurdly long timeframe.

Image: Nintendo. Look, this is depressing. Let’s look at how good DK and Child Pauline look.

I’m not going to say that the show was only bad because the games industry is somehow at both a terrifying precipice and a calamitous fall. Game development takes a long time, and 2023 was a big year. But also, it’s not not because of that. Many storied studios don’t exist anymore. Many of the industry’s biggest players are forcing fundamentally bad demands on their developers. Firings have not been as extreme as they were in 2024 and 2023, so far, but few places are safe from termination. Just as few sequels are “too big to fail.” And even if it’s not Keighley’s fault that the industry is at such dire straits, though I would like to point out that his position does offer him ways to push gaming into sustainable practices that he doesn’t take, he also chose to make this the image of the industry for the gaming community. What we got this year reflected that: uninteresting titles, oversaturation, and a desperation for attention that led a man to wear a MAGA parody hat so people would talk about his stupid “Halo meets Portal” sequel. Either none of the many people offstage considered stopping someone clad in the laziest hate symbol of the modern era, or they knowingly let him.

That was the most offensive because it’s actually offensive, but for me, the reveal of Resident Evil Requiem felt the most telling. See, before it got to be the “one more thing” at the end of the miserable two hour affair, the Resident Evil team got to appear earlier in the show to say they were doing “something” (currently speculated to be another remake of the first Resident Evil. I’d be interested to see how they might adapt the RE2make style of gameplay into a super small mansion). The organizers knew this event was gonna be bad, so they did a fakeout. You get annoyed at no Resident Evil, and then wow! You thought you weren’t getting anything, but now you are! And I am excited about RE9. I’m not planning to watch or read too much prerelease stuff about it because it’d be nice to go in without knowing everything, but I am. But it’s really only because it’s RE9, not because of a trailer that was, ultimately, perfectly fine. This year’s show was rancid and empty, and I think it’s pretty clear the people behind SGF wanted to stretch this to the breaking point. I don’t know. The games industry is in a bad place, and I don’t know if Summer Games Fest could function as something that explained that reality to consumers, but did feel less like “stacking the chairs on the Titanic” and more “sitting on deck and ogling how the chairs fall into the sea.”

…Remember when this was about Donkey Kong, the game that increasingly feels like my obvious Game of the Year? Anyway, Bananza will actually be my third Donkey Kong game, which feels strangely low. I bought Donkey Kong Country Returns on the Wii and Donkey Kong 64 on the Wii U’s Virtual Console, which I found hard to play and understand. Perhaps that’s for the best. I’ve never been as invested in the Donkey Kong side of things, but this really gets what I like about DK, which is that he’s a brutish strong guy. I’m really excited to see a depiction of him that leans into that. Who doesn’t want to just destroy everything in their path?