A Narrative Bananza

Donkey Kong Bananza is a game that gets the closest I’ve seen to recreating the Pixar narrative formula via game design. 

I’ve been on record saying that time is a problem for game design because film’s story structure relies so heavily on it but in interaction you can’t predict it. Using time as the key to story progress doesn’t work for us, but what does? Well the answer is game design, but what that looks like is honestly pretty hard to describe. Donkey Kong Bananza, however, gives us that answer. 

So let’s start at the beginning; What is the story of Donkey Kong Bananza? 

(fair warning that I will be completely spoiling the narrative of the game here, including a big plot twist/reveal at the end of the game)

A young girl named Pauline is stolen away from her home because she has a magical power to sing and is unaware of that fact because she’s too scared to sing in public. Donkey Kong finds her deep underground and they decide to work together to reach the center of the planet where wishes are granted.

This sounds pretty much perfect as a Pixar film. We’ve got the overall goal of reaching the core where wishes are granted, we’ve got a protagonist who has a magic power but is afraid to use it, and we’ve got a lovable oaf companion who just likes smashing things. This kind of setup is exactly what Pixar and Disney have perfected over the course of years. Even more specifically, it works with Pixar’s 4-throughline formula. For those unfamiliar, Pixar’s formula is this:

• Protagonist Throughline: What is the story the main character is going through?

• Friend Throughline: How does that story impact the people around them?

• Antagonist Throughline: How does that story impact someone with an opposing view?

• World Throughline: How does that story impact the world at large?

We’ve got clean answers for all of the above:

• Protagonist - Pauline was abducted to be used for her singing magic, but cannot sing in public. She just wants to go home.

• Friend - Void Kong stole all of Donkey Kong’s bananas to power his trip to the core, and now DK’s gotta chase Void down in order to get them back

• Antagonist - Void Kong needs to get Pauline to the Core and force her to sing, and he needs bananas to reach the core

• World - All the bananas have been stolen and an evil madman is going to wish the world be turned into rotten banana mush

The story is absurd, but it functions. Everyone’s got a clear motivation and a clear conflict. That conflict impacts everyone on every layer, and it gives the player a clear goal to achieve. We can argue the details of how it’s implemented, but overall it’s quite an elegant narrative.

So the above is nice enough, but it’s pretty standard. Nothing about that story is groundbreaking, it’s just a simple story written with children in mind. What’s interesting is how that conveys through the gameplay. Let’s look at each of these throughlines specifically with gameplay in mind.

Protagonist

Pauline’s story is about being abducted and wanting to go home. In order to do that, she asks for help from Donkey Kong who agrees to bring her to the core where her every wish can be granted. Along the way we begin to put her into situations where she is forced to sing despite her fears, because her magic is what’s going to allow DK to overcome the obstacles along his path.We see a number of cutscenes where Pauline is reluctant to sing near the beginning of the game:

And of course we see that reluctance disappear as we get to the end:

This is standard stuff, but what’s interesting is that this is reflected through gameplay as well. I used screenshots of cutscenes above, but the core systems of game design are also tied into this same narrative. Donkey Kong’s Bananzas are triggered by Pauline’s singing. These cutscenes I’m showing above come from when we’re talking to an elder and gaining the power to transform into a spirit beast. As the game goes on and the difficulty increases, the player will find themselves using Bananzas more and more often to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. This means that Pauline is singing in public more and more often. The story is reflected perfectly within the game design. We literally see her growth as we play.

Friend

Donkey Kong’s story is pretty simple in this game. He wants bananas and Void Kong has stolen all the bananas. This is always DK’s motivations and this game is no different. Collecting golden bananas as you explore the world of the game tracks perfectly to DK’s story, but this is pretty standard stuff. Nothing about this is new or novel, really, it’s just a Nintendo formula at this point. It’s not broke, no reason to fix it.

Antagonist

Void Kong’s story is about trying to slow down DK and Pauline while still making sure they can reach the core as needed. Void doesn’t need to beat DK, he just wants to make sure that Pauline is there when Void finally gets access to the Banandium root where he can make his wish at last. 

This tracks really well with the gameplay we’re seeing. He sets up a lot of things to slow DK down, causing chaos everywhere he goes as he collects all the easy bananas and leaves DK the difficult ones. This is another place where Nintendo falls back on its standard formula. Nintendo has gotten really good at Hero vs Villain stories and using the villain to convey their narrative through gameplay obstacles has become habit for them at this point. We see this specifically personified via the enemies and boss fights along the way. They ramp up in difficulty over time and this in turn increases the intensity of emotion we feel about Void Kong because we are constantly reminded that he’s the one responsible for those enemies and obstacles in the first place. It’s the exact structure they use for Bowser in Mario games. Again, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.

World

The world throughline is the other place where this structure gets really interesting. Pauline’s story of being abducted for her singing magic by a madman determined to have his wish granted means that the world is being impacted everywhere he goes. He needs bananas to power his trip into the planet’s core, and stealing them means disrupting a number of different societies along the way. The ostriches’ swamp has been flooded with poison, the zebras’ home is frozen over, the snakes’ artificial sun has been put out. Every single layer is dealing with a world-altering catastrophe that Donkey Kong must fix. 

The overall narrative of this story is that Void’s wish will destroy the world as a whole by turning everything into rotten banana, but we also see this story impacting every individual culture on a smaller scale as well. This means that each level of the game has a different and distinct narrative beat, but all of them reinforce the central plot. Without needing to say a word, the game shows you that Void must not be allowed to get his wish. There’s no lore dump about how evil he is, we simply see the impact he’s having. 

What’s truly interesting about the world throughline, though, is how it shows its arc of change over the course of the story. While Pauline’s arc is represented by the presence of obstacles requiring the player to use the sing button more often, the World arc is represented by the tone and theming of entire spaces. There’s a whole world that exists just for decompressing after the stressful first fight with Void Kong. You go to a beach and get the simplest world-based narrative in the whole game, a story about nothing more than “There is a really big fruit here. Someone should smash it, that would be so cool!”. That simplistic narrative moment contrasts sharply with the Void Kong sequence just before it, which had DK travelling up and down previously-explored regions to fight Void in a world-hopping epic showdown that reads like something out of a Marvel blockbuster. One level’s intensity is offset by the next level’s peacefulness, showing us that each level is considered, as a whole, to be a single narrative beat.

Bonanza establishes a core loop of smashing a level to find bananas. It accompanies that with a variety of mechanics like diving into a round portal to do a combat challenge, or punching triangular portals to do novel gameplay challenges. Every floor repeats the same beats and grows steadily more complex as we go. This allows us to switch up the gameplay as the story necessitates by reducing that complexity to an earlier state to give the player a breath. In the level I’m talking about, the entire space is a big open vista with empty sight lines that leaves the player with no question about where to go or what to do. They can see everything the level offers the moment they step foot into it.

This is sharply contrasted by the levels before and after it being closed off and claustrophobic, everything significant in those levels being buried in canyons and cracks between massive rock walls.

Because each level is a single narrative beat, we can control that story beat with level design and art techniques. This beat of the narrative is more intense cause the world is full of lava, that beat is less intense because it’s full of cool refreshing fruit. We can order them based on the needs of the gameplay progression, or alter them based on the needs of the story. Need a quiet moment after an intense moment? Easy! Need a level that’s all about fear? Again, easy! I’ve talked about regional narratives before, and this game is leveraging that concept with an expert flair for pacing and structure.

Historically, Nintendo is fantastic about the Friend throughline and the Antagonist throughline. Those parts of the Pixar formula are well-trodden ground for Nintendo, but we’ve not seen a game that ties every throughline together with the prowess seen in Bananza. Our protagonist grows and develops not only narratively, but also mechanically, gaining new techniques over time that require emotional growth in order to be used. She’s surrounded by people who are affected by her story and doing their best to support her, and enemies who are doing their best to get in her way and slow her down. The whole world has been changed directly by this story and the level design becomes as much a part of the story as any of the dialogue. Every single thing present in this game all comes together to tell a single story and the result is masterful.

Now, I will also acknowledge here that the writing itself is the weakest part. We really didn’t need K. Rool to suddenly show up and shift the narrative goal posts at the 11th hour. We really didn’t need the 6 different climaxes and 3 final boss fights. We especially didn’t need to make the story about giving up your wish so that a monkey can be hedonistic for a little while. I could also critique some of what I applauded earlier and say that early-game Pauline is entirely too responsive to the sing button, given she’s so scared of singing in public. Surely she should at least sing more quietly when NPCs are near, right? Surely? But these are all quibbles. I don’t expect Nintendo to tell a good story, that’s not their design goal. Honestly I’m surprised they nailed as much as they did here, this narrative design truly is some world class stuff, even if the writing is sloppy. Despite the flaws present, the game is incredibly good at conveying its story and deserves to be applauded for the parts that work. It would be pretty simple to tweak some dialogue and change the majority of my complaints. Adding in a “lower volume when singing near NPCs” would be a small change as well, and we could shift K Rool into a post-credits bonus level without too much work, they do that regularly in Mario titles. These are small potatoes complaints overall. Donkey Kong Bananza truly is one of the most technically interesting pieces of narrative design I’ve ever seen. I’m absolutely going to be following this up with a deeper dive into the lessons learned from these techniques that can be applied to other games, but for now this is it! 

Thanks for reading!