We Played Donkey Kong Bananza’s Totally 90s DLC – NVC Clips
Logan Plant here with Sam Clayborn and we just learned that Donkey Kong Bonanza is getting brand new paid DLC and Sam, you’ve played it. I have. I got to uh play it courtesy of Nintendo and it is a a two-pronged DLC and there’s a lot to go over in it. Um I very much enjoyed my time with it. I think it’s kind of exactly what the endgame needed for Donkey Kong Bonanza. I just want to point out right from the start, you got to beat the game first. So, if you want to play this DLC, you should play through the game. And luckily, Logan gave it a 10, so you know it’s worth doing. Yes, it’s my game of the year. My favorite game of all time right now. I’m still playing it. I’m over 100 hours in, Sam, in my third playthrough. So, what’s your banana count look like at that point? Oh, well, my first file is at 1,000. My second file, I did a zero banana run, so I’m at zero. And my third file, I’m doing no transformations. Okay. So, I’m at like, you know, 600, something like that in my my base game. And I was starting to lose steam on it. So that’s what this mode is really good for and and I can get into that, but do you want to talk about the island first? Yeah, so the two prongs are DK Island and Emerald Rush. And as you mentioned, you need to beat the game. So this is kind of a bonus DLC post game for Bonanza. Your preview’s up now on IGN.com. And you you kick it off talking about DK Island, which just sounds like an awesome nostalgic trip. Yeah. And and so you kind of noticed, you know, Donkey Kong’s on an adventure in this game. So you don’t have that kind of rooted like where is Donkey Kong’s like native island. Well, you do see it in the nostalgia uh uh area. What what’s it called? It’s called I Nostalgia Country. Nostalgia country. Yeah. Great level, which is a 2D uh Donkey Kong Country throwback that you just kind of comes out of nowhere in Bonanza. But this is an actual world. So, it’s a um I would call it a layer, but I don’t think it is because it’s just Donkey Kong’s island, right? It’s not like some kind of undersea area. But, uh it it it is recreating I think what you first saw when you played Donkey Kong Country, which is that, you know, cliff facade with Donkey Kong’s face in it. Um there’s a there’s a a couple of nods to that world. There’s a Donkey Kong treehouse. All the characters are just out and about by that treehouse. Diddy and Dixie and Cranky. And then um Squawks makes a return. There’s a uh pirate ship out in the bay. There’s there’s a DK Bongo’s island. There’s a lot to discover and you can destroy it all because this is Bonanza after all. Awesome. So, how how do you kind of I guess treading lightly on spoilers. How do you get there? Like you mentioned in your preview, Void Kong is involved with this. What’s up with DK Island? So, it’s interesting. So, first of all, just the kind of the road to actually unlocking that is that it’s announced to you by um any of the elders when you go on that because you know post game um you go on a I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minute I guess. Well, this is in-game content so just be aware of that. Uh you you have to go back and talk to the elders and they give you some kind of super hard quests in the post game. Uh while they give those to you that they tip you off that this is now available to to take the elevator to. Is that what it’s called? Elevator. Tealport. Yeah, it’s it’s all the same elevator. I’m thinking of all the eel puns that they use in the game. Um anyway, so you use the eels to just get to the slayer now. And when you do that, you also find out that void Kong is there and he’s there to recruit you as a uh void co employee. And um that’s the other mode. That’s Emerald Rush. But you can just freely explore this island. Now remember at the end game there’s bananas to find in all the layers banan DM gems and then there’s uh also still um you can still purchase them and that’s how you fill out your end ones, right? You still have to do like like in Mario Odyssey purchasing the moons. So you can do that still but they don’t add like benandium gem puzzle things like that. This the purpose of this island is like exploration nostalgia and then there’s also this big layered mode on it. Now that mode is also in other layers like you can unlock it for these other layers. It kind of transforms them into layers that can do this mode. It’s not all of them because some of those layers are like a transitional layer and stuff like that, right? But these kind of core layers have that. Um uh you also interestingly there’s a little like Easter egg where you can in the race if you’re just playing through this game now with after this update um that that allows you to get this DLC you apparently there’s a hint at this in the race level in the race layer really. Yeah, I thought that was interesting. So we’ll have to all check that out and see what that is. Yeah, that’s that’s super cool. That’s something I felt a little bit disappointed in the racing layer, which is where Diddy and Dixie show up, that they didn’t go more allin with some of the old Kong stuff. So, this seems like a really perfect addition. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, let’s talk about Emerald Rush, which we were talking about a bit before the show, and it sounds very complicated to explain. This is a new like high score chasing mode where everything kind of changes in these layers. Yeah. So, the first thing to know about this is that your skill set at this in in this mode is taken away. And so, what you’re doing in this mode is you do a a series of um goal-based rounds in which you the goals are based on collecting emeralds, which is a replacement for banium, almost as good in in Void Kong’s opinion. And what you have to do is you have to go out and figure out ways to get this in a time limit. So like in 100 seconds you have to get you know 500 emerald uh bar filled right. So in that time you have some options. You can just go mine emerald veins. They just like benandium veins like there’s the same idea. You can just like go nuts and like dig through the ground but you don’t have the skills. You don’t even have your transformations. So as you play you have to go uh hit um what look like benandium gems and fossils and other things to unlock uh perks and skills and your old skill set and then even your transformation. So, whenever the uh elephant transformation appears, I would always go for that tactically because then you can start stacking and I’ll talk about these in a second perks to do like uh a treasure chest based perks to get a lot of, you know, gems, emerald out of treasure chest or just out of banes or digging or whatever. And then the elephant’s really good at that, right? Because you just go in the area, you just vacuum it all in, you know, and then you start learning the island uh that’s new in this and you can know where sources of things are. are. And so that’s really helpful. So when you go back to other islands, you actually know that area a lot better and you know like, oh, I can just go like grind in this area. If I only have 10 seconds left, you can use um immediate fast travels by map each round, three of them to warp around, or you can turn those into a barrel and just shoot at the thing, which is kind of more fun. You can immediately fast travel in this round. So you you have to kind of tactically plan the round. You want me to get into that? Yeah. Yeah. Does it feel like really frantic? like you’re you’re rushing around really fast to do all this. It feels I kind of compared it to the Mario Kart um mode. You’ll have to remind me of the name of that mode even though I just remember after writing all this. Yes. Knockout tour because there’s round based checks. So if you don’t make your round, you’re you’re kicked out. Like that’s it. So your round based checks in this are like quantity. So even though you’re aiming at maybe other goals like getting your elephant skill back, you still need to get to that 100 emerald mark. And by the way, if you go over it, it actually carries over to the next mode. So, if you do a lot of great stuff, that’s going to be helpful. But then the checkpoints become really high, and that’s where perks come in. So, perks are every time you hit a fossil, and there’s a few other times this happens, you get to choose a little shuffle a perk system up, and it’ll be like uh one would be like every time you surf, you gain emeralds. Every time you uh find a chest, you gain emeralds. Every time you you uh complete a challenge, you get emeralds. Uh if you keep get choosing the same ones, they start stacking. So by round eight, you’re going to have it like a 10x or 100x multiplier, something insane on some rote activity that in the beginning you should be aiming for. That’s the only way you’re going to beat these modes because you have to plan them out like this island has a lot of veins so I should go for that would be a tactic. So uh uh the perks are important to stack, important to plan out and can really save your butt by the end of them. Now the challenges. So you can you can also aim for challenges. They pop up almost like a world event while this is happening. And I know by now this I’m starting to sound like just a crazy person explaining things to you. No, this makes sense. But uh uh so instead of just going nuts and vacuuming everything up, maybe your tactic is I’m just going to do the world events. The world events are get as fast as you can to the beach where these, you know, three monsters are and kill them. It might be something simple like that. One of them was really funny. It was high five Dixie Kong. Yet they know where Dixie Kong is. She She happens to be by the tree house and you have to get up there and high five her. It’s It’s pretty cute. That is so cool. It sounds like It’s reminding me a little bit of like a Kirby Air Rider City trial, like where these things happen and you go to them or even like an Elden Ring night reign where you’re rushing around trying to improve yourself as much as you can. It sounds really cool. That’s a really good comparison actually. And I think that and and and and just in terms of like kind of like quantity and effect on the game, it’s kind of like the B um uh Bowser’s Fury added on to where it’s just like whoa, this is like a whole game, you know, kind of grafted on to what you’re doing. It’s not like it’s not like it’s it’s not comparable to Odyssey’s DLC, which was Luigi’s going to hide a balloon and you need to find it or or actually that was actually a multiplayer thing where people hide them and hide and seek. Yeah. It’s just limited, right? And this is a kind of a large scope that that scales in two ways. You unlock more levels to do it in and then also you unlock levels of difficulty and those go, you know, very high. Like I think the point is to provide kind of a a very in-depth challenge. Well, so there is going to be an end to this content though. There’s like a highest level of difficulty for each layer this is included in. Yep. And then there’s also unlockables. And I did see uh gear in that unlockables uh list. So like there’s sounds like and by the way you can you can equip whatever you’ve unlocked in the base game before this. So like that actually matters, right? Cuz in the base game you might be equipping, you know, shorts and a tie that might be doing something that that doesn’t matter. But in this like you might actually need to swim fast because you don’t have that skill to surf on the water anymore and you got to get around the island, you know, like there’s like things like that to consider. This Yeah, this sounds like a really great fit for what this game is cuz two of my favorite comparison by the way. that stuff. Yeah, that that’s like it seems like that almost rog light but not super, but like it kind of fits into that vein of starting from nothing and building yourself up. And I think my my favorite part about Bonanza is DK’s move set. I think he’s so great to control and there’s so many highle techniques that people have figured out in the two months since this game came out. Like just when you pick up a chunk, you can do like quadruple jumps off of it if you know the right button inputs. mode advanced players that Donkey Kong and it seems like a really great fit. Yeah. Yeah. I’m I was extremely impressed. I had fun. I can’t wait to play more of it. And um yeah, like this is at the very least I think just just it’s so cool to see the connection to the original Donkey Kong stuff like but to connect it to the the core, you know, SNES 64 retro era and I mean that as the company uh Retro uh who took over from Rare. It just feels like there’s a throughine that’s being recognized here um in a more prominent way than it was in in the base game, which I think for me is very appealing. Yeah, that’s really neat because we we’ve talked about this before. Jungle Beat was the last time Nintendo internally made a DK game and that game tried to be like not rare at all. They ignored that rare games even existed. Like it’s totally its own thing. So to see Bonanza embracing DK history so much is is really awesome. So thanks so much for sharing, Sam. It sounds great. Absolutely. It was my pleasure. Thanks for watching this clip from Nintendo Voice Chat. Be sure to catch the full episode over at youtube.com/ignames. New episodes of NBC drop every Friday on IGN Games. igen.com and your favorite podcast platforms. With the Nintendo Switch 2 finally here, there is so much to dive into. We appreciate you tuning in and don’t forget NBC is the only place you can get the thing. [Music]
Nintendo announced new, paid DLC for Donkey Kong Bananza in today’s Nintendo Direct, and we’ve played it! Join Logan Plant and Sam Claiborn as Sam shares his impressions of the new DK Island level and the Emerald Rush mode. DK Island is a nostalgic throwback to the Donkey Kong’s Rare glory days, stuffed with references to Country, 64, Jungle Beat, and more. But the true star of this show is Emerald Rush, a remix on Bananza’s layers that strips DK of all his powers and challenges you to strategically reclaim them on your mission to hoard as much emerald as possible. It’s a fast, frantic, destructive mode that’s shaping up to be a great postgame challenge for Bananza fans. For more on this week’s Direct, check out our full episode of NVC that breaks down every announcement, and be sure to check out Sam’s written DK preview on IGN.
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