Donkey Kong Bananza Emerald Rush Turns The Game Into A Roguelite And It’s Awesome
[Music] Donkey Kong Bonanza is getting a new mode and it is meant for those of you who just like smashing stuff because that is what it’s all about. Okay, so this guy got about an hour of hands-on time with Donkey Kong Bonanza’s new DLC, Emerald Rush, and I got five major takeaways. One, it is a rogike. Yes, that’s right. It is going to be seeing you playing through a series of rounds. Each round kind of having different things shift and change. And also, there’s a perk system. So, you’ll be collecting fossils that then accumulate perks that you can then stack. Number two, this mode can be played in any level of the game already, which leads me to my third point. There’s an entirely new island, and this island is going to be something special for you old school fans out there. Trust me, it’s filled with lots of Easter eggs and treats and goodies to explore. Number four, it is a paid DLC, and in order to access it, you have to complete the base game. So, if you’ve not completed Donkey Kong Bonanza yet, keep that in mind for this mode. And number five, it’s all about smashing. I mean, like, it’s basically taking the whole idea of collecting gold, but this time the gold is now this new currency called emeralds, but they function the exact same. And it is your objective to collect as much emerald as possible within the confines of rounds. All right. Now, super quick before I get into this, a quick disclaimer. I was only given three minutes of B-roll to use, so I’m working with what I got. Just, you know, I’ll do my best to match it, but you know, you might have to use your imagination for some stuff. Okay, so let’s start with what Emerald Rush is. This new mode is a challenge mode. It’ll see you basically talking to Void Kong in which he will then employ you to collect a new currency called emerald. And this emerald functions exactly how gold did. So, if you remember seeing kind of the gold clusters or like those weird kind of like pimple looking things that explode gold out of them, well, now that’s all replaced with a sort of an emerald like currency that you collect. And each round, you are set a certain quota that you have to complete. The easiest version that I played was three rounds. And here’s kind of like where the rogike stuff kind of kicks into gear. When you start it, you no longer have any of your skills. At the easiest difficulty, you still have access to your bonanzas, but not their specific skills. So now, instead, you have to collect skills in between your rounds. And the way you do this is by finding bananas. Skills are now tied to specific bananas in the environment. In between collecting emeralds, if you want specific skills, like being able to turf surf, for example, you have to open your map, locate the symbol for that thing, see what banana is connected to, and then hunt that banana down. smash it, get your skill, and so on. In the mix of this, you also have to collect fossils because that is what gives you perks. Every time you collect a fossil, you are then able to choose one of three perks that appear on screen. Allah, Vampire Survivors, or any other rogike that you know has the same sort of system. There are lots and lots of different kinds of perks. These perks consist of increasing the percentage of emeralds you get whenever you smash them or collect them to finding more treasure chests to being able to find more chips, uh, banana chips specifically. Now, at first, admittedly, I was kind of breezing through this. Uh, I got my ways and my methods of smashing around town in this game, so collecting enough emeralds to meet quota wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t until I played the harder rounds, which then increase to 10 rounds, and also take away your bonanza forms, that is when this mode starts to get palm sweat inducing. Not having bonanza forms also completely changes the way this works because now in the harder modes, you have to unlock your bonanza forms the same way you would unlock skills in between rounds. You would have to open your map, see what bonanza forms are attached to what bananas, and try and get to that banana before the timer runs out and the next round begins, all while collecting emeralds to try and meet that round’s quota. It can get very stressful. Now, this mode is cool for a lot of reasons. One, it actually kind of gifies smashing. Now, in the base game, yes, there’s plenty of stuff that kind of pushed you to smash through things, but this kind of is ticking another part of my brain to be a little bit more strategic about how I smash and where I’m going next to smash things on top of trying to make sure I’m getting the right skills to make sure my smashing and is smashing right. Another thing that this mode is kind of elevating, which I admit I kind of underused in the base game, is the map. Now, opening the map is an important part of this mode. Now, thankfully, opening the map does kind of give you a breather because it pauses the timer, but it is basically absolutely necessary to look at the map to know where certain skills are that you want to hunt down. In between these rounds, Void Kong has these sort of void challenges. Now, completing these challenges will give you a whole dumpload of emeralds, so you’re going to want to hunt them down. There’s a lot of incentive in doing that. In my time, these challenges were a wide array of things from going down and beating up a certain horde of enemies to smashing a certain uh like material, like a certain amount of material. There was like I had to smash like 3,000 bits of rock at one point in order to complete it. Or they can be a little bit more innocent, like finding a character and giving them a high five. So, that’s cool. Now, if trying to collect enough emeralds for a quota or trying to hunt down specific skills in a set amount of time already wasn’t stressful enough, there are some things that can help you, like a new ability which allows you to basically turn into a warp barrel. You can point it and shoot anywhere you want in the map to get across it faster. But with a caveat, of course, you have a limited amount of these barrels you can use, and that includes warping or fast traveling to somewhere else on the map. In the easier earlier sort of rounds, uh, I had access to using three per round. So that meant if I was on one side of the map, I open the map and there’s a skill on the other side. Maybe it was right by void challenge, I could use one of my three teleports to go to the nearest warp thing, warp barrel around it. Or I could use my new handy dandy transform into a barrel power and shoot myself over in that direction, which in of itself opens up to a whole new kind of strategy because that means you could jump in the air, turn into a barrel, freeze in the air, blast in a certain direction, and then use another barrel midair to then change your direction, shoot a different way. That being said, if you are playing this mode in a different level in the game and you did not unlock all the fast travel barrels, you might be screwed. So before you do some of these modes, a good strat would to make sure you have all the barrels in the world or in the layer unlocked to help you out down the line. Otherwise, you might have a might have a tough time getting around. Now, the last big thing that this DLC is adding is an entirely new island. This is basically modeled after the Donkey Kong Country overworld from the Super Nintendo game. Uh, it has a giant Donkey Kong mountain shaped head right in the center of it. You can go visit Donkey Kong’s hut, which probably looks most closely to the hut that is in the Donkey Kong Country Returns game. All around this, you can see your usual suspects like Dixie, Diddy, and Cranky Kong hanging out with a little Easter egg, the Candy Kong hiding around somewhere in that hut. If you take a look, a closer look, you can see it. Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn’t stop there because this uh on this island, you can now use your banana chips to purchase these amazing statues of characters. They’re huge and they’re indestructible and you can turf surf on them and they’re great. Now, I have no idea how many there are, but I was told that there are a lot. And this is ranging from a ton of characters, including basically character models in the game, characters, you know, and ones who knows I haven’t even seen. Maybe maybe Mario will show up. Maybe maybe Jumpman will will appear and you can take him and throw him right into the ground and beat him into the earth like you’ve always wanted to Donkey Kong or at least me. With all that said, this mode is definitely good for just kind of zoning out. I was getting into an extreme flow state. Anybody who just likes to smash stuff and want an excuse to smash stuff or an objective to smash stuff, this is the mode for you. All right, for more Donkey Kong Bonanza’s coverage and everything else related to video games and all that jazz, you know, stay here.
Donkey Kong Bananza roguelite mode DLC will let you smash stuff forever. Plus, a new DK Island is chock full of homages to classic games.
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