Donkey Kong Bananza producer hoping the game leads to 2D and 3D branches, similar to Mario

In a new interview, Donkey Kong Bananza producer Kenta Motokura shared that he’s hoping the game leads to separate 2D and 3D branches of the series, similar to what we’ve seen with Mario.

Mario clearly has a subset of 2D and 3D games. With Donkey Kong, however, things are murkier. Part of that is simply due to a lack of games. We’ve seen a good amount of 2D Donkey Kong titles, but 3D has been underrepresented – fans know that Donkey Kong 64 was the last time there’s been something in the 3D space.

When asked where Donkey Kong Bananza fits in, Motokura stated:

“Well now… In a long-running series, novelty and continuity are both important, but we wanted this title to fully convey the appeal of Donkey Kong as a character. Meanwhile, we thought that by creating something new, leveraging our experience developing 3D Mario games, we’d have the opportunity to create two separate branches – 2D Donkey Kong and 3D Donkey Kong – just as we did with Mario games. So, keeping in mind that this game will come to symbolize 3D Donkey Kong, and with the theme of bringing Donkey Kong’s strengths and new actions to the forefront, we thought the concept of “destruction” would be a good fit.”

The same interview also brought us some concept art – most of it is attached above, but we have a couple of extra ones below as well.

Donkey Kong Banaza drops on Nintendo Switch 2 this Thursday. We also have some information about how Nintendo took advantage of the new system for the game’s development here.