schenksmill

2025-09-092025-09-09

Game Ramblings #210 – Donkey Kong Bananza

Genre: Platformer
Platform: Switch 2

What a treat.

I know I’m a bit late on this one, but I finally got a Switch 2 so I had to hop on this immediately. As more information was revealed it became clear that this wasn’t just a Donkey Kong title, but instead a prequel to and continuation of the ideas originating in Super Mario Odyssey. In practice, it absolutely feels like that, but given some iteration to really solidify the core meta loop that solved a lot of what I felt was unnecessary grinding in the original.

I enjoyed the hell out of Super Mario Odyssey but I didn’t really enjoy that everything was so heavily gated to collecting large amounts of inconsequential moons all over the place. I simply don’t play games to that level of care for completion anymore. Going into this I dreaded having to find 40 shines hidden in spots for the hell of it to get to the next area. Lucky for me, that is all gone. There is now such an obvious distinction between main path collecting needs and collecting for the sake of it. The main path has goal locations and you happen to collect things between those locations, and maybe the main location has a goal to collect a specific banana or a piece of a record during it, but they are goals and you beeline straight to them and you move on with your life, and if you happen to collect things on the way then that’s generally fun and cool. What I’m not doing is what felt like grinding out a counter to move on.

And I’m very serious about beelining. The fundamental mechanic that the game is built around is the ability to just dig through the environment and make your own path. That is generally what solved my collection dislikes about Odyssey. In this case, most things that you can collect have a clever solution and a chaotic solution. There’s tons of clues all over the place about places to explore – changes in the ground texture showing possible caves, people standing around talking about the possible location of bananas, suspiciously placed objects that seem like they can only hide something. If you’re paying attention you will simply find a lot of things, and that isn’t different from how it worked in Odyssey.

However, there is now also the dumb ape solution. Your goal is 300m in a direction and there’s a town, cliff wall, and a bunch of people in your way? Punch in a straight line! I cannot tell you how many times I would be bashing my way through a cliff only to find that I ended up in a cave that done “correctly” would have required me to search out something like an explosive to blast through a metal wall blocking entrance to the cave. In those cases, being a dumb ape going “lol punch everything” got me a faster reward than playing correctly, and I loved the fact that game is literally built to allow this style of gameplay.

That’s not to say that some things didn’t require me to actually pay attention, because there are certainly core story segments that do require some care. Bosses generally required me to pay attention to specific mechanics and execute them well. Story-specific bananas generally required me to execute mechanics well. Optional challenge rooms (of which there are a lot) generally required me to carefully get through them. However, the balance of gameplay felt a lot more tuned to where I am in life now. There are a lot of moments where I can just shut off my brain, be a dumb ape punching things, and have fun. I can then save those moments of paying attention for specific times where the situation required it. If I compare this to my memory of Mario Odyssey, I feel like I had more relaxed downtime and better specific periods of excitement in a way that struck a better balance for post-work post-kids bed time sitting in a chair and playing.

The weird thing to me is that that change in how I was playing the game changed what to me was a negative about Odyssey – the sheer amount of collection – into something that I largely think is a positive here. Where in Odyssey I felt like I had to collect a lot of things, here I simply happened to collect a lot of things. Where in Odyssey I felt like I had to weave around and explore everything to collect what I needed, here I collected enough simply being a dumb ape and barreling through the environment. Ultimately the change is that instead of feeling forced to explore, I simply was exploring for the fun of it.

This is very much a classic Nintendo first party title. It’s relatively easy in the mainline path, has plenty of challenge when you go off of that, and concludes in a place that left me wanting more. They took what was already a solid foundation and passed it through iteration of core mechanics and adaptation to another part of the Mario IP. What came out of that is a game that is surprising in how well it worked and is almost certainly going to be seen as a much higher point than Donkey Kong 64 in terms of pulling this part of the universe into 3D. I don’t know if I could recommend buying an entire new console to play this game, but if you’re going to buy a Switch 2 anyway this is where you should absolutely start.

2025-08-262025-08-19

Game Ramblings #209 – Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution

More Info from WayForward

Genre: Platformer
Platform: GBA
Also Available On: Switch, PS4, PS5, Steam

It’s interesting playing a new GBA game that clearly benefits from lessons learned over 20 years of making games. While this is an “old” game revisited and completed it’s clearly been given a modern touch. This is simply a great game on GBA rather than a great GBA game and that modern feeling is surprising, even knowing how good this series has been.

Looking at this purely from a Shantae perspective, this leans a lot more toward the level focused gameplay of older titles than that of Seven Sirens but that makes a lot of sense. This was supposed to fall in between the original and Risky’s Revenge. It certainly has some Metroidvania elements like hidden treasures, upgrades, and small segments of paths that require revisiting areas. However, the focus is on core platforming gameplay and it is smooth.

The thing that I often find difficult about going back to a lot of older games is that they dealt with a lot of platform restrictions via brute force, and that often meant that there is jank or slowness built into the experience. You’ll sometimes see if with weird air control or slow movement in platforming gameplay. You’ll see it in slow usability of menus. You’ll see it in extreme levels of not explaining what the player should at least be trying to do. None of that is present here.

It’s a series of really small things, but movement here feels modern. In regular platforming movement is really fast. Normally I would expect that the limited screen space of the GBA would be a hazard here, but this is paired with what is really one of the best visual styles of any game I’ve played on the platform. Importantly, the thing that makes it work is that distinguishing enemies from the background at a glance is immediate so you don’t have to slow down to avoid danger. You run quickly, dispatch enemies quickly, and move on. This is paired with the movement being similarly smooth in transformations – climbing on spider webs is super agile, flying as a harpy is fast, wrecklessly dashing as an elephant removes a lot of danger – so that no matter what movement you’re in you just kind of intuitively go at it.

This bunch of little things also goes straight into overall UX. Transformations are linked to B+<something> combos and are super snappy, so you can switch to the right transformation quickly. Switching between magic types is fast and quick to use despite the overall lack of button options. There’s a whole upgrade path that you can steer your play time through, but they’re all obvious in terms of their use – some are power curve upgrades while some are simply ease of use, such as a purchaseable money multiplier. Talking to characters in the world is the primary way of getting clues about what to do, so it’s both not hand holding but also not vague. If you want to simply explore you can, but you can also be given instructions if you choose to dig for it. The primary meta game mechanic involves changing the background and foreground layers and moving between them, and that again is super fast but flashy enough to be impressive every time. Basically, it all feels like something that would be incredibly in-place in a modern retro-styled title, but as something played on GBA hardware is even more impressive.

That’s not to say that this is an all timer or anything though. While the original Shantae was unbelievably good for its time and this released 20 years ago would have been up there, we’ve seen a lot of progress since then. Where this falls is somewhere along the lines of really good game that is elevated by nostalgia and the reality of the platform it’s on, but on modern platforms it’s probably more of a curiosity for fans of the series. It doesn’t really do anything new or interesting now so separate from the story of its development delays and original cancellation it doesn’t necessarily stand out from the crowd.

But boy could I think of games that are far worse.

2025-08-192025-08-19

Game Ramblings #208 – Shadow Labyrinth

More Info from Bandai Namco

Genre: Metroidvania
Platform: PS5
Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

For a game that has Pac-Man levels, I actually found those segments to be by far the least fun sections of the game. The platforming involved in there was just never fluid or interesting. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What is there most of the time is a melee Metroidvania that surprised me in how well it took simple combat and crafted it into something fun with a very limited set of mechanics.

I can’t really think of a boss fight in this game that had more than four or five attacks, and generally they had one or two. What that really meant was that learning and avoiding the attacks was the most important part of combat, and not actually doing damage. You could ultimately indefinitely extend a boss fight via well timed defense.

Where this came in for the player was dodging and a chosen defensive maneuver – parry, shield, etc. The dodge is really what made the game sing. It’s a very fighting game-style dodge where you get pass through and immunity frames. This pushes combat in a direction where timing is the most important element. During a new encounter I’d lay back, learn the attacks, probably die a couple times, then come back in and know my timing. You hit your defensive move, lay in a handful of attacks as necessary, maybe use some excess energy on bonus damage, then time the next attack. In action games that work for me I generally talk about how the combat has a good rhythm and this has that. Once learned, most of the boss fights have pretty reliable segments of two melee combos followed very quickly by an attack with little downtime in there.

So let’s go back to probably die a couple times. Normally that’s where I find a lot of issues and even going back to ramblings like Hollow Knight that was where the game fell flat for me. Shadow Labyrinth feels like it was designed to mitigate the downsides of death. For one thing, nearly every major boss fight had a save point immediately before its room, if not a full on teleport location. This allowed the boss fights themselves to be isolated in their difficulty and let you focus on going in, learning, and immediately executing on learnings instead of having to do a death run back.

The second thing that really stood out was how many places existed that could be opened as shortcuts through the world. The map when completed really feels like it’s a series of compact loops. There’s an obvious first path through an area that you run through and find a bunch of impassable doors. You then start hitting branches in that path that loop back and end at one of those doors. If I was to really visualize it, it would be like taking a winding river as the main path and a straight line through it as the path that gets opened once you finish all the loop backs. It highly encourages exploration, often leading to upgrades, while also encouraging fast retraversal. Combined with a really solid teleportation network, every time I earned a new traversal upgrade (hook shot, double jump, air dash, etc) was very quickly followed by me happily going back to past areas to find new stuff.

Where things weren’t necessarily as positive for me largely centered around progression. This is a game that just does not offer any progression hand holding. In some ways that’s good because it forces exploration. However, in a lot of cases I want to know vaguely what direction I should be going. At one point around the middle of the game I was tasked with finding two major power sources to move the story forward but it took me about 10 hours of gameplay to complete that. It’s not that I was having trouble, but that I just kept picking the wrong direction to go in. I would go down a path for 20 or 30 minutes and hit a wall, then have to wander back and find a new direction. This continued for a long time. It’s not that I was suffering for it, because I earned a ton of upgrades. However, what it generally meant was that by the time I found the right path to where I was supposed to go I was tremendously overpowered and had nearly completed the entire map in the game. The couple hours immediately following it were just a breeze. Had I had a little bit of direction to say “go roughly into this region” I think the flow of the overall game and my character’s power curve would have been more appropriately challenging and interesting.

I could also just do without the Pac-Man challenges and I think that really differs from a lot of reviews that I read. I just found these to generally be a chore. Platforming as Pac-Man was always some variation of stiff and inconsistent. Switching between the always moving default mode and player-controlled movement mode felt like switching between two modes with equally bad weaknesses – always moving had huge weaknesses in directionality of jumping and player-controlled really felt sloppy once in the air. Getting good completion times felt like it was just learning precise movement patterns instead of actually being good at the game, and later higher challenge levels felt more like fighting mechanics than actually having fun gameplay. It felt like a bad implementation of Pac-Man on the surface and a weird distraction from what was otherwise a really solid core Metroidvania game.

Wrapping Pac-Man into the wider Namco space force lore and turning it into a Metroidvania was certainly a bold choice, but I think more than not it worked out well. Combat was a real pleasant surprise for me in that it took a simple set of mechanics but did them incredibly well. Things around that experience may not have been as solid as other entries in the wider genre, but there’s enough that works out well here for me to give this a pretty easy recommendation.