{"id":858931,"date":"2026-08-15T10:58:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T10:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/858931\/"},"modified":"2026-08-15T10:58:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T10:58:10","slug":"nintendo-sound-team-donkey-kong-bananza-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/858931\/","title":{"rendered":"Nintendo Sound Team: Donkey Kong Bananza Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donkey Kong Country\u2014British developer Rareware\u2019s massive 1994 overhaul of Nintendo\u2019s classic franchise after 13 years as a simple arcade platformer\u2014opens with a gag<\/a> about its incomparable music. Cranky Kong, the withering ape from the original Donkey Kong arcade game, cranks a Victrola that\u2019s playing the ancient game\u2019s 30-second 8-bit main theme. Before he can finish his oldie, his grandchild (the Donkey Kong we know and love today) kicks ol\u2019 Cranky to the curb, destroying his Victrola and replacing it with a boombox playing composer David Wise<\/a>\u2019s euphoric remix of the original theme. Country reinvented the franchise from every angle imaginable\u2014gameplay, graphics, personality\u2014and before you can hit a single button, its landscape-altering music gives it shape. Even after Rareware stopped making games for the franchise in the 2000s, Nintendo turned DK into a bongo-playing, sing-songy character whose essence was tied to the music that redefined him; music and Donkey Kong were inseparable.<\/p>\n

Come 2025, after years of rhythm games and 2D platformers in the vein of the original Country trilogy, it was time for the franchise to undertake its second full-scale reinvention\u2014this time, as an astoundingly creative 3D platformer called Donkey Kong Bananza. Bananza gave the DK character a brand-new personality, his series a fully developed narrative, and his gameplay a remarkable rehabilitation. All of these innovations factored into Bananza\u2019s near-universal praise, and they all revolved around one thing: music. Bananza places music at the core of its narrative and gameplay. Headed by Super Mario Odyssey composer Naoto Kubo, a small cast of in-house Nintendo composers built upon Donkey Kong\u2019s legacy with a genre-hopping score whose dynamism graces the wildly diverse layers of the game\u2019s music-obsessed planet, where the power of one\u2019s singing voice is strong enough to both save the world and bring about its end. Released one year after the game, Bananza\u2019s soundtrack is both an ode to the series\u2019 trailblazing music and a modernized step forward for the franchise.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Throughout Bananza, DK and his teenage partner in crime, Pauline\u2014a wannabe pop star whose singing voice is said to awaken the wish-granting root sought by an evil corporation\u2014are guided by song through a world full of music-loving inhabitants: breakdancing apes, DJing elder monkeys; it\u2019s an endless musical jungle. Pauline whistles and hums DK toward secrets within the world, and she sings a wide array of lovably over-the-top pop songs to help him transform into different animalized \u201cbananza forms,\u201d from the Latin-themed \u201cZebra Bananza\u201d to the rap-rock \u201cKong Bananza.\u201d Even rockabilly makes a cameo, on \u201cOstrich Bananza.\u201d Pauline\u2019s raucous, almost cheesy songs might be less enjoyable outside the game, but inside, they\u2019re crucial to Bananza\u2019s experience.<\/p>\n

Just as essential to its musical outlook are Bananza\u2019s main level themes, which bring back the sort of whimsy long found in Nintendo\u2019s best games. Lagoon Layer has an ideal first-level theme: a jaunty, tropical romp whose softly strung intro escalates into sprawling refrains of delicate guitars, fluttering woodwinds, and heroic brass that leaps from the background. It perfectly conjures the mystery and wonder of this new world, and thanks to Bananza\u2019s dynamic soundtracking, the track changes as you explore more of the level, becoming mightier as DK comes across new areas like Salvager\u2019s Landing. By the time you reach the Radiance Layer, later in the game, the music sprawls wistfully all over \u2014from the spiraling chimes of \u201cSolar Control Tower\u201d to the \u201cElder Court\u201d\u2019s orchestrated intensity to the mystifying ambience of \u201cSerpent Sands.\u201d It\u2019s rare to find games, let alone Nintendo ones, that use music to enliven their worlds quite like this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donkey Kong Country\u2014British developer Rareware\u2019s massive 1994 overhaul of Nintendo\u2019s classic franchise after 13 years as a simple…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[342,49,48,61,343],"class_list":["post-858931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}