Since Donkey Kong Bananza got announced, fans have been noticing that Nintendo has been somewhat neglectful in telling us a little more about the game. Because of this, a few small tidbits have been leaking out unintentionally, as Nintendo’s best efforts to coordinate their marketing are slipping here and there.
We haven’t reported some of these, because admittedly, they aren’t quite all that newsworthy. But in this case, it looks like Nintendo’s announced something, but didn’t plan well enough so that we would all learn about it at the same time.
As reported by NintendoLife, they listed Donkey Kong Bananza on the Nintendo eShop under the local multiplayer category. This may be a mistake in listing that could be changed later, but we suspect that that isn’t the case. Nintendo also took a few days to announce that Switch 2 hardware and software would appear on the web eShop and Nintendo Store, much later than when fans first noticed it.
We think what could have happened here is Nintendo did plan to progressively reveal details about Donkey Kong Bananza, but they forgot that this would come up when the web eShop listing would also go live. Since they didn’t show off local multiplayer in the Nintendo Treehouse live events that followed the Switch 2 Direct, Nintendo is probably going to show this again before the game and the Switch 2 launches.
And yes, that adds weight to the speculation that Nintendo must have another Nintendo Direct on the way. There are just way too many things that we don’t know about the Switch 2 and its games that Nintendo must explain before the games become available for sale. The line of thinking may be that they want to do promotions for games like Donkey Kong Bananza and Metroid Prime 4 Beyond before the Switch 2 launches, because market research has proven that marketing is most fruitful two weeks before games release. If that’s what Nintendo is thinking, we should be getting these Directs and other promotional events by next week.
As for what these multiplayer modes could be, we don’t know if it makes sense to make an open world with split screen multiplayer. It’s not impossible, but the game doesn’t look like its conducive to something like pick up and play multiplayer. Instead, this may come in the form of mini-games, and we can definitely imagine Nintendo has some fun Donkey Kong-themed mini-games in mind with Joy-Cons and/or Pro Controllers.
