Fans have continued to wonder why Pauline is only a thirteen year old in Donkey Kong Bananza. As we pointed out when they first revealed it, this fact ruins the notion of there being a continuity in the Donkey Kong or Mario video games.
In a recent interview, IGN got to confront Donkey Kong Bananza’s lead about this, and we think you’ll want to know what they said.
Donkey Kong Bananza’s game director, Kazuya Takahashi, shared this statement:
Well one of the important roles that we knew we wanted this character to accomplish was in accompanying Donkey Kong on his travels and acting in some cases as a bit of a narrator.
And considering we would probably have both new players who are experiencing a Donkey Kong game for the first time, as well as people who are long-time fans of Donkey Kong. So we had the opportunity to offer a character that was familiar to long-time players, but had a new appearance that might be interesting for new folks as well.
But then things got weird. Takahashi said that he wanted the players to find out on their own why Pauline was 13 in this game. Kenta Motokura, who is producing the game, then said that they will let the fans figure out on their own how old Donkey Kong himself is in this game.
When asked if Donkey Kong Bananza is connected to Super Mario Odyssey, Takahashi said this:
Certainly because a lot of team members also worked on Super Mario Odyssey, there are some similarities in terms of how they think about the setting of the characters for both games, but it’s something we really can’t explain all of for now because we need to leave something for people to consider as they’re playing the game.
Of course, Takahashi and Motokura really want us to play Donkey Kong Bananza, but from the way that they’re answering, it doesn’t look like they actually considered this when making the game. As we have brought up recently, Miyamoto explained that Nintendo considers Mario characters, such as Donkey Kong and Pauline, as actors playing different roles in different video games.
While some fans have come up with wild ways to explain away this peril with Pauline, it may not really be all that deep. For example, thirteen year old Pauline may simply be a different Pauline from the girl who’s invested in Mario’s and DK’s Mini-Mario factory. And that Pauline may be a different lady from the mayor of New Donk City, and all of those ladies may be different from Lady, AKA Pauline, the woman who was occasionally kidnapped by some gorilla who may or may not be the same Donkey Kong nearly forty years ago.
Donkey Kong Bananza is releasing this July 17, 2025, exclusively for the Switch 2.
