Nintendo has put up their Ask the Developer feature on Donkey Kong Bananza, and they have once again added a strange piece of lore surrounding the addition of Pauline.
On hand for this interview are the main heads in development of Donkey Kong Bananza, all of whom had previously worked on 3D Mario games, notably Super Mario Odyssey. The people who talked about this lore are Kenta Motokura, the game’s main producer, and Naoto Kubo, the sound director.
In the same way that this developer team came up with offbeat but engaging gameplay elements and features in Super Mario Odyssey, they came up with novel ideas for Donkey Kong Bananza.
In discussing how to compose tracks for the game, Kubo brought up the team’s reaction to Donkey Kong getting a Zebra transformation:
The series has a lot of recognizable background music, so of course, Donkey Kong Bananza has arrangements of those sprinkled throughout, too. However, it’s also a completely new Donkey Kong game, so we momentarily set aside the fact that it’s part of a series and took up the challenge of composing new tracks from scratch.
At the same time, Donkey Kong’s new transformation mechanic was added, which meant we had to create tracks that would play while he’s in his transformed state. That’s when one of the designers came up with this sketch of a zebra as one of his transformations.
And they declared, “Donkey Kong will transform into this!” (Laughs) The mere sight of this sketch was enough to shock me, but actually seeing it programmed into action, I thought to myself, “Well, since we’ve gone this far, we might as well also transform the music that plays once Donkey Kong has transformed.”
…We envisioned a track that would give you the urge to sprint as soon as you heard it, and then the image of a zebra galloping passionately to Latin or Spanish-style music popped into my head. I mean, not that Latin music has anything to do with zebras, but still… (Laughs)
At this point, seemingly out of nowhere, producer Motokura brought up adding Pauline into the game.
Originally, we were discussing whether to have Pauline in the game as a character that players could relate to. But at the time, we weren’t able to incorporate Pauline into a gameplay feature unique to this title. However, now that the transformation mechanic had started to take shape, we thought we could create something new by tying Pauline’s singing to the Bananza transformations. So I asked Kubo-san, “Would you care to write an animal song for Pauline to sing?”
They went on to explain that adding vocals to these original songs enhanced their experience, and they then came up with more ways to make use of Pauline’s presence. Unlike the Rare and Retro games before them, Pauline could be on hand to explain things to DK and for the audience. They also saw Pauline as someone who players could relate to more as a human character, and someone who’s character growth could mirror DK’s character growth as well.
If we were honest, Motokura doesn’t really explain what Pauline had to do with a beefy zebra drawing. But as you may have noticed, they’re still not explaining why Pauline is a 13 year old, either. Is this something that the Donkey Kong Bananza really didn’t bother to explain? Or is there an actual deep meaning to this in the story that they want players to find out for themselves?
We won’t be waiting that long to find out, as Donkey Kong Bananza releases on July 17, exclusively on the Switch 2.
