Topic: Donkey Kong Bananza

Seems like a half glass empty personal philosophy type argument more than a true difference. If they only added upward people would ask what the game did badly to not add upwards more. Like grading classwork — you mark the things that are right but people want to know the ones you didn't mark right and why.

As for 'why complain about 9/10' I think people do agree 9/10 is amazing in general but have reasons in this particular circumstance:

1. Just Nintendo fan hope that one of the new console games would be a serious Nintendo-polish Game Awards GotY contender. The reviews, although good, is making that much less likely.

2. Even if it isn't the 'whole reason' the game wasn't 10/10, the large amount of discussion both in reviews and outside of reviews about performance issues is tiring. Switch 1 reviews and general discussion started being more and more focused on bad performance in recent years. And I think a lot of us just didn't want to see that immediately with Switch 2. I personally don't care at all about mild frame drops, but the discourse about it is tiring and depressing. I suspect the fact that Switch 2s main selling point is arguably performance will just make the 'bad performance on Bananza' arguments even more annoying. I'm half expecting user score review bombing on metacritic (which also happened on both mario kart world and welcome tour but for different reasons)

i just got money and preordered bananza, so excited to launch it up tomorrow! although i will only be able to play tomorrow for now, since im going on vacation this weekend. @FishyS 91s not terrible at all! hopefully nintendo gets at least one entry in the goty race (the only other competitor i think could be prime 4, maybe kirby air riders if sakurai gives us some surprises)

Loving the game so far!

I'm sure a Nintendo game will get a nomination but for a 'not traditional GotY type game' like DK it has to do extraordinarily well to be a serious contender.

Also, for those of us comparing to 2017, Nintendo Life gave out 10/10 to Mario Kart, Odyssey, Splatoon, and Zelda. The equivalent release of 2 of those got 9/10 for Switch 2. Which is fine, just slightly disappointing.

But yeah, 91 is very good; I'm glad it's doing well, especially as a not Mario platformer.

I already downloaded the game so will play at midnight... and I have a 12 hour work day tomorrow so I will inevitably play too long, be sleep deprived, and regret it tomorrow. But I won't regret it tonight! Can't wait.

Are we still taking guesses for the digital 🍌?

My guess for the metascore a week from now is 92.

Looks like I was wrong in the score being below 90. Ah well, I'm not gonna complain lol

yeah, but didnt astro bot all kind of surprise us last year? but to be fair, 2024 was exactly gamings biggest year. still holding out hope for dk!
youre right, i hope we at least get one 10/10 switch exclusive this year, but i have a feeling 2026 will be a year of hits. good luck staying up!! 😸

The thing is, it depends on the type of class work. For a basic maths tests in which you’re graded on having the ‘correct’ answer, counting up or counting down are equivalent. Indeed, I’d suggest counting down in this case is more useful, as you’ve more to learn from analysing your mistakes. A perfect score is clearly defined, and you’re not trying to expand upon the test in any way. Just fill in the correct answers and you get the marks.

A video game however is not a simple maths test with a mark sheet dictating what is right and what is wrong. It is a creative work/product, designed to entertain and engage the player with interesting ideas and mechanics. The best games are groundbreaking enough that they make the player/reviewer reassess what the standard by which they evaluate games.

Counting down only works when you have a clear idea of what ‘perfection’ is supposed to look like. 10/10 is the highest possible score, but it does not mean the game is ‘perfect’. To bring up the NL scoring policy again, a 10/10 is supposed to be the sort of game that “raises the bar in virtually all critical categories” and “ breaks boundaries and pushes the industry forward in a meaningful manner.”

With this in mind, the class half full/empty analogy doesn’t work, as a 10/10 game manages to cram more into the glass than you thought was possible. Or makes it overflow. Or… comes in its own, bigger glass, making the previous glass look small and insufficient in comparison. Either way, the preconceived notion of what constitutes a ‘full glass’ is turned on its head.

The only way of counting ‘back’ from something effectively is by establishing what constitutes perfection, and the goal of creative works is typically to push that concept forward in unseen ways. You can’t count back from something which doesn’t exist.

@Maxz We don't actually know how Nintendo Life rates things and it might depend on the individual reviewer. Certainly some reviews on other sites have scores like 68/100 which I suspect means they have a bunch of check boxes each worth varying amounts of (inevitably subjective) points. That's certainly how I rate things for myself. Being groundbreaking is certainly one of my categories and it's hard but not impossible to get a 10 in my system without checking that box. So that's one method. Another method is to play a game, clear your mind, and pull a review score from the cosmos. If you can't explain where that review number came from I would agree you can't explain the negatives as well as the positives. Since NL goes out of their way to explain the negatives and positives we know they aren't using that method. I'm sure there are many other methods.

I might argue if you aren't 'raising the bar in virtually all critical categories' in a game, you could point to the category which is not raising the bar and therefore where it lost a portion of a point.

As an aside, Nintendo Life recently completely changed the language of their 10/10 description. It used to be quite different. For example it included the language 'game that we absolutely feel you should own'.

Also, this is a pretty big tangent for this thread so... whoops. 15 minutes until I get to play Bananza and I am trying to stay awake.

Okay can we stop talking about review numbers and start talking about the game so I can be jealous of everyone who can play it before me?

@N00BiSH I just started it. It's georgous. This is my first actual Switch 2 game and how much better it looks than a Switch 1 game kind of shocks me.

It took my approximately 30 seconds to get annoyed by the default controls and change the jump button to B. I'm glad they make that super easy to switch.

@FishyS You’re absolutely right in saying we don’t really know, and that ultimately each review is down to the individual reviewer. The current NL scoring policy is the best thing we have to go on and even that is subject to change.

Games are hardly more objective than music or poetry and no matter how systematically we try to judge them on their merits/demerits, there is no one system that will definitively spit a number representing how much you will enjoy a product. If anything, the more ‘objective’ or ‘systematic’ someone claims their evaluation criteria to be, the less I’m inclined to take them seriously. It seems absurd that people treat ‘critiquing art’ (in the broadest possible sense of the word) as some piece of trivial arithmetic.

Game reviews are in essence fairly simple things: someone saying, “I enjoyed the game this much and this is why”. We get tend to get fixated on the scores, which are just a necessarily (and arguably quite useful) evil. I suppose technically they’re not necessary, but most places still opt for them.

I’ve heard from reviewers who’ve previously worked for publications using a X/100 system (such as ONM) that they thought it was a bit of a dumb system and were glad to be done with it. From what I understand, there was no series of check boxes that resulted in that score. They just had to arbitrarily declare that something was a 93, which would upset a bunch of people because a game they liked better got a 92. I think there’s a reason most publications have moved away for a scoring system out of 100, though some still cling to it.

Humans are tribal animals who will intwine their identities with all manner of things and happily turn anything into a competition. It’s seductive to boil things down to simple narratives, or better yet, simple arithmetic. But as you say, we don’t know exactly what’s going on in another person’s head when they’re playing the game. All we can do is read the reviewer’s words and try to make sense of them in good faith, even if they don’t chime with our own experience.

@N00BiSH Sorry. I’m done now, I promise.

You may want to delete one copy of your accidental double post a few posts back

Fortunately Miyamoto just told us that games are not art 😆

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2025/07/miyamoto-views-game...

In other news, I spent my first hour of the game doing essentially nothing but destroying things.

@FishyS Sorry, the double post thing has been happening a lot recently. Fixed.

Staying… off topic, I think it’s worth clarifying that Miyamoto didn’t actually pronounced that “games are not art” or make any statement to that effect.

What he said in a recent investor’s Q&A was that he’s always telling teams that they should be “looking towards the customer, not the higher-ups” when working (”上司ではなく、お客さんを見て仕事しろ”). The official English translation renders this as “work for the consumer, not your boss,” which is a bit pithier.

Later, former colleague Takaya Imamura would post the following tweet regarding Miyamoto’s general approach to games:

宮本さんは美術大学で工業デザインを学ばれており、ゲームを“作品”ではなく“商品”として捉える考え方をされています。その視点が、よりユーザーに寄り添ったゲーム作りにつながっているのだと思います

The most relevant bit being that he thinks Miyamoto grasps games not as ‘works of art’ (作品) but as consumer-facing ‘products’ (商品), and that this is influenced by his background studying industrial design at (perhaps ironically) an art college.

The original Automaton article that the NL article riffs off gives a very balanced take and digs a little deeper into Miyamoto’s methodology for making games (“if the players don’t understand it, there’s fault in the design I made”). It’s well worth a read, and certainly more enlightening than the superficial (and inaccurate) “Miyamoto claims games are not art” take that some people have misconstrued from the NL article.

Again, it’s tempting to reduce things to simple, satisfying narratives, but what Miyamoto actually said is basically just “keep the end consumer in mind when doing your job”.

…Which seems like perfectly sensible advice to me.

@SprSynJn I believe you can adjust Pauline’s voice language settings in the menu (Pauline Button Settings → Audio Language), but that the text language is locked to the console system settings.

If you have one of the Japanese region-locked consoles, then all the text will be locked to Japanese in the game and across the system.

Has anyone in UK attempted to buy a Japanese download code for this game and used it? I bought one successfully but won't get chance to try the code until tonight. Fingers crossed it works as this will be my purchase method going forward on switch 2 games if the insane UK pricing continues

@brendathecat yeah I did this last yesterday and it worked fine

@SprSynJn No worries! Before making the purchase, it might be worth double checking whether you’ll be able to play any of your non-Japanese Switch 1 games on it (if you have any)!

I’m in the same boat, and I’m worried that there might be issues carrying some of my Switch 1 games forward (for example, my EUR copy of Splatoon 2, which doesn’t feature have Japanese as a supported language).

I’m not happy about it, but I’m still planning to cough up the extra 2万円 for a region-unlocked version so I can smoothly transfer my Switch 1 library which contains a mix of games bought in various countries. I also want access to non Japanese shops (sometimes a certain region has a particularly tasty sale) as well as various NSO apps (different regions can have slightly different game lineups).

But of course it’s your money, and you’ll have a fair bit more of it if you get the Japanese-only version. I just wanted to air some of my personal concerns given that I’m faced with the same choice!