IGN: Can you both tell me about the conception of Donkey Kong Bananza? What idea or mechanic or theme was at the core of this game's development when it was first started?
Motokura: Well, I would say the very original impetus for the development of Donkey Kong Bananza was when my boss, Mr. Koizumi, approached our team and asked us to consider working on a 3D Donkey Kong game. And that's when we realized we really needed to know more about Donkey Kong, so we went and spoke to Mr. Miyamoto, the original creator of the character. And Mr. Miyamoto has experienced not only working on the Donkey Kong games that he was directly responsible for, but also worked alongside Rare on the Donkey Kong games that they created. And for him, a lot of things that came up were the unique actions that a really strong character like Donkey Kong can engage in, things like the hand slap or blowing his breath.
Why was this game best suited to release on Nintendo Switch 2 as opposed to Nintendo Switch or both?
Motokura: So this game originally began its development cycle on Nintendo Switch 1 and at the time, we were still using voxel technology and thinking of lots of different ideas for applications. But when we learned about the Switch 2 development, we realized that the best implementation of these ideas and technology would be on Nintendo Switch 2.
Takahashi: And when I was previously talking about the importance of the continuity of destruction, that was something that we could expand on and have a longer continuous play experience with that kind of concept on Nintendo Switch 2. So this allowed us to engage in creating really extremely rich variety of materials and very large scale changes in the environment on that new hardware. And when destruction is your core gameplay, one really important moment that we wanted to preserve was when a player looks at a part of the terrain and thinks, can I break this? Because that creates a very important surprise that has a lot of impact for them and that was something that was best done on Switch 2. But it's not really even just the processing power of the Switch 2 that I think attracted us and gave us some interesting possibilities. There was also the device itself that offered things like mouse control, which you can use in co-op play for a second player to control Pauline's vocal blasts or DK Artist, a mode where you can sculpt a large set of voxels.