Donkey Kong Bananza hasn't even hit its first anniversary and its producer is already thinking about what comes next. Speaking with GamesRadar+ at GDC, Kenta Motokura confirmed that the same creative chain linking Super Mario Odyssey to Bananza will likely extend to whatever the team builds after this.
"Probably, we'll see the same sort of phenomenon as we did when going from Super Mario Odyssey to Donkey Kong Bananza, where there were some ideas and development that acted as hints for the future development of Donkey Kong Bananza," Motokura said. "I do expect that will be the case where some ideas from Donkey Kong Bananza provide future hints for our next project, as well."
That's not a roadmap. It's not a tease of a specific game. But it does tell you something important about how this team operates: they don't start from scratch. Odyssey's ideas about player transformation and open-world momentum fed into Bananza's destruction-based traversal, even if the two games look nothing alike on the surface. The next project, whatever it is, will carry Bananza's DNA in some form.
Motokura's comments on what "fresh" actually means are worth paying attention to. He didn't say the goal is to build on what came before. He said the standard is what will feel new to a player. "When we were developing Super Mario Odyssey, we were thinking about Mario transformations that no one had seen up to that point," he explained. "That's always a goal in mind when working on a project." So the inheritance is more about process and philosophy than mechanics being carried over wholesale.
What This Team Does Next Matters
This is the studio that delivered the best 3D Mario in years and then pivoted to make the first 3D Donkey Kong game in 25 years. Credit where it's due: that's a genuinely bold call. They could have made Odyssey 2 and sold tens of millions of copies without breaking a sweat. Instead they rebuilt a dormant franchise from the ground up and, by most accounts, nailed it.
So when Motokura says Bananza will provide "hints" for the next project, the real question is whether that means another franchise revival, a new IP entirely, or finally the 3D Mario sequel everyone has been waiting for. The community is already doing the speculating for him. Comments on the story are full of people hoping for a new Diddy Kong Racing, which, look, I understand the nostalgia, but nothing in Motokura's comments points that direction. He's talking about ideas and development philosophy, not genre pivots.
Motokura also previously said Bananza "will come to symbolize 3D Donkey Kong," which suggests the destruction mechanic isn't a one-off gimmick but a foundation the franchise will build on. Whether that means a direct sequel or something that borrows the same design thinking for a different game, the team clearly isn't treating Bananza as a standalone experiment.
The fact that Motokura is talking about this at GDC, in a panel dedicated to Bananza's development, suggests the post-mortem is already underway. Studios don't publicly reflect on what worked and what could carry forward unless they're actively in early thinking about what's next. Nintendo rarely confirms anything before they're ready, but this is about as close to "we're already working on something" as you'll get from them without an official announcement.
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