Today, I’m going to yak about the post-game DLC for Donkey Kong Bananza. It’s light on story, but heavy on some new interesting mechanics, so this will be spoiler free territory. I wrote about Bananza briefly in my GOTY write up for last year, but it’s only in the new year that I have explored the DLC. For those who haven’t played it, Bananza is the shining star of the Switch 2’s library so far, and is the must own game of the system right now. It’s the Mario Odyssey team’s latest effort, and you can see their mastery on full display here. But, the main game has been talked about at length in big publications and podcasts. I have not seen as much discussion surrounding this DLC, maybe because of it’s seemingly steep $20 price tag. It feels pricey when it’s just one extra mode, and an extra level very light on content. Looking at it in a different light makes this a much more appealing proposition: Would you pay $20 for a roguelite designed by the Mario team?

Emerald Rush distills the game down to gathering as much emeralds as possible. Through your rampage across an entire level, you’ll bust open bananas and fossils to gain skills, and develop perks to better your ability to scoop those precious gems up. Every round has a growing target number of emeralds you’ll need to grab. You’ll keep pace through your perks which will give you multipliers based on various ways you can move and smash across the map. Growing goals? Multipliers? Builds that benefit certain play styles at the expense of other strategies? This Donkey Kong is a Balatro.

Now, DK isn’t playing poker, but that core principle is at work here, and is fascinating to see the impact that popularity of the roguelite genre has had on Nintendo. They played around with the idea in Splatoon 3’s DLC (Which I still need to check out!) and they’ve dipped back into that well for this one. One of these days, we’ll see a full-fledged Nintendo project designed from the ground up to be a roguelite, but until then, I am more than pleased with their experiments in the genre. So how does this award winning formula feel when applied to a 3d platformer? Like a breath of fresh, banana scented air.

Steam has seen a wealth of roguelite genre combos over the years, but I don’t think I’ve seen it combined with a platformer yet, and I think Nintendo did remarkably well with this attempt. Banana placement is the same every run, and the same skills are assigned to each banana, although they switch up skills every couple of rounds. Fossils, while always in the same place, give a different set of perks every time you bust them up. This fusion of adapting to randomized elements within a predictable level structure gives the game a very unique flow. This may result in the game not having the same bottomless replayability of other games, but I keep finding myself coming back to this mode, and the runs still are exhilarating stretches of frantic smashing and scrambling, paired with the quiet contemplation of the map screen, trying to route out the best path to get your build online and scoring huge mounds of emeralds.

Most of the roguelites I play move at a more contemplative pace. I have time to chew over my moves, and can pace around the room and sip a coffee if I really need to think out a line of play. Emerald Rush gives me brief moments to look at the map and figure out how to use my limited resources of warps, but most of the playtime asks for perfect camerawork and execution to maximize my score. I had a great time with the main game of Bananza, but I found myself wanting some more challenge from the experience. The end game stretch delivered that, and I still have a final bit of the post game to wrap up. Emerald Rush is the end game challenge I always wanted, in a form I would have never predicted.

Emerald Rush has fully shifted the game for me. I can now boot this game up when I am in two completely different moods. I can still pursue 100% completion in the main game, but I can now firmly place the game in my roguelite folder. Runs usually end up taking half an hour with all the time I use staring at the map, so they even managed to nail the length of a run. I fully welcome Nintendo’s exploration into the roguelite genre, and cannot wait to see what fruit it will bear eventually. Roguelite F-Zero, here we come!