Luigi’s Mansion (Nintendo GameCube on Switch 2 Review)

December 27, 2025 by 3 Comments

Luigi’s Mansion
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released September 14, 2001 (JP) November 18, 2001 (US)
Directed by Hideki Konno
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2

I ain’t going to win any friends with this review.

My first day one Nintendo console was the GameCube. I was SO excited, even though 2001 had already broken my heart twice with new game machines (and the early demise of Dreamcast). The Game Boy Advance’s screen was like playing video games with three pairs of sunglasses on and the Xbox’s controller was NOT made for the hands of an already-small-for-her-age 12 year old girl. But that’s okay because that GameCube controller felt custom built for me and there’s no way Nintendo would ever bungle a launch lineup. All I can say is THANK GOD for Super Monkey Ball and Star Wars: Rogue Leader. And then Super Smash Bros. Melee came out a few weeks after launch and THAT dominated my next couple months of playtime and was everything I wanted from a new game on a new machine and more. So my GameCube worked out just fine in the end, and so did the Xbox and GBA (just not THAT GBA). Eventually, I did finish all those 2001 day one launch games. All except one. I never got around to finishing Luigi’s Mansion until I did this review. I’m not even sure I beat the second boss.

This is either the first boss fight or how fans of Luigi’s Mansion will react to this review.

I remember Electronic Gaming Monthly had an Xbox versus GameCube issue and someone actually gave Luigi’s Mansion a 5.5, which was jaw-dropping for a Nintendo-published game. Literally shocking. But it only took me about an hour of playing Luigi’s Mansion to get where they were coming from and, actually, I thought a 5.5 was generous. As a 12 year old, I thought Luigi’s Mansion was a boring all around experience, and now as a 36 year old, I feel the same way. It feels like a ten second long proof of concept hardware trailer that was stretched into a full length game. Because that’s exactly what this is. They took the 10 seconds of Luigi in a haunted mansion footage from Spaceworld 2000’s GameCube tech demo (the same one that got people hyped for Zelda before the cel-shading) and turned it into a full-length game. It’s kind of stunning that Nintendo didn’t throw every resource they had at making sure a Mario game was ready for launch. Apparently Hiroshi Yamauchi’s last request before stepping down as president of Nintendo was “make a Mario game for our new game machine!” Presumably he also asked “why don’t you have one already? Are you f*cking stupid? Don’t you remember how Virtual Boy did with no (real) Mario game to send it off?”

I thought “Game Boy Horror” was trying to play a launch day Game Boy Advance.

But hey, I liked the idea of Luigi in a haunted house as a kid. I was as hyped for that Spaceworld footage as anyone else. I wasn’t expecting a Mario game, and good thing for that because there’s no running or jumping in Luigi’s Mansion and the primary method of combat is basically tug-of-war. So much tug-a-war. First, you have to stun-lock the ghost by pointing a flashlight at it, and when its heart dings, you have to suck it up with a vacuum by holding the opposite direction the ghost pulls. And, well, that’s basically the whole game. Just do that over and over and over and over and over again. If you don’t like the combat, you’re going to be bored with Luigi’s Mansion. If you like it, you won’t be. It’s really that simple. I thought it was boring as a kid and I still think it’s boring now.

God, the Nintendo fans are going to have aneurysms with this opinion, but, yeah, I think the character designers are really forgettable and generic. I just didn’t like anything about this at all. And before you burn down my house, remember that I’m not a Nintendo hater. Read some of my other Nintendo reviews. Try Mario Wonder, the Switch remake of Mario RPG, Yoshi’s Island (from the same director as this), and hell, just go to my retro review index. I even gave the lazy as all f*ck Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition a YES! because I had more fun with it than not. So I think Luigi’s Mansion has no redeeming qualities. So what? It’s okay to not like one Nintendo game, you know?

There’s just not enough twists on the ghost catching formula. The idea is supposed to be that the “portrait ghosts” take extra steps to expose their weak spot. Like the guy in the above chair? He’s not visible if you face him. You have to turn around and wait for him to yawn, and when he does, THEN you can stun lock him and suck him up the same way you do basic enemies. All the portrait ghosts have 100hp and could take multiple stun-locks and suckages to capture. And again, the actual combat is exactly the same as it is for the basic enemies. It just gets so old, so quickly, and that’s before you factor in things like poison mushrooms. They spawn spontaneously during boss fights (and are also hidden in some fixtures in the rooms) and shrink you in size. I don’t care so much about the health ping. It’s easy enough to get health back. But you can’t operate your vacuum while shrank. It’s not hard to avoid damage once shrank, but it takes too long to grow back. It’s one of many, many aspects of Luigi’s Mansion that feels like it only exists to pad out the run time.

Safe bet that the team behind this were gigantic fans of the Haunted Mansion rides at Disney theme parks. Many of the gags are straight from the ride, including this candle bit. There’s also the whole mansion setting and portrait theme, a fortune teller with a crystal ball, dancing ghosts, a graveyard, a music room, suits of armor, and ghosts seen through shadows. Really, all that’s missing are the busts and the stretching room. This isn’t a knock on Nintendo, BTW. So, in a way this is kinda the third game I’ve reviewed based on that ride, including Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for the NES and the Super Famicom exclusive Mickey no Tokyo Disneyland Daibouken. So does this mean in another twenty years we can look forward to Waluigi’s Pirate Adventure? Because that would slap. And if you’re a Nintendo fan who has never rode the Haunted Mansion and are rolling your eyes at me right now, Disney+ actually has the full Haunted Mansion ride point of view. Watch it and tell me I’m wrong. Yes, the Tokyo version of the ride is basically identical. Hell, even the music is kind of similar to Luigi’s Mansion at times.

Every ghost portrait ghost is caught by the vacuum and the sucking mechanic. No exceptions, not even the bosses, whether it makes sense or not. At one point, you meet a fortune teller and the object is to retrieve five of Mario’s personal items and bring them to her. When this is done, she asks you to use your vacuum and suck her up. “All right! At least with this one I won’t have to watch the number 100 tick off yet again.” Wrong. She still resists the vacuum and still has 100hp. Why? She literally instructs you to capture her. She’s going willingly. Shouldn’t the gag be that she has 1 hit point, or none? It makes no sense.

Maybe this is how ghosts do foreplay.

And that’s what my general problem with Luigi’s Mansion is. Anything potentially clever is kind of ruined by reverting back to the same, tired mechanic that’s used on all enemies great and small. Plus, on the Switch 2, I’m not entirely sure it worked as it’s supposed to. I was constantly getting the dings for stun-locking ghosts and then immediately cuing up the vacuum, only the ghosts vanished in the transition to the vacuum. Maybe that happened when I was 12 too and I forgot, but once I switched off a GameCube controller (a $70 accessory, mind you) and moved to the Joycons, it didn’t happen as much. Oh, it still happened. It happened a lot. This isn’t the “pulling back to suck them in” part but just initiating the combat itself. For whatever reason, the flashlight felt less effective than I remember it being.

I do have one nice thing to say: for such a darkly-lit game, it’s not as flashy as you would think.

And what I said about the flashlight above really only applied to the generic basic enemies. I don’t remember it ever being a problem for any of the “portrait ghosts” that are the main objective of the game. In general, I assume the combat is supposed to feel very frantic and wacky but I thought it was underwhelming and repetitive to the point of exhaustion. Eventually the basic enemies can be dealt with by using the different elements you can suck up into the vacuum: water, fire, and ice. Some enemies require one of those three things, but when it was optional, I preferred using the elements because it worked every time, unlike the vacuum. The problem with that is there’s no PUNCH to using those elements. No feeling of doing damage. You just watch a number count down and then the ghost dies when it reaches zero. They don’t even really react to it. They just kind of stop and fade out with no satisfying death animation.

I’ve jokingly called this “Luigi’s Tech Demo” for years but that’s really what it is. It’s meant to show off how cool the GameCube is. And this IS a massive upgrade over the jaggy Nintendo 64. I actually was surprised by how low resolution this looked. I hadn’t played a GameCube game in a long time. This certainly didn’t hold up as much as Wind Waker did. I mean, it’s not a deal breaker or anything. It looks fine.

And then there’s the Boos. One of the main objectives of the game is to unleash a cluster of fifty boos into the mansion, then find them and suck them up. They don’t put up fights as much as the other ghosts (some of the Boos don’t attack at all), but they can have as much as 300hp. That sounds like busy work by itself, and that’s before you get to what they CAN do: run away, leaving the room entirely. I was using save states to reload them, but eventually I gave up on that and started chasing them into hallways and other rooms. A ghost that has 300hp might require you to follow it back and forth into a room over a dozen times. It just creates more busy work, and again, it’s the same thing you’re already doing with basic enemies and portrait ghosts.

I think the vacuum could have been satisfying if they significantly dialed back the HP on the ghosts. If there was a quick, snappy pace to it, hell, for all I know this could have been one of the best games ever made. But the way they did it just makes it feel like a grindy slog, especially since the ghosts just reset if you don’t catch them in a single pass. The only positive thing I can say is “at least they don’t require you to repeat every single activation step.” Faint praise.

If the mansion offered anything but the combat, like a genuine sense of exploration or getting lost or hidden things, I’d have liked it more. But it doesn’t. The “puzzles” in Luigi’s Mansion are really rudimentary stuff, and there’s really no room puzzles at all in the “you’re locked, how do you get out?” sense. Everything is based around the ghosts. But haunted mansions are almost never JUST about the ghosts. There’s two “hidden” rooms. One of them you fall into from the roof and the other you enter by scanning a mouse hole with the Game Boy Horror, which is like the game’s radar.

Besides the “speedy ghosts” I did get everything in the game, including all 50 Boos. Initially I finished the game with 49 out of 50. There was a hidden room I missed and my OCD got to me while writing this review. Worth the effort? Not really, but at least I’ll have this to figure out how much the sequels improved the game. Which I assume they must have because it can’t get much more boring than this.

But activating the ghost battles isn’t exactly something that requires you to have a seat on your thinking couch. Move a curtain with the vacuum. Move an airplane on the ceiling with a vacuum. Spray a sleeping ghost with water. Spray a bathing ghost with ice. Spray a frozen ghost with fire. Even late in the game, there’s a ghost that you just have to wait for it to basically say “boo.” Activate all the musical instruments or clocks in a room by pressing the A button next to them. The engine is just too limited to do anything more complicated or clever. If you can’t manipulate it with the vacuum or with a single press of the A button, the game can’t handle it. That’s probably just as well. The most complicated enemies require you to clog the vacuum with a ball that you then can launch back at them, it’s pretty haphazard. The controls in general are. Even then, I wish each ghost had a unique capture method instead of vacuum.

Like, these guys WOULD be fun battles since they fight back and feel boss-like (but they ain’t bosses). Except the method of capture is the same for them as it is everyone else. It gets old.

I guess I pictured in my mind a Clue-like mansion (or maybe the Winchester House, which I totally recommend visiting at least once) with lots of hidden rooms, secret passages, booby traps, and puzzles. Instead, it’s the facade of a haunted house, with all the expecting trappings but barely any of the interactivity I would hope for. A lot of the rooms look interesting and have lots of furniture and fixtures, but you don’t really do anything with them but shake them (sometimes it looks like he’s dry-humping them. At least I hope it’s dry). If they have money or health refills in them, it flies out inelegantly. Maybe a drawer or door opens or a chandelier sways, but that’s basically the extent of what you can do with the setting. At one point, I had to walk on a treadmill to get a key and the moment stood out so much I couldn’t believe it because so much of it just sits there doing nothing.

Another weird thing, at least for me, is how the Boos are the central focus of the game, yet they don’t look like the portrait ghosts at all. The portrait ghosts are the only eventful parts of the game, so when you think about it, shouldn’t the portrait ghosts be Boos playing dress-up instead of being humanoid ghosts? Especially since the last boss is also just an ordinary looking Boo with a crown on his head. Maybe his expression is a little more sinister, but he’s just a Boo, right?

So, I thought Luigi’s Mansion was a mostly empty game with boring combat and a plodding pace. I literally didn’t like anything about it. Even the bosses were snoozies. The first one, a giant baby, was probably the most memorable. The second one I honestly thought looked just like the basic enemies, and the third one IS just a giant Boo that you have to lure into the spikes of unicorn statues. Then the last boss is also a Boo but he’s the last boss because he has a crown on his head. Well Boos are like 94% head anyway and it’s not like he’s going to wear the crown on one of his flippers, but at least he also operates a robotic Bowser so that the game can feel climatic.

That’s the second boss. Brought to you by AT&T because they phoned that sh*t in.

I was wrong though about Luigi’s Mansion being cynical. Hey, I can admit when I’m wrong. No, I think the problem is the game was rushed out because they didn’t have a Mario game or anything remotely Mario-like for the GameCube launch. Luigi’s Mansion is a very simple game. Simple combat. Simple puzzles. Nothing too complex. Nothing ambitious at all, really. Maybe the least ambitious Nintendo launch game ever made (well, besides Mario’s Tennis on Virtual Boy). One of the biggest general complaints about Luigi’s Mansion is that it’s too short. That’s kind of bonkers because it’s one of the most artificially padded games from Nintendo I’ve played. If not for the poison mushrooms or tedious life bars, this might have only taken a couple hours to finish.

Honest to God, this guy felt more boss-like than two out of the four big bosses. He also had one of the more involved “puzzles.” You had to suck up the foot he was eating, then capture the waiters who would bring him more food, and THEN dodge his attacks when he had a tantrum, and THEN he was ready to be captured. Hell, I thought he WAS that floor’s boss. It felt like an event.

I don’t happen to think the layout of the mansion was optimized in the way, say, a Zelda dungeon is. But even if I ignore that, the game does so many things that grind the tempo to a halt. After you beat the giant Boo boss, it takes you back to the lab to turn the portrait ghosts into paintings. The next thing that happens? You have to manually walk back to the spot where you just fought the giant Boo on the third floor, at which point lightning strikes the mansion and knocks the power out. This is done as an excuse to restore basic enemies to the floors you’ve already cleared (basic enemies stop appearing in any room with the power restored), at least temporarily. You can go to the basement and restore the power. Why couldn’t the lightning strike have been a cut scene after you beat the Boo? Or why couldn’t the circuit breaker to the house be somewhere else? I guess the reason I found Luigi’s Mansion to be so boring is because nothing about it feels optimized. If you enjoyed it, hey, it’s okay. I like plenty of things that people find to be boring. I watch competitive ballroom dancing and everything.
Verdict: NO!

They went to all the effort of programming these upside-down gravity swap panels that you can step on and then they totally underutilized them. I think like two rooms in the entire game use this. To me, this is the prime exhibit in “they had a lot more plans that had to stay on the drawing board.” And really, I think this is the only time that you use this to reach something. You have to drop down on a table to reach a chest. Wait, isn’t Luigi the better jumper of the two? You mean to tell me he can’t reach up and open a chest on a table? Yeah yeah, I know, because then it wouldn’t be a game. But this upside down mechanic could have made for some interesting maze-like design. There’s none of that type of thing in Luigi’s Mansion. Rooms are just boxes that you wander around in. There’s no sense of a labyrinth of mystery. It’s just a shell. I expect more from Nintendo by 2001. This came out after Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, etc. And even 2D games had evolved past this by this point. (shrug)

Filed under Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Marvel Cosmic Invasion (Review)

December 24, 2025 by 4 Comments

Marvel Cosmic Invasion
Platform: All Current Platforms
Released December 1, 2025
Directed by Fred Gemus
Developed by Dotemu
Published by Tribute Games
$29.99 Hulk-Smashed baddies in the making of this review.
This review was played on a Nintendo Switch 2.

SOME SMALL ROSTER/BOSS SPOILERS AHEAD

Yeah, don’t sweat it. You’ll get lost in the fog of war playing this. I must have attacked my own teammates once or twice every stage. And that’s to say nothing of how many times I walked off the goddamn Bifröst.

Yep, this unofficial sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is everything you want in a Marvel brawler. Old school fisticuffs with new school sensibilities. The fifteen starting characters (you know DLC is coming) all feel completely different from each-other and have unique fighting styles and move sets. HUGE move sets. It could take you a while just to get the hang of one character, let alone fifteen. But even if you have no gaming skill at all, it’s okay. This game’s a cinch for everyone! During a recent get together I threw on Marvel Cosmic Invasion, handed out four controllers, and mostly just watched. I wanted everyone to get a turn, and the sheer joy that everyone had was something to behold. There were a lot of kids and their parents, and what made it cool was the parents recognized the gameplay from their own childhood while their kids were hyped because Marvel is scorching hot right now. Frankly, this feels like a better use of the genre than Ninja Turtles because there’s just so many superheroes to choose from and such a wide variety of superpowers to mine for moves than you can get from four nearly identical reptiles.

After the big group-wide session was finished, we had knocked out this much of the unlockables.

Technically, you don’t just pick one character in Cosmic Invasion. You take two characters and can swap to your second superhero on the fly at any time AND you can execute double team moves with the press of a button. Each character has their own life bar too, so it’s really hard to die. Unless some twerp you’re playing with takes all the health even if they’re full, DAD! Sure, you can mash buttons if you want, but it only takes a little practice to be able to pull off combos. In theory if you’ve got the right group of people, you should be able to easily juggle enemies from one player to another like no brawler ever before. I do have one petty complaint about that: the juggling can continue long after you’ve inflicted lethal damage on an enemy. That sounds like it could be fun, but it eventually became obnoxious while playing with psychotic children who thought it would NEVER get old to keep bouncing the lifeless carcasses of enemies while everyone else waited for them to actually walk forward and continue playing the rest of the game. There was at least one kid every stage who did this, to the point that everyone waiting for their turns had to yell “STOP JUGGLING AND MOVE!” It should never have come to that. Again, cute in theory, but annoying as all hell in practice.

For the most part, MCI (what an unfortunate acronym) avoids having enemies linger on the edges of the screen, which is my #1 brawling pet peeve. But, it does still happen, and a couple bosses even feel tailored around it, like Thanos Finnegan. He has a ballsack on his chin-e-gan. Killed half the universe but they came back again. Poor old Thanos Finnegan-egan-egan.

Other than the juggling stuff, if there’s a means to keep the beat-em-up action from becoming stale, it was probably done here. I can’t stress enough how unique each character in the game feels, which is especially impressive given the roster size. However, I’m not the biggest fan of upgradable stats in arcade-style brawlers. For something like Castle Crashers? It’s fine, I guess. For stuff like this? The problem with them is that upgradable stats discourage players from swapping characters in the middle of a quest, which means it has the exact opposite effect of what a large roster of characters is meant to do: keep things fresh. Go ahead and swap, but you’ll be playing level six or seven or eight with a character still on their base stats. GO AHEAD! SWAP! What, you don’t want to anymore?

Some of the dialog is so self-referential and fourth-wall breaking that you would swear it was meant for Deadpool.

And also, I guess I have to mention that the roster was very disappointing for basically everyone. Missing from Marvel Cosmic Invasion: Thor, Hulk, Captain Marvel, Bucky, Doctor Strange, Falcon, Blade, Starlord, Groot, Gamora, Deadpool, Daredevil, Punisher, Ant-Man, Vision, Black Widow, Colossus, Nightcrawler, War Machine, Beast, Drax, Cyclops, Gambit, Wasp, Shang-Chi, and the entire Fantastic Four, among others. Kind of annoying since characters nobody wanted like Nova, Phyla-Vell (well Sasha the Kid liked her at least), and f*cking Beta Ray Bill (are you kidding me? Over Thor?) are in this. I’m not entirely sure how balanced the characters are. Whoever used She-Hulk seemed to have had the most fun, as she has a wide range of attacks while also having some of the hardest-hitting moves. In general, the whole game does an excellent job of feeling like strikes are impactful and violent. Now, there is a catch: some characters fly, and some don’t. Sometimes enemies feel like they’re tailored for flying heroes, but if nobody is using a flyer? It can get a little frustrating. They kind of reminded me of the Baxter fight from TMNT in that it was hard to line-up with the flyers properly.

There were like twenty people over at our house during that first play session, and two things happened that broke my heart. This isn’t a bit I’m doing as a joke. I literally mean “I got a pit in my stomach” heartbroken. The first thing was that several kids opted out of playing because they had already watched their favorite Twitchers or YouTubers playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion and somehow had gotten everything they needed out of this without ever picking up a controller. Why have fun playing a game when you can watch someone else have fun? I couldn’t believe it. It actually made me almost sick to my stomach that a lot of kids would rather watch some idiot play games instead of playing themselves. By the way, those kids then went on to smugly spoil all the hidden characters, level details, and boss fights for everyone else. They were the absolute worst, to the point that my normally jovial father, seriously the nicest guy in any room he’s in, said something to the effect of “no more games when these Twitch kids are around. They can’t take a hint to not ruin it for everyone else.” And they really couldn’t. Not little kids, mind you. Ages 11 to 14 or 15, and I guess it was their way of showing how smart they were to everyone else that they remembered what happened in a video they saw that week. They kept it up the entire time and simply didn’t give a sh*t how annoying it was. The second heartbreaking thing was that every single kid saw the missing characters as the cynical cash grab for future DLC packs that it was. There’s interviews with the development team that say they really just wanted some oddball selections, but why do that at the risk of alienating fans of MAJOR comic characters unless you were certain you could make up for it later with DLC? For the kids, there was literally no question in their minds that both the missing heroes and the missing supervillains (no Doctor Doom, no Green Goblin, etc) were missing because they’re going to be up-sold later. Again, not a bit I’m doing. There is something tragic that kids are that jaded about why games are the way they are. If that doesn’t hurt your heart, I don’t know what will. I hate cynicism, but it was totally justified and likely accurate. Gaming shouldn’t be cynical for children. It should be magical. I hate that it’s come to this. I know that it’s a business and they have to make money, but don’t turn kids into cynics. It’s not cool.

So what’s there to complain about? Well, besides the juggling and some of the weird character selection options? Honestly, I don’t know what more anyone could want out of a brawler. I guess the tutorial took forever and almost caused the game to get shut off during that party. And some of the extra goals in the game aren’t awesome. Hitting X amount of a specific move using a specific character on a specific level being a check mark? What if nobody picks that character? Or sometimes the goal is not taking any damage from a swarm of enemies. Those goals became so distracting, especially since you have to pause the game to see what the goals are, that we all voted to not attempt them anymore. We also took that pledge when it was just me, Dad, and Sasha the Kid replaying this for this review. And everyone seemed to agree that some of the bosses were letdowns, especially the final boss. I think everyone was so unimpressed with Annihilus as the finale that they really thought someone else would be the final boss (except my nephew who thought he was “very Shredder-like”). Oh and the whole battle against Silver Surfer was a groan-inducing slog that had everyone listless. Actually, none of the bosses that become characters are exceptional. BUT, there’s also a ton of fantastic boss fights in this. I can’t stress enough: we were NEVER bored playing this. It was just so good.

I guess I kind of wish there had been more things like these turrets that you can smack to take out waves of enemies. For the most part, the environments are REALLY well done. I don’t think any 2D game EVER has as many one-off visual gags as Marvel Cosmic Invasion has. There’s so many little winking nods to famous Marvel stories and characters. And luckily we had a few kids who told us when those things were coming before they showed up on the screen. Even after we asked them not to. All while their witless parents had a thousand yard stare, hopefully contemplating all their birth control choices that led to this.

Probably the strangest thing I can say about Marvel Cosmic Invasion is that I was kind of over it as soon as I finished. That seems weird, because while I was playing it, I was thinking “this is probably the best brawler ever made! It does everything right.” I mean, it doesn’t, obviously, but it comes close enough that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could hope to top this take on a 90s style brawler. It’s like an all-star game of all your favorite arcade fist-throwers. Yet, now that I’ve kind of played it twice (during the party I only played two or three levels), I don’t really want to play it ever again. I have no interest in more levels or DLC. I’m good. I had a great time while it lasted. Me, Dad, and Sasha the Kid had fun running through it so I could actually do a proper review. I usually enjoy competently made brawlers, and this goes far beyond competently made. It’s a masterclass in cathartic beam ’em up action.

“MJ is going to be SO MAD when she finds out what we’re about to do. This is her thing. Meh. Maybe she’ll be down with it.”

But it’s also an empty calories game. This genre was perfect for arcades for a reason. It’s video game junk food. That’s fine, by the way. Gaming is a big tent and there’s room for brawlers. For a while, this genre was the dominant genre at this very blog because they’re really easy to review. Give me a variety of eye-catching set-pieces (even if they’re facades), a variety of moves, and OOMPHful hits that feel legitimately violent and I’m a happy camper. The only way you can screw it up is not enough variety, or moving off the formula too much, like what happened with the Digital Eclipse Power Rangers brawler that I didn’t like. Even then, their heart was in the right place. Brawlers can get tiring. I enjoyed playing through Invasion’s fifteen levels. Doing that twice sounds exhausting to me. Maybe that’s why the genre works. I guess that’s why I’m annoyed by upgradable stats in games like this. Who on Earth would want to play this over and over again? It’s perfectly fine for a game to be a one-and-done. Besides, you need good games like that to make those good games you do want to replay again and again mean something. It should be special when a game has replay value. It should be equally special to play a game that’s fantastic, tons of fun, and has no replay value at all.
Verdict: YES!
This is Cathy Vice reminding you to help control the annoying child population. Have your mate spayed or neutered! Whether they like it or not. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Filed under Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Donkey Kong Bananza (Nintendo Switch 2 Review)

September 25, 2025 by 1 Comment

Donkey Kong Bananza
Platform: Nintendo Switch 2
Released July 17, 2025
Directed by Wataru Tanaka and Kazuya Takahashi
Developed by Nintendo
$69.99 (normally $79.99) chopped down a mountain with the edge of my hand in the making of this review.

This is more like a whiny blog post than a normal review but I just put about two weeks into Donkey Kong Bananza and I’m not happy with the last third or so of the game. I spent two-thirds of Donkey Kong Bananza thinking it would go down as one of my favorite games ever, and it’s certainly not. Given how many total hours of euphoria Bananza gave me, I have to give it a YES! For a platformer, I don’t think a horrible final five or so hours should be capable of flipping the verdict of an amazing twenty-to-thirty hours of a rough but highly-entertaining experience. With that said, I’m really unhappy with the last several levels of Bananza, and there’s no way to explain it without spoiling it, so be warned.

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW!
I’m awarding Bananza a YES! verdict.
That’s because there’s far more good than bad in this game.
But I also HATED the last third of Bananza, and I explain why.
And there will be spoilers!

I can’t remember being so frustrated with a game I loved before. Not even Wind Waker.

The above screenshot was a really bad sign of how things would end for Donkey Kong Bananza. In one of the worst boss designs I can remember, you have to manually travel between several past worlds just to smack main baddie “Void Kong” a few times in each world. And when I say “manually” I mean you have to chase Void Kong, smacking him and then chase him more because he runs away and his primary attack is to put crap between you and him. After you chase him and smack him enough times, a cut scene happens and he warps to a prior stage. You then have to go to the warp gong, hit it, then go to the next level the Void Kong is in. Repeat doing this until it tells you that you don’t have to anymore.

Imagine this in ANY OTHER game. Imagine you’re fighting the 5th boss in Legend of Zelda, only after getting a couple smacks on him, he teleports to the middle of the 4th dungeon, where you have to make your way to him and smack him a couple times, then he teleports to the 3rd dungeon, THEN BACK to the 5th dungeon. I don’t give a flying f*ck if you can just walk out of the dungeon and blow the warp whistle to cut down on the travel. It’s still a horrible, HORRIBLE idea, and yet it’s here and a major part of this game. I literally cannot believe anyone gave Bananza a perfect score unless you somehow teleported this game to 2001 and showed it to someone who was disappointed with GameCube’s launch lineup.

It’s a complete slog and a bore that grinds the game to a screeching halt. You have to chase him through the Junction Layer (“Layers” are levels), then chase him through the Hilltop Layer, then chase him through the Lagoon Layer, and then BACK to the Junction Layer. It’s not fun AT ALL. It’s not exciting AT ALL. It’s not satisfying to make progress AT ALL. I don’t remember a single boss fight that was transformed into unbearable busywork quite like this. It’s such an overindulgent idea that it should have been rejected out of hand when it was pitched. Yet, here it is, in the final game. Up to this point, I was head over heels for Donkey Kong Bananza. It’s the sequel to Super Mario Odyssey I’ve been waiting almost eight years for, and that’s not hyperbole. The game did recover after this sequence, but it would eventually crater for good, a solid five or so hours before the actual ending.

This should have been the best level in the game, but some REALLY broken gameplay mechanics put the screws to that. You know, this burger reminds me of something but at this time I can’t recall what.

Mario Odyssey leapfrogged the first WarioWare to become my all-time favorite video game. Okay, the fact that Odyssey and WarioWare are my two favorite games probably speaks volumes about my attention span but I don’t care. I couldn’t put Odyssey down and, as long as it didn’t involve a jump rope, I never got bored with it. I even beat it a second time last year. I found every Moon, in every stage, and all the post game stuff, TWICE. I would have totally bought Odyssey DLC if it had been offered. I was good to go for weeks or even months after I finished it, both times. And there are no words to describe how overjoyed I was that Bananza’s hunt for bananas and fossils is exactly like the moons and purple coins in Odyssey. Like, 90% like it. The fossils are based around the Terraria-like digging, but the SEARCH for them is identical. It’s a direct Super Mario Odyssey sequel in everything but the name. EVEN WITH THE NEW GAMEPLAY MECHANICS, it’s Super Mario Odyssey 2, or like amazing DLC for Odyssey that grants you a new character in Donkey Kong. The logic of the level design is the same. The amount of moons/bananas is basically the same, and the variety of ways to find them has a very similar vibe. Some are just laying around, others are bought, and some you have to go hell and back to get. Again, it’s a direct sequel with a new character. Period.

My strategy was basically to beat the stages, then systematically knock-out the bananas and fossils that I missed. As you can see, there’s a LOT of stuff all over. This is just one part of a bigger map, mind you. The main levels have multiple “layers” that each have their own challenges.

And I was in love. This felt like it justified my Switch 2 purchase by itself. No joke. I got so much value out of Bananza that I have to give it a YES! because the amount of quality gaming hours I experienced far exceeded the bad parts. And that’s why I was so frustrated by the last few levels of Bananza. The last “real” level that’s Odyssey-like is basically broken, and after that, the game just f*cking refuses to end. The fun is barely visible in the rear view mirror by that point. The last couple levels, especially, are boring settings and broken mechanics.The difficulty spikes dramatically while also slowing down because the game leans extra-heavily into knocking you off the stage. When that happens it takes away a balloon (balloons are so common that you dig them up even after you reach the max 99, which is crap) and returns you to the start of the sequence you were on. It’s a very slow mechanic because you have to fall all the way to the bottom of whatever pit you’re on, so it’s like if you were playing Castlevania and the legendary knock-back of that game took five to ten seconds to recover and start moving again. Maybe even longer.

This is near the start of the second-to-last level. There’s two levels in a row that are fake-out last levels before you get the proper final part of the game. You can punch through that concrete with the Gorilla Bananza but it’s slow. Everything about the last three or so hours of Bananza is slow.

I’m fine with the recovery time punishment when it’s my fault. If I’m walking around, trashing a level and I screw up and fall off the side of a wall or tunnel through a mountain into oblivion, fine. A long recovery time is a good incentive to not do that again. But I object to the enemy design deliberately going for the knock-back, because now you’re in the action part of the game and not the exploration part. Okay, it’s technically accurate that allowing an enemy to hit me is also my fault, but apples and oranges, because having such a long recovery time in the thick of battle is boring. It’s like the development team forgot that we’re playing video games specifically to not be bored, but the game’s sudden obsession over the final four levels with going for the over-the-ledge knockouts is beyond the pale. And suddenly all the mechanical foibles I had been overlooking for a couple weeks weren’t nothingburgers anymore.

This part specifically, which is the home stretch for the second or third fake-out final boss fight, placing you on this moving platform where you really can’t stop moving AND puts enemies that knock you out quite high up. Not only do you have to wait to fall all the way but it sends you all the way back to the start of this segment.

As much as I enjoyed DKB, it was never a perfect game. It has one of the worst cameras Nintendo has done since the GameCube era, back when 3D games were brand new and game makers were still figuring that stuff out. I assume it’s based on the “almost every solid surface can be destroyed” element. The camera is NOT suitable for it, as it’s often hard to find a good angle to do what you want to do. But then there’s other janky things. Many of the power-ups have multiple actions mapped to a single button. Tap the button to do one thing, hold it for the other, and it’s badly programmed, as regardless of what you INTEND to do, tap or hold, the game will do the opposite. It never gets better, either, and so even against the final-final-final-final-final boss (yes, all those finals make sense), I would need multiple attempts to perform the action I intended to do because the game doesn’t (can’t?) wait to see if I was holding or tapping the button. Which seems like it defeats the point of making it like that to begin with.

The elephant’s ability to slurp things up, especially when you level up those abilities, is so overpowered that it probably should have been saved for post game content. I mean, I LOVED it, but it also basically marked the end of “elegant” exploration in Bananza.

Whether you’re powered-up or not, the act of aiming a pile of terrain you’re holding, which pulls the game into a third-person view with a crosshair, fails constantly. Sometimes it will just plain not work the first attempt, or second, or third. Maybe it’ll throw the piece away, which means you have to scoop-up more. Since you probably NEED this mechanic to work when you’re trying to use it, especially if it’s during combat, it’s a pretty damning thing to happen as often as it does. The animal power-ups fail just as often. The elephant has two powers, the first of which is the ability to vacuum up the terrain. It’s ridiculously overpowered and will probably force you to reset the terrain on stages multiple times because you can render areas impassable, and I loved it. Except you do the vacuum by holding the button down, and often, instead of doing that, it will instead create a boulder out of the stuff stored in its trunk, which is done by tapping the button. And again, sometimes it’ll flip. Plus, you can combine those problems with the failure to register that you want to aim and throw the boulders you make, because that happens too. This game is a Russian nesting doll of mechanical failures.

When you actually get to the third-person crosshairs, it’s pretty accurate. Also, is it just me or does that spot of terrain look like the Prince from Katamari?

By far the most unreliable power-ups were the snake’s double jump and the gorilla’s charge punch. The snake is one of those “always hopping” mechanics that Nintendo keeps going back to, like in Mario Wonder, and it’s NEVER fun and they will NEVER get the message on that and stop including it. It’s so unimaginative to begin with, but unlike Mario Wonder, it’s not really optional for large stretches of Bananza. You even have to fight a boss as the snake. The snake can also cause slow motion by holding a button down, but once again, sometimes it just doesn’t work the first couple attempts, and I often needed multiple attempts to do a simple double jump up a straight wall. What’s crazy is that, when you’re able to free-climb on a surface, it’s like a Spider-Man game that controls perfectly. It’s only when it does anything but the basic Donkey Kong moves that the game becomes janky.

I lost count of how many times I tried to ride up a wind current as the ostrich and fell right off it because it’s not intuitive to jump first to use a flying button. It really doesn’t help that the move the button does when you’re not mid-air is useless. I never found a use for rolling as the ostrich. It’s a waste of a button.

All these issues make Donkey Kong Bananza probably the worst controlling 3D platformer Nintendo has done in several generations. By far the worst of any game I actually overall enjoyed. The Gorilla Bananza power-up, which is like a beefy version of Donkey Kong, has a charge punch. Just hold the B-button down and he’ll blink and then you can throw a punch for more damage. Except half the time, it doesn’t do it. It does something else. I don’t even know what, but not the charge punch. Even late in the game, when I was trying to charge-up the punch, I’d have to press and hold it again maybe two or three times before it worked. It really felt like maxing-out the upgrades for it didn’t help or maybe even made it more prone to failure. I know video game fans don’t like to wait for anything, but Bananza would have been so much better with another year or so of polish. There are dozens of moments, if not hundreds, where the game feels like a rough prototype. And the controls aren’t even as rough as some of the mechanics. Take the muck, for example. See this?

That ooze stuff is supposed to be like slug slime. That hole only opened up after two or three hits that seemingly did nothing.

It’s called “muck” and the final proper, Mario Odyssey-like level is themed around a theme park that got covered in it. It’s kind of like Mario Sunshine, except instead of having an easy-to-refill hose to wash it off, you have to pick up piles of salt and throw it at the muck, which will clear a tiny amount of it. You have to do this one pile at a time. That would be bad enough if it worked, but it doesn’t. Even no-questions-asked direct hits don’t always work. I don’t know if it’s because there’s a microscopic piece of debris in the way. I think that’s what has to be happening. Maybe they shouldn’t have been as stingy as they are with how much muck a handful of salt can clear. For muck without an enemy in it, one pile doesn’t do a lot. On its face value, it slows the game to a crawl IF it worked 100% as intended, and would have been a bad idea on its own. But it’s like the Nintendo Switch 2 can’t handle the idea of this pile of salt you pick up disintegrating into thousands of particles that evaporate the muck. If ANYTHING is in front of it, the whole pile you threw is lost. This was especially problematic with fossils that were embedded in it. Even trying to throw around the fossil and carve it out would just leave the damn thing suspended in air. I can’t believe they included this whole mechanic in the game. (shrug) It doesn’t work! I don’t know how else to say it! It doesn’t f*cking work, at least good enough to be used as much as it is.

That’s assuming the salt even gets picked up. There were a few times where I was standing over it and somehow picked up dirt instead.

Enemies and bosses can be the same way, too. Larger ones are covered in layers of one of the materials that you can dig through (usually whichever material dominates the level layout) and if you throw something at them, it’s never consistent from one throw to the next how much shield you’ll peel off. Sometimes a direct hit goes right through them and removes their shield, and other times it might just make a tiny little dent in it. There were a lot of instances where their shields would be incredibly misshapen from all the crap I’d thrown at them, but they were still alive and attacking because the direct hits weren’t registering the full damage to the “suit” the skeleton underneath it was wearing. It’s a very janky, inconsistent game that, frankly, often makes the Switch 2 feel less powerful. Like, in 2025, it kind of feels like this texture-based gameplay should be further along than this.

This mini-game in the Canyon Layer where you have to kill 10 Squeeloids is the ideal way to grind the maximum two hundred or so bananas that you can purchase for 100 coins + 300 gold. I didn’t know there was a cap and spent a long time grinding on it, since you can just hit “restart” after everything is dead (any coins you don’t collect will be automatically given to you after the last one dies). Also, notice there’s two records in this screenshot? This is also the ideal room to get the records really fast. I went from missing 100 or so to having everything in about thirty minutes. It’s “Canyon Layer Banana #11: Exploding Pork Platoon.” It’s super easy, too. Sometimes you can clear the whole screen in a single punch that causes a very satisfying chain reaction Later in the game, you get a costume that increases coin drops by over 40%. You can get 25 or more coins per round, which takes under fifteen seconds to finish.

And then there’s the finale. After chasing around Void Kong and his minions the entire game, and Void Kong is NEVER a satisfactory boss to battle with, at least compared to the massive bosses that buffer him, something weird happens. The game has a proper, satisfying enough ending, and even made me laugh. Donkey Kong gets trapped in the purple crap, and it’s pretty funny looking. My brain played the sad version “Frosty the Snowman” and I was in tears, howling with laughter.

But then Pauline sings him free, and that’s a good, proper ending to the game. It’s how the game started. First Pauline was covered in the purple crap during the tutorial stage, then DK was, and now they know their power and their wish can come true. Void Kong is defeated, peace and returns to the layers, and we reached the Infinity Banana, which grants wishes to whoever gets to it. It’s the Triforce of bananas, apparently. Those last couple hours were pretty bad, but overall, Donkey Kong Bananza was a really fun game.

But then this happens.

Excuse me, what?

What the f*ck? Yeah, the “Root” exists but the thing you think was the root was King K. Rool’s tummy. This wasn’t set up at all leading up to this. What follows is another level that sucks and is nothing like the Mario Odyssey-like adventure I had loved for the first couple dozen hours of gameplay. Also, now the big enemies that once had skeletons inside them are housing the Kremlings inside of them instead.

And then you eventually find King K. Rool and the Banana of Destiny and you fight. Well, the best thing I can say about the King K. Rool battle is that it’s a much better fight than I expected. I think the last boss in Donkey Kong Country is a BORING boss fight (frankly none of the bosses in Donkey Kong Country 1 are fun) but this time, he’s a proper big boss, unlike the lame Void Kong battles. It’s one of those “knock the thing they shoot back at them” fights. And hey, I got one last reminder that the Gorilla Bananza’s charge punch, which is the only thing that will knock his cannonballs back at him, just f*cking refuses to activate half the time, so that was nice. One final reminder that this is the least polished major Nintendo game in decades.

But then you win that battle, get the Root, and the game IS over. Pauline wished to return to the surface. Donkey Kong wished for bananas. Awesome. The game is finally over! It sucks that they added one terrible level to an already sloggy ending sequence, but it’s finally done. You have the Banana Root or whatever and you make your wish, the Banana Root blows its load and launches you and her up to the surface. Roll the credits. I mean, surely they’re not going to do the fake end credits thing like in Donkey Kong Country and then have the game continue even further.

Oh no.

My God. Okay, so after an extended cut scene that is clearly the ending, somehow King K. Rool shoots up this banana geyser you’ve been riding to the surface and ANOTHER final battle happens. Each of these final battles has been little more than a reminder of how haphazard DKB’s gameplay is. In this battle, you have to pick up chunks of the geyser and throw them at King K. Rool. You hold down the “grab a chunk” button” to bring up cross hairs to aim, assuming it works. It often doesn’t, like every other mechanic in the game. Sometimes I just couldn’t get the aiming crosshairs to work. Also, this is a battle that goes for the “make you fall off the edge and use a balloon” knock-outs. Awesome.

Thankfully, after five or six hits, King K. Rool is defeated FOR GOOD THIS TIME and…… wait, after all that, HE gets the Banana Root and it instantly gives him his wish to take over New Donk City? MOTHER F*CKER are you kidding me? How come MY wishes don’t work as fast as his? I think this root is evil!

And there’s even a new title screen!

I wanted to cry. And it’s YET ANOTHER terrible stage. It’s short at least, but actually, it’s also the worst part of the entire game because it’s got fast-rising, instakill lava. No time to enjoy the level design. Run for it, or you will die and have to start over from the last barrel you reached. Also there’s thorns and life-sucking hot rocks everywhere and enemies are still going for that one-shot knockout. It’s just the worst. And then, after all that, it’s essentially the same “knock the cannonballs back at King K. Rool” battle as before, only he uses the Banana Root to make him look like this:

Goddammit, Mom! What did I tell you about giving your likeness to Nintendo?!

Right before I finished this boss, I had to pause the game to ask “what the hell am I doing?” Seriously! I hadn’t had even a tiny amount of fun with Donkey Kong Bananza in several hours at this point. Everything I’d loved about the level design and themes and exploration had long since ended, yet the game just refused to stop. I was happy fighting the main villains, but then suddenly Nintendo lost their nerve to not get drunk on nostalgia and switched out the new cast for the old cast. It’s Avengers: Doomsday a year ahead of schedule! So, back to the same old boss Donkey Kong has been fighting for decades, and they didn’t even give him good levels. One of the DLC packs is apparently based on Donkey Kong Country. Why wasn’t THAT the final level? If you’re going to bring back King K. Rool, put him in the Donkey Kong Country level! F*cking lame. At least this time, it was the real ending. You beat King K. Rool, Pauline says she’ll learn to keep the beat without DK beating his chest, and he returns back to his world. Yes! The credits! It’s finally over!

“Three months later…”

Nope. I’m good.

This was one of the most negative reviews I’ve done, but I promise that I had a ton of fun with this.

Okay, so I’m disappointed that Donkey Kong Bananza had a terrible end game. I figured it would be like Mario Odyssey where I’d be joyously knocking out the much harder post-game content, but nah, I’m okay with never playing this again. Hell, I didn’t even pick up the post-game banana. That was my middle finger to a game that forgot that it’s supposed to be fun. All my interest in the post-game content or the DLC was reduced to zilch by one terrible level after another to close out what had been an overall rough but amazing game. Again, by raw ratio of good-to-bad, Donkey Kong Bananza is an automatic YES! Maybe if DKB had been a heavily story-based game, like an RPG, bungling the finale like this could ruin the overall game. But it’s a platformer, and most of the levels were huge, heavy in content, and pretty damn fun. Even the ice level had some damn clever stuff in it.

I liked the whole “singing to undo the purple stuff” mechanics. If anything, I think it’s a little under utilized. There’s no boss that you beat by singing. You might activate a battle with Pauline’s tune, but her singing is set up to be magical. Why not have some enemies that you strip their shield by singing at them. Not that this game needs more actions mapped to one button.

There’s a million reviews out there that talk about the positive aspects of Donkey Kong Bananza, so I’ll sum up my experience by noting that, by my count, there’s eighteen levels in the standard game, assuming New Donk City counts as a level. After being pretty dang bored with opening tutorial stage (Ingot Isle), which has a bland mine setting and doesn’t feature the geocaching-like search for bananas and fossils that I would become addicted to, the next eleven levels, starting with “Lagoon Layer” and ending with “Racing Layer” were the Mario Odyssey sequel I’d waited nearly a decade for. Not all of those are full-sized levels, but it doesn’t matter. For all the camera sloppiness, clunky controls, and mechanical failures, I’d LOVED Donkey Kong Bananza and was making an effort to get every single banana and every single fossil, because it was bliss and possibly my favorite game of the last five years. Other than that sprawling Void Kong fight, it’s a damn fun, damn charming game for that eleven level stretch.

Okay, the racing Diddy and Dixie Kong thing was lame as f*ck. I didn’t like how it controlled at all. BUT, I also won the first and only race I needed to get the banana and open up the next stage. Unlike the ending, the racing segment didn’t overstay its welcome. I’m guessing the post-game content hid a ton of bananas

The game didn’t really start to get bad until after the racing level, the “Radiance Layer” which became the point where I was ready for the game to start wrapping-up. The snake mechanic was introduced and was horrible. There’s large segments where you have to pick up blocks made of light that quickly fade away. It just wasn’t a very fun level at all, at least until the home stretch. Then the “Groove Layer” takes away your ability to transform and the digging/exploration is largely removed. It’s a HORRIBLY boring level, and that was pretty much the end of Donkey Kong Bananza as a good game. The next level, the Feast Layer, is the salt-on-muck level that, frankly, I think is terrible. It’s tragic, too, because Feast Layer’s level design was outstanding. It could have been the best level in the game if the salt/muck mechanics worked, but they don’t. That wouldn’t matter if the level design didn’t rely so heavily on eliminating that muck, but it’s literally the main hook of the stage, and it’s so bad that I can’t believe this was released in this state. There’s nothing worse than picking up a clump of salt, aiming carefully, hitting the muck you were aiming for DEAD ON and having f*cking nothing happen. Thus the potential best stage in the game is rendered not even fun at all.

This is so clever. You have to destroy a block in one place to teleport it to another. Several levels later, out of nowhere, Bananza includes THREE mini-games where you have to create a pathway for falling ice cubes using this “hit a block in one place and it goes to another place” gameplay, and I loved it.

The two full-sized levels that followed were boring, and the New Donk City finale with the rising lava was even worse. In a game based around exploration and discovery, they close things out with a fast-moving instakill sprint. A completely nonsensical idea barely less silly than ending Legend of Zelda with a game of football. But, none of the bad stuff undoes everything that came before it. I paid $70 for this. Did I get $70 worth of entertainment? Easily. And I’m not even mad that the game didn’t end sooner. I’m not arrogant enough to think that most fans won’t disagree with me. They’ll probably LOVE the entire King K. Rool sequence, and I’m happy for them. Hell, I envy them, because my Donkey Kong Bananza experience went from being certain I still had weeks worth of post-game content I’d be eating up to deleting Bananza from my Switch 2 while my sister played “Grounds for Divorce” by Elbow.
Verdict: YES!

Froooosty the snowman……………. what’s wrong with me? It doesn’t even look like Frosty!

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