Donkey Kong Bananza’s Emerald Rush is one of Nintendo’s best and most underrated DLCs
Posted on 4 weeks ago by Ethan Gnau in Features, Switch 2 | 0 comments
In this day and age, there are plenty of controversies surrounding video games – and it feels like there’s a new Nintendo-adjacent controversy every other day. To be fair, though, many of those controversies are valid – some recent ones that come to mind are Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition’s poor upscaling on Nintendo Switch 2 and the sky-high prices for amiibo.
One Nintendo controversy that wasn’t justified in my opinion, however, was Donkey Kong Bananza’s DLC. When I reviewed Emerald Rush a few months ago, I had played the new mode for somewhere around 15 hours and wasn’t quite hooked. Nearly six months later, however, and that’s changed – I find myself going back to Donkey Kong Bananza every month or so to play the new in-game events. Super Mario Odyssey had a somewhat similar system with Luigi’s Balloon World, but that doesn’t compare to Emerald Rush at all – I remember a ton of balloons in Luigi’s Balloon World being placed out-of-bounds, so the mode wound up more like a showcase of game knowledge (including technical strategies and especially glitches). Emerald Rush, however, is where the bulk of Donkey Kong Bananza’s challenge lies. And it’s a very rare case of a 3D platformer that’s kept me coming back six months later without replaying the story from the beginning.
