There’s a lot of fun to be had in smashing the place to tiny little voxel pieces in Donkey Kong Bananza, it’s easily its biggest draw. People have been into the sweet catharsis of wanton destruction since way back before there were even people. Probably.
However, the one thing that’s caught my attention most whilst playing thus far – and I must admit, I’m only around about halfway through the campaign at this point – is the game’s absolutely beautiful world map design. I love it.
Now, it doesn’t have the same level of interactivity and usefulness as some other games do, and sometimes it gets lost when you’ve dug through miles of terrain, but it’s not about that. Donkey Kong Bananza’s map’s strength lies in how it gives you the actual level you are on, fully realised as adorable 3D miniature, like a diorama that you can swirl around and see exactly what is in front, to the side, above, below and beyond you.
When you press the map button, the camera zips you up and out of the level to look down upon the earth like some sort of hairy, banana-addled God. What’s more, it tallies all of your actions and activities and replicates all the damage you’ve done across the layer. It’s a magic, real-time tracker kind of thing, and it’s got me dazzled.
There’s almost a game within a game here where you can set points of interest or places you want to get to just for fun, rather than for the sake of progression, and then work through the area both in-game and through the map, jumping seamlessly too and fro, in order to do some satisfying messing around and discovering. I love how it orientates you, too. Jump into this map and direct yourself towards something, then back out and DK is pointed where you are headed.
It also allows you to do fun things with the landscape. I mean, who knows what I could sculpt that great big mountain in the distance into if I really think about it? And when I’ve decided, I can go into the map to get a bird’s eye view on the progress of my mountain that’s shaped like Wario’s butt. Woah! Wait a minute…. Where did that come from?
The more intricate the level, the more impressed I am. I’ve spent far too much time spinning these maps around and resetting the terrain so it’s all fresh and new and ready to destroy all over again. And, for a game that’s got so much going on elsewhere, this ingenious little map really has become the cherry on top for me.
Of course Nintendo is no stranger to the World Of Very Good World Maps™. In fact, one of my earliest and most lasting memories of gaming is how blown away I was by The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past‘s map back in the days when I’d play my full-colour games on a barely working black and white TV. Yes, I am a dinosaur. And a bald one, to boot.
The parallaxing wonder that was A Link to the Past’s map though, my goodness. And you got a paper copy of it in the box as well. Halcyon days. It was the first time I’d seen a map and thought of it as an organic and useful part of a game as a whole. It wasn’t some stuffy menu that was separated off; it put you above the world, not removed temporarily to the back rooms, still in-game, just from a different perspective. It’s amazing how much this adds to the escapism of an adventure. It certainly had 13 year old me more invested in a game than I’d ever been before.
Zelda has continued to innovate and impress in the cartography department, too. Both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom give us these enormously complex maps that show you where you need to go and where you’ve just been. They also retain the magic of A Link to the Past’s effort by teasing you ahead of time, showing you places that you want to go, intriguing things you want to see or mess with. These maps do their jobs by being a guiding companion, but they also keep you hooked by enhancing the game’s ability to embed you in its world.
Then we’ve got Super Metroid, another game that absolutely floored me with its map. Previously I’d found Metroid a little tortuous — sometimes you blame yourself in tough situations, saying you’re just not good enough or patient enough to play that type of game. But it was the map’s fault! Blame the game, give yourself a mental health break. As soon as you popped in Super Metroid’s cartridge, with its incredibly useful maze of a map, everything clicked into place. Ah yes, this is why people like Metroid and why there are so many Metroidvanias out there. Thanks maps!
Metroid Dread carries on in the same glorious vein; its map is another ludicrously labyrinthian affair, but your path and location remain crystal clear an all times. And the Prime Trilogy map, well, it’s just more of that good gravy. Not as fundamentally game-changing as its predecessors, perhaps, but certainly showing that the love is still there, and now lifted into three dimensions. It makes me sick to think about how complicated creating this stuff must be, which is a sure sign that it’s a good thing.
Super Mario World is another example of a map I was in love with as a kid. Again, not the most useful, overall, but it doesn’t need to be. It looks amazing, it’s interactive as you move across the paths that link all the levels together, and it keeps you in the world, in that not-real-life headspace, which is where I belong.
And just like all the other games mentioned, it teases you in the same ways. You immediately need to know where all those little caves go, what that suspicious patch is over there, etc. And all of this is to speak nothing on how the map designs add to, or even speak to, the style, the vibe, and the architecture of the worlds that they’re a part of. They fit, they enhance and they improve.
So, whilst smashing the place to a billion beautiful pieces in Bananza, zipping in and out of its map, twirling and zooming, plotting and planning, I’ve been reminded in a wonderfully nostalgic burst of all this lovely stuff. It’s nice to see that, as much as the technology may change and gamers might want different things from the experiences they buy into, Nintendo has stuck to giving us some of the best maps in the industry.
When you think about all these maps, especially with how complex the latest Zelda ones have been, it feels like a bit of a full circle moment that, in DK’s latest outing; you get to tear the map apart until there’s nothing but the skeleton of a world remaining.
Got any favourite Nintendo game maps or map memories? Let us know!
