The Pokémon franchise lost me at some point. The games felt repetitive and I wasn’t interested in the grind anymore. That’s why I didn’t care about Pokopia when it was announced. Why would I want to play a knock-off Animal Crossing?

This quickly changed when the first reviews came out and were over-the-moon positive. And what can I say? I finished the main story yesterday and had a blast. I can’t remember the last time a video game had me in its grips like that.

I can’t wait to jump back in and start really working on my towns and making everything pretty.

Not to be contrarian, but I don’t think Donkey Kong Bananza, Nintendo’s second Switch 2 exclusive, is very fun. The first level intrigued me. The sheer chaos of punching and breaking everything had me spending a couple of hours in a vortex of dopamine hits.

This got old very quickly, though. It’s the same thing in every level of the game: run around, smash stuff, collect gold, run around some more, repeat.

I haven’t finished it yet, but I’d say I’m more than halfway through the game, and it hasn’t surprised me as often as I expected based on the very positive reviews floating around. It hasn’t surprised me at all, to be honest, come to think of it. I watched the Nintendo Direct presentation showing what the game is all about, and that seems to have been it.

Not even the art style impresses me much. Coming off my second playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom, Donkey Kong Bananza only looks nice. Nothing made me stop and take in the vistas. Not to mention the character design, which feels a bit like something a 13-year-old in the 90s would have liked.

The story is basic and can be understood without reading anything, and its difficulty is easy enough to just run from quest marker to quest marker without having trouble progressing.

Sorry, DK, this Bananza is just a tad too boring for my taste.