Opinion: We Really Don’t Need A Donkey Kong Timeline

From the moment Nintendo revealed Pauline’s presence in Donkey Kong Bananza, I knew one thing for certain: I was going to be writing a feature on the DK timeline in the next two months.

Look, you know I love Bananza. DK and Pauline have such a wholesome little relationship, I adored hearing the same senile rant from Cranky on each and every layer, and the little nods to the great ape’s previous endeavours were perfectly balanced. It felt like a wall-to-wall celebration of all things DK while also serving as an introduction to the modern age of 3D platforming for one of Nintendo’s oldest characters.

And then the ending happened. It’s a wonderful set piece that I played with the biggest, cheesiest smile on my face, but it, along with the mere presence of a 13-year-old Pauline, throws up a lot of questions about where Bananza sits in the wider canon, and let’s be honest here, DK doesn’t need that.

If you’ve stayed with me this far and you think there’s a chance I’ll make it through the next 800 words without spoiling the end of Donkey Kong Bananza, you are very much mistaken. I’ll be talking about the final sequence of Donkey Kong Bananza in depth. Heck, there might even be some screenshots thrown in for good measure.

If you don’t want that spoiling (and I’d really recommend seeing it fresh for yourself — it’s awesome), then wrap up your reading here and only scroll past the following image when you’ve seen everything for yourself, as there are major spoilers below.

Where was I? Ah yes, the ending!

The final stage of Donkey Kong Bananza finally sees DK and Pauline get back to the latter’s home turf on the surface, which is… New Donk City! Yep, the very one seen in Super Mario Odyssey. There’s some more platforming and a boss fight (I’ve broken it all down in an Ending Explained guide, if you need reminding of the deets), but the tl;dr of it is that NDC returns to its rot-free glory, DK returns to the mines — like Steve, he yearns for them — and Pauline gets to live out her dreams of singing in front of the whole city. Hmm.

That last note got under my skin when I first played through the grand finale, and I haven’t been able to shake it in the weeks since. This is Pauline. This is New Donk City. This is singing. Nintendo could have played the riff from ‘Jump Up, Superstar!’ over the entire sequence, and it wouldn’t have made it any more obvious that the game is going, “Look, it’s just like that 2017 3D Mario game!! See??”

All these threads come together in a great big Odyssey-shaped signpost, actively encouraging us all to think about the prized plumber’s previous platforming exploits and start to question where Bananza fits in around it.

And think about it I did. I was so ready for Bananza to end with Pauline saying something like, “You know what my real dream is, DK? To be mayor of this great city!,” but it doesn’t. Instead, it ends with an image of a very-much-still-13-years-old Pauline singing on the roof of City Hall (after the post-credits missions, that is), and all of those references to her grandma — which she’s been banging on about throughout the game, let’s not forget — ringing in your ears.

This isn’t the Odyssey prequel that I thought it would be, but instead a sequel. Another child in the Pauline family tree (also called ‘Pauline’, confusingly), learning to love the giant ape that had caused so much drama for her ancestors. Aw.

No! Not “Aw“! This is exactly why I started this piece in the first place. I have put too much thought and energy into a timeline that, let’s admit it, is a load of rubbish.

Don’t even get me started on Cranky Kong. We all know that this elderly ape is the DK from the original arcade machine (it’s even referenced in one of his Bananza speeches), so what’s he doing still up and about all these years later? And what about his son, Donkey Kong Jr? Are we just going to assume that vest-wearing chimp faded away as he headed back to his home planet?

Don’t get me wrong, I can get behind a BS timeline. I know the Zelda one more than most and actually enjoy slotting things into it. But at least Hyrule Historia is based loosely (and I mean loosely) on the games’ narrative events and not solely on “how old is this kid now, do you reckon?”

A Donkey Kong timeline — or, casting the net even wider in this instance, a Mario timeline — is a fool’s errand right from the jump because there’s almost no narrative to hang things on. Nobody is saying “Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze has to come after DK: King of Swing because you can see DK still riding the high of the Jungle Jam Festival”.

And I really want to hammer this home, I love Donkey Kong Bananza, I just don’t think that good things necessarily need to be strung up to other good things. I should be relishing in the glow of post-Bananza joy, but instead I’m getting myself wound up over lore that didn’t exist until a month ago.

If we’re going to keep pretending that the narrative events of DK or Mario matter to the wider pantheon of Nintendo games, at least give us a nicely bound lore book to add to the coffee table. The DK Dictionary? Kong Kompilation? Gorilla Glossary?… I’ll work on it.

What do you make of DKB’s finale and how it ties into the wider Mario pantheon? Do you want to see more of this shared world-building, or are the games best left as stand-alones? Let us know in the comments.