Donkey Kong Bananza Taps Veteran Developers as Director and Producer

Donkey Kong Bananza, the highly anticipated first-party game headed exclusively to the Nintendo Switch 2, is being headed up by the same development team that gave Nintendo fans Super Mario Odyssey in 2017, and its director and producer have now been revealed. With just a week left until the launch of Donkey Kong Bananza, Nintendo veteran Kenta Motokura has been identified as its producer with Kazuya Takahashi serving as director.

The Nintendo Switch 2 was released on June 5, and it’s proving to be incredibly popular, setting the pace for a potentially record-breaking run of console sales that could see it surpass its predecessor relatively quickly. But while the console itself is drawing a lot of attention, the Switch 2 launch game lineup left a lot to be desired among many fans, with Mario Kart World serving as the only entry from an established Nintendo-owned franchise.

That desert of Switch 2 exclusives will become a little less dry with the release of Donkey Kong Bananza on July 17, 2025, and a newly published interview with IGN hs revealed that Motokura, the director of Super Mario Odyssey, is serving as the upcoming game’s producer. A 25-year veteran of Nintendo, Motokura first worked on Pokemon Stadium 2 as a 2DCG designer and has also played a part in the development of classic games like Pikmin, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, and Big Brain Academy. But it’s the Mario franchise that takes up the bulk of his resume, as he’s served as director of Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Odyssey, producer of Super Mario 3D All-Stars, and design director of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Super Mario 3D Land, in addition to various development roles on other games.

Donkey Kong Bananza’s Team Has a Wealth of Mario-Releated Experience

Takahashi, by comparison, is much newer to Nintendo, but he has worked there for five years and brings with him a lot of experience in designing open-world games. That sounds like it will be beneficial to Donkey Kong Bananza’s design, as Takahashi noted that the openness of its levels and their fully destructible environments will provide a lot of opportunities for making new discoveries. “And on one level, similar to Super Mario Odyssey, each level has to be fun just if you’re playing through it the normal way without doing a lot of destruction,” he noted during the interview.

With similar development teams, fans may expect to see some of the same style of familiar gameplay from Super Mario Odyssey in Donkey Kong Bananza. Motokura confirmed that there are some similarities between the two games, such as their use of voxel-based visuals, except the newer game utilizes them to a much greater degree. The biggest difference players should expect, though, is the selection of abilities in Donkey Kong Bananza, which Motokura described as being designed to fit Donkey Kong’s physical strength and arm reach.