Donkey Kong Bananza has been out for a week now, and speedrunners are already figuring out incredibly fast ways to beat the game in as little as an hour and a half. While they’re sure to find ways to cut that time down even more in the coming weeks and months, one really interesting trick has been discovered with a strange side effect: it skips getting Pauline as DK’s companion.
Warning! Spoilers for the ending of Donkey Kong Bananza’s Lagoon Layer follow. Read on at your own risk!
In a normal playthrough, Pauline bursts out of Odd Rock near the end of the Lagoon Layer when she and DK play music together and activate DK’s Kong Bananza transformation. It’s a critical story moment both in that it actually introduces Pauline into the story proper, but also because the cutscene is required to get Kong Elder to open the door to the next layer.
However, speedrunners have found a trick that lets them skip the whole thing. The drop to the next layer is hidden in a building that DK can actually clip into under the right circumstances. This video shows the trick in action, but it essentially involves hanging from a pipe close to a barred window into the building, and rapidly entering and exiting Photo Mode to get DK to clip through the bars and into the room with the hole. This works regardless of whether DK has Pauline or not, which means DK and Odd Rock can journey to the next layer together without progressing the story.
Unfortunately for Odd Rock lovers out there, you can’t actually progress the game much farther this way. The next sublayer is a boss fight arena, and while you can collect a few Banandium Gems in there with Odd Rock’s support, the boss won’t actually spawn if you don’t have Pauline with you. Weirdly, you will hear a bit of Pauline’s (not Odd Rock’s) dialogue as you approach the arena, but with no boss to fight there’s also no way to manifest the big hole in the ground that leads to the next main layer. So you’re soft locked until you go back and properly get Pauline.
That said, knowing how fast speedrunners work at breaking these things, I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear about them solving this new problem sometime soon and doing something that results in some crazy no-Pauline tricks, or maybe even ways to skip Odd Rock entirely. After all, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom runners figured out how to play as Link instead of Zelda. Video games are just wacky like that sometimes.
Donkey Kong Bananza is out now, and we love it, having given the game a 10/10 in our review. As our reviewer said, “Donkey Kong Bananza is a truly groundbreaking 3D platformer, with satisfying movement, powerful abilities, impressive destructible environments, and clever challenges that all come together in complete harmony to create Nintendo’s first Switch 2 masterpiece.”
If you, like us, can’t get enough of Bananza, we have plenty of walkthroughs to aid your journey underground, including Banandium Gem locations, starter tips and tricks, and a full walkthrough.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
