After completing the main game of Donkey Kong Bananza, I couldn't resist to also get the DLC expansion, even though I had my reservations about it. And while my first impression wasn't a good one, I slowly grew to like what's effectively a whole new game within the game.
DK Island & Emerald Rush adds exactly what the name implies: you get DK Island as a new layer, which serves as a home for the new Emerald Rush mode. And this mode really turns everything on its head. Read more to find out more...
Nothing New on the Surface
First of all, you should not buy this in the expectation that this will add more content to the main game. It really doesn't. While there is an additional layer with DK Island, it primarily serves as a scene where you can take photos with the other Kongs. Rambi lets you move them to different locations on the island, and that's really it...
Well, you can also change the background music via some DJ turn tables and get access to all the different bonus stages. This is making it very easy to collect lots of gold here, should you still be in need of some. However, there are no Banandium Gems or any fossils for you to find, even though there technically are spots for them on the island – but they only appear during Emerald Rush.
Instead, there is a new collectible with the statues, which display all characters and monsters from the game all over the island. You can pick them up, use them to smash stuff or to surf around, or simply place them elsewhere.
These statues are purchased from Squawks in exchange of Banandium Chips. This may sound bad at first, because it was already hard enough to collect enough chips for everything in the base game, and now this is asking even more of you. But you can earn lots of them by playing Emerald Rush, so this goes hand in hand with the new mode. Playing it will eliminate the need to grind for them, where you can also get a total of 12,000 Banandium Chips from the special events, which is more than enough. But more on that later.
Emerald is the new Gold
There is one other inhabitant waiting for you at DK Island, near the wreckage of the Gangplank Galleon. It's Void Kong, who is asking Donkey Kong to work for him. This is where you can start the Emerald Rush mode, which tasks you to collect as much emerald as possible on a timer. Emerald will be replacing all the gold during this mode, but also the Banandium Gems and Chips, as well as the fossils have been swapped with green equivalents.
The important part here is that you will always start from scratch. Other than your outfits, there is nothing from the base game that you are allowed to take into this mode. You will be back to three hearts and all of your skills are locked again. In the higher difficulties you won't even have your Bananzas. And instead of teleporting around freely, you will only have a limited amount of Warp Barrels, which replenishes after each round.
Considering that this mode isn't available until the postgame, this feels like a slap in the face and very much crippling at first. You've worked hard to unlock all those skills and now you're back to the beginning. The postgame even has a series of difficult challenges, which let you unlock special golden skills, only for them to be pretty much useless afterwards, because there is nothing left to do in the game. Now, this would have been perfect for Emerald Rush, but it all gets stripped away.
Instead, this game mode basically acts as a "roguelike", where each time you play it you will get skills and perks at random. Banandium Gems will contain Bananzas and skills, which is also shown on the map for where to find them, but this shifts after a number of rounds, so not all bananas offer something from the start. You can also purchase any missing skills via the green Banandium Chips, but this costs quite a lot and eventually you will only go for the essential things, like surfing on water or special Bananza abilities.
And what matters the most are the perks. You will get these primarily from fossils, but also from any active Banandium Gems and from clearing Void Goals. The latter will task you with defeating enemies or smashing Emerald Lumps, which both spawn in designated locations. Or they might ask you to do something trivial, like smashing a certain amount of material, visiting certain characters, surf turfing for a given distance, and so on.
Whenever you obtain new perks, you will be offered a choice between three different ones. This interrupts the game, which will feel very strange at first, because this happens a lot. Like all the time. It completely kills the flow that you normally have in Donkey Kong Bananza, because you're constantly asked to make these choices.
But it's these choices that make Emerald Rush so interesting. This mode is really about picking the right perks and pursuing a strategy based on them. Most of the perks revolve around adding multipliers to the amount of emerald ore you receive from specific actions, e.g. defeating a certain type of enemy, defeating enemies in a certain way, opening treasure chests, or collecting lots of chips. There is a lot to this and not everything will be intuitive at first, but once you get the hang of it, this can become really addicting. With the right multipliers in place you can receive tens of thousands of emerald from killing a single enemy, easily bringing you into the millions. And that's when this mode really clicks.
You can also re-roll perks at the cost of some emerald (which increases each time), and later even block perks from appearing at all. And this will help you to go for a strategy once you've made up your mind, so it's more likely that you will get the perks that you need for it..
There is even some permanent progression to be made. After each game, you will receive points, which let you unlock additional perks, new outfits, and more layers to play on. Up to eleven layers can be chosen, which includes DK Island, serving as a tutorial stage for Emerald Rush.
In addition, there are seven different difficulties to clear for each layer. The harder the difficulty, the less you will have in the beginning and the more emerald you are tasked to collect, while there are also more rounds to survive. In each round, lasting 99 seconds, you will have to meet a quota, which rises every time. The hardest difficulties last a total of fifteen rounds, but this also allows you to really build up on skills and perks, before you go into the grind.
As for the outfits, there are some variants of the ones could get in the main game, but also some new ones, which will increase the odds of rarer perks. You will be primarily using those in Emerald Rush, but some of the base game outfits can still be very good, like the Soggy Cravat on any layer with lava.
But otherwise there isn't really much new content here. Emerald Rush makes clever use of everything that is in the base game to create its own game within the game. Here it's questionable whether this is truly worth the price tag of 20 bucks, but if you enjoy this mode, it can easily double your play time with Donkey Kong Bananza in order to clear all layers in all difficulties and to clear all the events... Actually, it's even a bit much. They could have reduced the amount of difficulties down to five, since the difference between some of them is rather negligible.
Emerald Rush Events
Probably the biggest complaints about the DLC came from the limited-time events. Not only will you have to pay extra for this DLC, it also introduced a total of twelve special events, where each of them ran for a week. If you can reach one million emerald in one game, you will receive a thousand Banandium Chips and two exclusive statues per event. These statues feature the five Bananza transformations, as well as a series of characters from other Donkey Kong games, like Enguarde, Funky Kong, or the Tikis.
Well... Nintendo has eased the pain by now. Starting this month, these events will get infinitely repeated and also last an entire month each, so you will still have all the opportunities in the world to eventually finish them and collect all the statues. That's already much better, but the events are now tied to your system's clock (unlike before), so you can basically activate whatever event you still need at any time.
And the interesting thing about these events is that they remove the random factors. Each event will present you with fixed locations for Bananzas and skills, a fixed list of Void Goals, and a fixed set of perks. There is a clear intend behind each of them. "Chip Fever", for example, which is the first event and the one that's currently available, revolves all around perks that let you earn emerald via chips and increase your chip total.
Even if you fail, you can try again and also use your knowledge from your previous attempts to your advantage, where you can plot an efficient path to go for exactly the right skills and perks. It's a lot of fun and offers a whole other way of playing Emerald Rush, where it's very good that these events are now seeing repeats, because otherwise an important part of the DLC would be missing.
By the way, the highest score you can reach is 9,999,999. If you want to go crazy, you can try to max out this score in all of the events and on all of the layers in the normal Emerald Rush mode, making this last even longer.
Conclusion
Even if you've greatly enjoyed Donkey Kong Bananza, it's not a given that you will also like Emerald Rush. It is effectively a different game mode with roguelike mechanics, which has you hunting for highscores, built on top of the gameplay and the worlds of Bananza. Other than DK Island, it is offering very little new content. What it's offering instead is a whole new way of playing the game, which can be addicting to some people, but off-putting to others.
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