We are just ONE WEEK AWAY from the arrival of Donkey Kong Bananza, and many gamers are pumped for DK’s first solo game in quite a while. Plus, it’s his first truly open-world title, with destructible environments no less, so that adds to the fun further. However, the one thing, or should we say, character, that people want to talk about more than anything is Pauline. Her announcement for the game was nothing short of shocking, and people have been trying to get answers about how she came into the game for a while. Thankfully, answers have now arrived.
During a big interview with IGN, producer Kenta Motokura revealed that while Pauline was floated around as an idea for the game early on, her platform for coming into the title fully came because of the game’s music:
“I think the moment we actually realized we would go in that direction came about as a result of an artist who created some concept art of the zebra transformation. We saw that image and thought it was really fun, so we immediately prototyped it to try it out in the game. And when our composer saw that, they decided to create specific music just for that transformation.
And the music for it was so good, we thought we could expand on this and turn it into a song and maybe Pauline would be a good choice to sing that song. And so we then asked the composer to create songs for each of the transformations and I think that’s what really cemented Pauline’s place.”
As we now know, Pauline has a “special power” in Donkey Kong Bananza that allows DK to transform into various “Bananza Forms” after getting a blessing from the underground Elders. Pauline’s singing can also guide players to certain things, and is even a co-op feature that can be used to attack enemies!
She’ll have a lot to do when the game comes out on Nintendo Switch 2 next week!
