Donkey Kong Bananza
I'm trying very hard to be fair to Bananza - my distaste for Nintendo's open-world designs that have cropped up in the Switch era is not a secret, and while DK is not really an open world game, it is absolutely pulling from a similar playbook. On the surface, this is a sequel to Mario Odyssey (from the same dev team, no less) and you can play it like it that to some extent, but the real meat and potatoes of the game is its terrain destruction. See a banana gem being blocked by an iron gate? Just punch a hole in the rock and make a little tunnel around it. Sure, you could follow the NPC leading you to a secret cave, but you're just as likely to find it by accident by digging down and breaking through the ceiling. And I broadly think this is a good thing! It's a similar principle to there being a billion moons lying around in Odyssey: it doesn't matter how you get to the banana gems, as long as you eventually do. There's just a lot less of a coherent reward structure to work with in Bananza.
Unlike Odyssey, the game never gates you based on the number of bananas you've collected - you can always progress by following the plot marker. Instead, every five bananas that you collect gives DK a skill point, which can be spent to upgrade his various attributes. And let's not mince words: this system sucks. For one, it's mostly pointless - outside of increasing punch strength and getting extra health, the upgrades on offer are either things that you should have been able to do from the start (Surf Surf being the primary offender) or incremental upgrades on your existing abilities. While they are admittedly larger than your typical skill tree upgrades - most of them are 30-40% increases rather than the 5-10% that you might expect - they're still just things like "Bananzas last longer" or "Surf Turf terrain degrades slower," all of which could have been upgrades acquired in-game with minimal changes. Once you max out the important abilities (which for me was about 2/3 of the way through the game), bananas cease to have any value at all - at best, they get you a small increase to an ability that you weren't really using anyway, and at worst they serve no purpose whatsoever - collectables for the sake of being collected.
The other major mechanic is the titular Bananzas - DK can transform into a variety of animals with some help from Pauline, each offering a twist to the standard punch-and-jump gameplay. Kong Bananza is strong and can punch through concrete (which otherwise needs to be destroyed with explosives), Ostrich Bananza can glide through the air, Snake Bananza can charge up a super jump, etc. If these sound exactly like the Animal Buddies of old...well, they basically are. You have to charge up a meter before you can transform, but all that requires is collecting gold, and there's so much of the stuff lying around that I question why Melon Juice (the item that lets you transform for free) even exists. It doesn't help that a couple of them are head and shoulders above the others - unless a situation specifically calls for one, there's basically no reason to use anything other than the Ostrich and Elephant Bananzas. Flight and gliding is an absurdly powerful combination in a game with otherwise minimal jumping capacity, and the Elephant can use his trunk to suck in a bunch of terrain at once and turn it into throwable objects - great for clearing a room of dangerous terrain very quickly.
You may have noticed that I have given very little attention to the platforming in Bananza, and that's because the game really doesn't either. This isn't to say it has no platforming, some of the endgame levels are okay and it has a number of bonus levels that are both interesting challenges and blatant callbacks to the 2D DKC games. But by and large, this is a game about digging and going down rather than up, and DK's mechanics are in line with this directive. That doesn't mean you can't do some cool stuff - DK inherits Link's ability to climb anything (and he has no stamina bar for good measure), and there is absolutely some sick movement tech you can do by chaining rolls together and making good use of Surf Turf. But on the whole? This is a game that's wide and deep, rather than tall. And this kinda sucks! Once again, I will freely admit that this is a bit of "What I wanted the game to be" leaking in, but I would have been perfectly happy with "DK64 but with better levels and Mario Odyssey's movement tech," and that's just not something the game is interested in being.
As for the plot...well, this game sure has one. DK has found himself on a mining island for...some reason, to try and collect Banandium Gems. Shortly thereafter, he meets a talking rock (which turns out to be Pauline) and is tasked with going to the planet's core to get his and Pauline's wish granted. Along the way, they'll be opposed by Void Kong Mining Co, led by Void Kong himself and his two subordinates whose names I have already forgotten. All of them are terrible villains, and while I have conflicting thoughts about where the story goes at the end, I was happy to see them take their leave from the stage. To the game's credit, the finale sequence is very good, and basically everything from the end of Layer 1500 on kicks ass, but the middle of the game sags hard. My immediate reaction was that you could cut the entire second half of the game without losing anything of value, but it's probably more accurate to say the middle third is the weak link. The game generally alternates between small "break" levels and larger "real" levels (with 3-4 sublevels of content), but the second half is pretty rough - I personally really liked the Tropics Layer, but aside from the Storms Layer, you could cut pretty much everything between layers 800 and 1300 and not miss anything important.
The game also puts a really big emphasis on music - Pauline's entire thing is that she wants to sing, and each of the Bananza transformations come with their own background song. Despite this, the background music in the world is extremely forgettable, and you'll never hear said Bananza music aside from when you're transformed (which is on a timer outside of a handful of specific instances), which generally means you hear the first 5-10 seconds of each song, and that's about it. This isn't really a pro or a con, per se, it's just...weird? Certainly a decision that someone made at Nintendo.
All in all, I think the game is...fine? Like, it's a great game in an "objective" sense - it looks good, runs well, and accomplishes what it set it out to do. I don't particularly like what it's trying to do, and it most reminds me of Echoes of Wisdom. That game was an attempt to hammer the square peg of "BotW-style Freedom" into the round hole of "Capital D dungeons" and Bananza feels like it's trying to do the same thing - by being built off the bones of Mario Odyssey, it gives us all the tech and movement options of a platformer, but then asks us to dig holes in the ground instead. And at the end of the day, I don't care how competently designed the hole digging is, or how smooth the digging controls are; I wanted an actual platformer.