Here’s How To Make Donkey Kong Bananza’s Jump Feel Normal

Donkey Kong Bananza is now available, and it appears to be a hit for the Nintendo Switch 2. But longtime fans of other Nintendo platformers like Mario Odyssey may have noticed that something feels … a little off? Out of place? You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something is wrong when you put your fingers on it. It’s the jump button.

For DK Bananza, the jump button has been uncharacteristically mapped to the A button by default on the Switch 2, as opposed to the more traditional B button. This is mainly so that the face buttons map to the directions DK punches: X button for upward, Y button for forward, B button for downward. It makes enough sense. But going back to the days of the Super Nintendo, the jump button has almost always been on the bottom of the “diamond” shape of face buttons. So if you just want jumping to feel normal again, there is a way to do that.

From the start menu, go to the fourth menu in a row–Options, with a gear icon–and scroll down to the “DK’s Action Buttons” submenu. There you have the option to switch the B/A functions from “Punch downward / Jump” to “Jump / Punch downward.” It’s not full button mapping but it shows Nintendo recognized that some players might feel more at home with the traditional jump button placement. The downside is that the punch directions no longer correspond to their placements on the face buttons.

This has inspired something of a debate around the GameSpot offices, with some swearing by the default control scheme and others finding it too strange to get used to. Personal tastes will vary, so we won’t tell you how to live your life. As the reviewer, I spent almost 20 hours with the default control scheme and it feels perfectly natural to me, but others say they changed the control scheme early and got used to not having the face buttons mapped directly to your punch direction.

No matter how you play it, DK Bananza is a raucous good time. “As part of the launch lineup for the Switch 2, this nicely fills the gap for one of Nintendo’s signature substantial single-player adventures,” I wrote in GameSpot’s Donkey Kong Bananza review. “But more importantly, it’s an excellent game in its own right, and deserves to be mentioned alongside games like Mario Odyssey as among Nintendo’s best recent work.”