While the rest of us mere mortal Nintendo fans have been busy poring over trailers for upcoming Switch 2 games, enjoying the nice graphics and fancy new characters, some folk have been taking things a little more seriously.
Yes, as it turns out, if any of us were actually paying attention, we’d have noticed that the Donkey Kong Bananza trailers released thus far contain a secret language — just like that found in Tears of the Kingdom — which can be decoded to reveal messages in-game.
Going by the clips of the secret code that YouTuber 2Chrispy provides in his very informative video last week, (thanks Gamesradar), he has some seriously sharp observation skills. How on earth he’s seen these is beyond us, really, but they are there!
In the video (below, which is well worth a watch for a very thorough and entertaining explanation), 2Chrispy tells us how he accidentally noticed his first glimpse of the ape lingo in one scene. He then expanded out to a painfully slow search of all available gameplay and cutscenes, gathering any symbols he could find. He even had to jump to the Nintendo Today! app to find a few more symbols scattered about. Top work.
Then, a breakthrough, when he discovered that an in-game item had the official name ‘Chip Exchange.’ From this he was able to work out which banana letter was an ‘E’ and from there began to slowly break things down until he’s reached the point that only five letters are unaccounted for in the “Bananabet.”
It’s quite the feat, having had to first come up with a list of words that may or may not have been related to the game. It was an endeavour that so easily could have fallen apart at the start, but 2Chrispy stuck at it and has gifted us with the key to a whole new language.
And what do the messages in-game say? Is there anything of great import to be discussed? Well, you’ll need to watch the video, or figure it out for yourself in July (it’s so close!).
Are you looking forward to Donkey Kong Bananza? Do you think you would, in a million years, ever have deciphered its hidden language? Let us know in the comments!