Donkey Kong Bananza’s Absent Enguarde the Swordfish Is Quietly Sidelining DKC2 Fans

The Swordfish That Sliced Through a Generation

Donkey Kong Bananza has arrived with enormous energy, but for a specific pocket of the fanbase, something is missing – and that something has a fin, a sharp bill, and a permanent residence in the hearts of anyone who grew up playing Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. Enguarde the Swordfish is nowhere to be found, and the silence around his absence is getting louder.

Enguarde Was Never Just a Ride

In the original DKC trilogy, animal companions served a clear mechanical purpose: get through a section faster, reach a hidden area, or survive an otherwise lethal obstacle. But Enguarde occupied a different emotional space than most of his counterparts. Swimming through the murky underwater levels of DKC2 with Enguarde felt less like using a tool and more like traveling with a partner. His bill-stab attack was satisfying in a way that most underwater combat in platformers simply is not, and Nintendo’s aquatic level design in that era was built specifically around making him feel powerful.

That’s a key distinction worth holding onto. Enguarde didn’t just help players survive the water – he made players want to be in the water. The Krem Quay and Gloomy Gulch underwater stretches are remembered fondly not because underwater levels are typically beloved (they rarely are), but because Enguarde recontextualized what it meant to navigate them. He turned a genre trope that most players tolerate into one they actively sought out.

His design also carried weight beyond pure function. The swordfish silhouette is immediately recognizable, and Nintendo leaned into that. Enguarde moved with purpose, the animations were clean for the hardware, and the sound design around his attacks gave every thrust of that bill a satisfying crunch. These are small details, but they accumulate. They’re why players still remember him three decades later.

That level of attachment doesn’t evaporate just because a new game arrives. If anything, anticipation sharpens it. When Donkey Kong Bananza was announced and previews began circulating, DKC2 fans quietly started watching for any sign of Enguarde in the footage. What they found was a lot of ground-based destruction, impressive terrain deformation, and a Donkey Kong with dramatically expanded physical capabilities – but no swordfish cutting through any water levels.

What Bananza Is Doing Instead – and Why It Stings

Donkey Kong Bananza is built around a fundamentally different design philosophy than the DKC games. Where those titles leaned into environmental variety and specialized animal companions to drive momentum, Bananza centers on DK’s own body as the primary tool. Punching through terrain, ripping layers off the environment, and burrowing through substrates are the verbs that define the game. It’s an internally consistent vision – the problem is that this vision leaves almost no structural room for Enguarde to exist within it.

That’s not an excuse fans are finding particularly satisfying. The counterargument circulating in DKC communities is straightforward: if the game has water sections – and early footage suggests it does – then Enguarde’s absence is a deliberate choice, not a technical necessity. Retro Studios spent years building Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and still found space for animal companions within a modern design framework. The idea that a 2025 DK title simply cannot accommodate Enguarde without breaking its own rules feels thin to anyone who watched Tropical Freeze’s Rambi sequences work perfectly alongside everything else that game was doing. DKC fans raising this same concern about Rambi the Rhino’s absence from Bananza have been making the same argument since the game’s earliest previews.

There’s also a question of what Enguarde’s absence communicates about water level design in Bananza specifically. Underwater sections in platformers are notoriously difficult to make engaging, and Enguarde’s historical value was precisely that he solved this problem elegantly. Without him – or any comparable companion – Bananza’s water areas will need to justify themselves through DK’s expanded moveset alone. If those sections land flat, the conversation about Enguarde will get considerably louder after launch.

Some players have pointed to Bananza’s overall companion structure as a possible explanation. The game appears to lean heavily on Pauline as DK’s primary companion, with the dynamic between the two driving both the story and certain gameplay mechanics. Introducing a roster of animal buddies alongside that relationship might have felt like overcrowding the experience. That’s a reasonable creative calculation, but it’s still a calculation that costs something. Every choice to streamline also means something doesn’t make the cut, and Enguarde is conspicuously on the wrong side of that ledger.

What makes this particularly frustrating for DKC2 fans is the asymmetry of the loss. DKC2 is consistently ranked as the strongest entry in the original trilogy, and Enguarde is central to that game’s identity in a way that Glimmer the Angler Fish – another DKC2 companion with her own absence generating its own quiet frustration – is not. Enguarde appeared across multiple DKC games, carried into spin-off material, and remained recognizable enough that Nintendo has referenced him in promotional contexts well into the modern era. He’s not an obscure deep cut. He’s part of the franchise’s visual vocabulary, and leaving him out of a mainline DK title isn’t a small omission.

The Weight of What Gets Left Behind

There’s a real tension between what longtime fans want from a Donkey Kong game and what Nintendo appears to be building with Bananza. The DKC trilogy and its successors established a set of expectations: varied biomes, animal companions with distinct mechanics, a balance of accessible surface design and hidden depth. Bananza seems to be trading some of that variety for a more unified, physics-driven identity. Whether that trade is worth it depends almost entirely on execution, and execution is something only the final product can prove.

Enguarde specifically represents something harder to replace than a mechanic. He represents the underwater level as a space that could be genuinely good – not just tolerable, not just visually interesting, but mechanically satisfying in a way that made players want to find every aquatic secret. If Bananza’s water sections deliver that feeling through different means, the conversation about Enguarde may soften. If they don’t, he becomes the symbol for everything the game chose not to be.