The Swordfish That Keeps Not Showing Up
Donkey Kong Bananza has arrived with big promises – a return to form for the franchise, a new 3D playground for DK, and a roster of animal buddies designed to make the adventure feel alive. But for a specific, vocal segment of the fanbase, one absence is louder than any of the new additions. Enguarde the Swordfish, the beloved underwater companion from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, is nowhere in Bananza’s lineup – and DKC2 loyalists are making sure nobody forgets it.
This is not a casual complaint. Enguarde carries genuine emotional weight for the players who grew up navigating the murky, terrifying underwater levels of DKC2, where the swordfish was not just helpful but often essential. His absence in Bananza isn’t simply a missing feature – for many fans, it reads as a statement about which parts of the DK legacy Nintendo considers worth honoring right now.
What Enguarde Actually Meant in DKC2
Enguarde debuted in the original Donkey Kong Country, but his role in DKC2 is where the character truly landed. The sequel leaned into underwater level design far more aggressively than its predecessor, and Enguarde was the answer to those sections’ difficulty. He moved fast, attacked with precision, and made the player feel in control of an environment that otherwise punished every mistake. That functional clarity is part of why he stuck with people.
There’s also the visual memory of him. The swordfish design is clean and confident – a blue, streamlined body with that unmistakable pointed bill. He didn’t have Rambi’s brute force or Squawks’s utility, but underwater he was untouchable. Players who spent hours inside Kremlantis and the ship-wreck levels of Gangplank Galleon built a specific attachment to him that Bananza, by not including him at all, has done nothing to acknowledge or address.
The DKC2 fanbase is smaller than the general DK audience, but it’s deeply committed. The game regularly appears in discussions about the best platformers of the SNES era, and its soundtrack alone has maintained a passionate following for decades. When Bananza launched with a selection of animal buddies and Enguarde wasn’t among them, that community noticed immediately – and the reaction has been pointed rather than passive.
The Aquatic Problem in Bananza
Part of what makes Enguarde’s absence sting specifically in Bananza is the question of water. If the game featured robust underwater traversal, the lack of a water-based animal buddy would feel even more glaring. If it skips aquatic sections almost entirely, that decision itself becomes part of the conversation – because it suggests Nintendo may have sidestepped the problem rather than solved it.
Nintendo has had a complicated relationship with underwater gameplay across its major franchises. Sections that involve swimming tend to split audiences, and designing them well requires a different set of tools than land-based movement. Choosing not to build Bananza around water could be a deliberate design call. But for Enguarde fans, that reasoning doesn’t close the wound – it just reframes it.
Why This Absence Hits Different Than the Others
Bananza is missing several legacy characters, and the absence of Rambi the Rhino has already sparked its own debate among fans who trace their DK allegiance back to the original trilogy. Each missing character lands differently depending on which game formed a player’s primary attachment to the series. For DKC2 fans specifically, losing both Enguarde and seeing the sequel’s tone largely unrepresented in Bananza compounds into something bigger than any single omission.
What separates Enguarde from other absent buddies is how niche and specific his fanbase is. Players who cite DKC2 as their favorite in the series tend to do so emphatically – it’s not a casual preference but a considered one. The sequel is darker, more layered, and musically richer than the first game, and its animal buddies including Enguarde, Squitter the Spider, and Clapper the Seal are remembered with that same specificity. Bananza touching those characters would have signaled something to this group. Not touching them signals something too.
There’s also a practical angle worth examining. Animal buddies in Bananza are presumably designed around the game’s core mechanics – the underground digging, the terrain destruction, the momentum-based movement. Enguarde as a water character has an obvious challenge: if water plays a limited role, a water buddy has limited purpose. Nintendo may have made a clean engineering decision. But clean decisions can still produce friction with audiences who aren’t thinking about development constraints.
The sharpest version of the complaint isn’t really about Enguarde in isolation. It’s about what his absence suggests regarding DKC2’s status within the franchise going forward. If Bananza is Nintendo’s big statement on what Donkey Kong is and can be in 2025, and that statement doesn’t include meaningful nods to the sequel many fans consider the high point of the entire series, then the tension between nostalgia and new direction is going to follow this game through its entire lifecycle. Enguarde is just the specific shape that frustration has taken for one corner of the fanbase – and that corner is not staying quiet about it.
