Donkey Kong Bananza’s Absent Squawks the Parrot Is Quietly Grounding DKC2 Fans

The Parrot That Isn’t There

Donkey Kong Bananza has been generating serious excitement since its reveal, with Nintendo packing the game full of callbacks, cameos, and nods to the franchise’s deep history. But for a specific subset of fans, one absence is louder than all the confirmed inclusions combined. Squawks the Parrot, the sharp-eyed, spotlight-carrying sidekick from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, is nowhere in the Bananza roster, and the DKC2 community is not quietly accepting that.

Squawks is not a background character.

In DKC2, the parrot served as one of the most mechanically distinct Animal Friends in the series. He carried a lantern through pitch-black cave sections, acted as a projectile-spitting aerial mount, and in some stages functioned as a floating guide that players had to follow and protect. He was practical, visually iconic, and tied directly to some of the game’s most atmospheric and difficult moments. Cutting him from a major new DK title, even one that seems to be doing its own thing structurally, reads to long-time players as a deliberate sideline rather than an oversight.

What Squawks Actually Meant to DKC2

The DKC series built much of its identity around Animal Friends, and DKC2 took that system further than any other entry. Squawks appeared in multiple forms across the game, each version serving a different gameplay function. That design variety made him feel like a full character rather than a one-trick power-up, and players who grew up with DKC2 remember those Squawks-centric stages with the kind of detail usually reserved for final bosses.

The lantern cave sections, in particular, are still talked about as some of the most effective atmosphere-building in the entire series. Nintendo leaned into darkness as a mechanical obstacle long before it became common practice in platformers, and Squawks was the tool that made that tension work. Removing that character from the broader franchise’s active memory is not just a roster gap – it quietly erases the context around why those design choices were so effective in the first place.

There’s also a straightforward affection factor. DKC2 fans grew up with this parrot. He appeared on the box art. His squawk sound effect is recognizable to anyone who logged hours in Crocodile Isle. When Bananza’s Animal Friend lineup gets discussed and Squawks is absent, the reaction from that community is not abstract disappointment about franchise continuity. It is personal.

The Bananza Roster and What It Signals

Donkey Kong Bananza appears to be building its own internal world rather than functioning as a greatest-hits celebration, which explains some of the gaps. But that framing only goes so far when other legacy elements are clearly present. When a game signals nostalgia in one breath and skips a beloved character in the next, it sets up a hierarchy of which parts of franchise history are being treated as relevant and which are being quietly shelved.

Squawks falling into the latter category stings for DKC2 fans partly because that game already occupies an underappreciated position in Nintendo’s handling of the Donkey Kong IP. The DKC trilogy has never received the same consistent re-release treatment or merchandise attention as Mario or Zelda. The characters from those games – Dixie Kong, Squawks, Funky, Cranky in his DKC2 form – surface occasionally but rarely in the way that signals genuine institutional commitment from Nintendo. Bananza felt like an opportunity to change that, and for Squawks specifically, it has not been that.

It’s a familiar frustration for fans of that era. DKC2 is regularly cited by players and critics as the high point of the Rare-era Donkey Kong games, yet its specific characters and mechanics rarely get meaningfully carried forward. Funky Kong’s boat from that same game is also absent from Bananza, and the pattern of DKC2 elements being left out is starting to look less like coincidence and more like a structural decision about which version of DK history Nintendo wants to build on.

A Loud Silence From the Treetops

Nintendo has said nothing about Squawks, which means DKC2 fans are left reading tea leaves, and the tea leaves are not encouraging. If a character is not shown in trailers, not mentioned in promotional material, and not surfacing in any pre-release coverage, the window for a surprise inclusion gets smaller with every passing week. Squawks may simply not be in Donkey Kong Bananza, and for a generation of players who associate that parrot with some of the best-designed platforming of the 16-bit era, that is the kind of gap that doesn’t close easily with “maybe next time.”