Donkey Kong Bananza has arrived with massive hype, a new engine, and a fresh cast of Animal Friends – but one beloved companion from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest is conspicuously missing, and the DKC2 community is quietly taking note. Squitter the Spider, the web-slinging arachnid who could build platforms out of thin air, hasn’t made the cut.
Who Is Squitter and Why Does He Matter
Squitter debuted in Donkey Kong Country 2 in 1995 as one of the most mechanically distinct Animal Friends in the entire Donkey Kong series. Unlike Rambi, who charged through walls, or Enguarde, who stabbed through underwater enemies, Squitter offered something genuinely different: the ability to shoot web projectiles that solidified into temporary platforms. This let players build their own paths through the air, turning standard platforming into a creative puzzle exercise.
That mechanic never really showed up again in the same form anywhere else in the franchise. Squitter returned in Donkey Kong Country 3 and appeared briefly in DK: King of Swing, but the character never received the expanded role that fans felt his toolset deserved. For DKC2 loyalists, Squitter represents the untapped ceiling of Animal Friend design – a companion whose core ability could evolve enormously with modern hardware and a physics-heavy engine like the one powering Bananza.
That’s exactly why his absence stings so specifically. Donkey Kong Bananza is built around terrain destruction and environmental manipulation. The entire game is designed around punching through rock, collapsing structures, and reshaping levels in real time. Squitter’s web-platform ability would slot directly into that design philosophy – arguably more naturally than several of the Animal Friends that did make it into the game.
The DKC2 fanbase isn’t a small or quiet group. That game consistently ranks among the highest-rated SNES titles ever made, and its Animal Friends – Squitter included – carry serious nostalgic weight. When Bananza’s Animal Friend roster started becoming clear and Squitter wasn’t on it, message boards and Reddit threads filled with the particular kind of disappointment that comes not from anger, but from recognizing a missed opportunity.
The Roster That Did Make It – and What That Says
Donkey Kong Bananza does include Animal Friends, and several of them are well-chosen. Rambi the Rhinoceros is back, which surprises no one since Rambi has appeared in nearly every DK game since the original DKC. The selection process clearly prioritized characters with straightforward, immediately readable abilities – the kind that new players can understand without prior franchise knowledge.
Squitter doesn’t fit that mold as cleanly. His web-platform ability requires a moment of explanation, and more importantly, it requires a level design philosophy built around exploiting verticality in creative ways. If Bananza’s stages aren’t architected with Squitter’s specific mechanics in mind, dropping him into the roster would produce a character who feels underused. Nintendo has been burned before by Animal Friends who show up in one or two levels and then disappear, feeling like afterthoughts rather than integrated tools.
That argument cuts both ways, though. Bananza’s destructible terrain engine is exactly the kind of sandbox where Squitter’s web construction could be genuinely expressive. The game already asks players to think three-dimensionally about environments – adding a character who lets you build upward through a collapsing cavern ceiling, for instance, would have been a natural fit. The design work would be significant, but the payoff could have been substantial.
It’s worth comparing this to how other DKC2 staples have fared. Enguarde the Swordfish is also absent from Bananza, which compounds the sense among DKC2 fans that their game’s roster is being quietly sidelined in favor of entries that predate or follow it. Two significant DKC2-origin Animal Friends missing from the same title isn’t a coincidence – it starts to read like a pattern.
The question of why becomes more complicated when you consider that Squitter has no equivalent in Bananza’s roster. The game didn’t replace him with a similar platform-building mechanic. That gap exists, visibly, in how the game handles creative traversal. Players who remember what Squitter could do are aware of a design possibility that was never pursued.
What DKC2 Fans Are Actually Asking For
The frustration isn’t really about nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. DKC2 fans aren’t simply asking for a pixel-accurate recreation of a 1995 spider. The ask is more specific: take a mechanic that was genuinely ahead of its time, apply it to a modern physics system with real destructibility, and see what happens. Bananza had the engine for it. The opportunity existed and passed.
Nintendo has a long history of cycling Animal Friends in and out of Donkey Kong titles without a clear logic governing who returns and who sits out. Squitter has been waiting since DKC3 for a real comeback. Bananza, with its emphasis on environmental creativity, may have been the best-positioned game in nearly three decades to actually deliver one – and it didn’t. Whether that changes in DLC, a sequel, or not at all is the question DKC2 fans are now sitting with.
