Early previews for Donkey Kong Bananza have been positive so far, with some describing the game as a potential Super Mario Odyssey moment for the DK franchise. That just might be the most apt description possible, because Bananza is being developed by the same studio behind what is considered to one of the best Super Mario video game of all time--Super Mario Galaxy fans might beg to differ here--Nintendo EPD Tokyo.Nintendo had previously confirmed this during one of its Treehouse presentations, but beyond that, the company is being secretive about who is leading development on the project or who some of the key staff members are. This would also explain why we haven't seen a new 3D Mario game since 2017--but we have seen numerous other Mario projects since then--if the studio has been focusing heavily on creating this ambitious new adventure for DK. GameSpot has reached out to Nintendo for clarification, and we'll update the post as soon as we hear back from the company.As noted by VGC, development on modern 3D Mario games has been led creatively by Kenta Motokura, Yoshiaki Koizumi, and Koichi Hayahsida, but their names haven't been listed in new EPD-developed games since Odyssey in 2017. Several of these games were developed in conjunction with other Nintendo divisions, and it is worth noting that Nintendo has a much higher retention rate of employees compared to other studios and publishers across the world, where mass layoffs have sadly become very commonplace.Donkey Kong Bananza launches on July 17 for Switch 2, and it's shaping up to be the next must-have game for the console."This is a new 3D platformer from the team behind Super Mario Odyssey, arguably one of the best of its genre. It's hard to see how those disparate elements come together from a distance, but an extended hands-on showed me how all the pieces gel together to make a new experience that feels like a next step for the Odyssey team, and even reminiscent in some ways of 3D platforming's earliest roots on the Nintendo 64," Steve Watts wrote in his Donkey Kong Bananza preview.