Few moments hit on the original SNES like your first time hearing “Stickerbush Symphony” while shooting through a labyrinth of towering thorny beanstalks in Donkey Kong Country 2's Bramble Blast levels. It’s one of the best songs to ever appear in a game, alongside one of the most evocative 16-bit platforming levels ever devised. That incredible mashup hasn’t been repeated since, until Donkey Kong Bananza.
A fresh round of previews, including one from VGC, revealed that one of the Switch 2 exclusive’s challenge levels is not only a tribute to Bramble Blast but contains a remix of composer David Wise’s incredible track for the trio of DK2 levels. While instant nostalgia-bait for fans who played on the SNES in the ‘90s, “Stickerbush Symphony” also became known as a mental health checkpoint online whenever people needed to just chill out and vibe.
Nintendo could have made this the entire game and I would have been satisfied. Bananza might be a 3D action-adventure that takes you across big open maps, but it’s cool to see 2D platforming puzzles tucked away in its hidden challenge levels. The only thing that could make the Bramble Blast sighting even better is if DKC2's other brambly stages, Bramble Scramble and Screech’s Sprint, have secret homages tucked away in the game as well.
The DKC2 levels were magical but also got progressively more punishing, with extended sections where players have to navigate between hazardous brush by hanging onto the parrot Squawks, whose fluttering can feel imprecise and hard to control. It was sort of like a precursor to Flappy Bird, though with mixes of enemies and barrels thrown in, and a soundtrack that helped players keep their sanity no matter how many times they died. The original Donkey Kong Country had nothing like it, and it turns out that none of the subsequent Donkey Kong games would either, though the song did appear in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
While the “Stickerbush Symphony”/Bramble Blast mashup carried over to Donkey Kong Land 2 on Game Boy and Donkey Kong Country 2's GBA port, the Bramble motifs didn’t return in Donkey Kong 64 or the character’s subsequent 2D spin-off, Donkey Kong Country Returns. That game’s follow-up, Tropical Freeze, did have a remix of “Stickerbrush Symphony” and a level called Bramble Scramble, but the two elements were separated from each other. The song appeared in the beginning of the level Twilight Terror instead, with a jazz version buried in the end credits. Now they’re back together, and the new cover sounds great.
“Not to bash the Brawl and Tropical Freeze versions, but it’s nice we are finally getting a remix of the song that sounds like the original,” wrote one fan on Reddit. “Tropical Freeze’s biggest miss,” wrote another. “Had a bramble level, had Stickerbush Symphony, didn’t put the thing in the thing.” At long last, Bananza does.
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