Donkey Kong Bananza fans break game, set records with infinite flight

There’s breaking Donkey Kong Bananza, and then there’s breaking Donkey Kong Bananza like your Kong Bananza. Nintendo built the Switch 2 game in a way that affords the players a ton of freedom when it comes to choosing how to achieve their goal (or not). You can do standard platforming, jumping across gaps like normal. Maybe you opt to dig your way from point A to point B instead.

Speedrunners are doing neither of those things. Instead, they’re flying straight to their next destination, courtesy of a new tech that the community has dubbed “IFAT.”

IFAT stands for “Infinite fast aerial surf turf,” and it involves some tricky maneuvering. Basically, you grab a chunk off the ground, jump, turf surf, then immediately cancel the turf surf and then go back into it. Another way of putting it: Attack + Jump, ZL, ZL. You can watch YouTuber Nicro break it down in the video above, as well as repeated examples of the technique in action. It might take a few tries to get right, and Nicro recommends changing the button layout for ease. He has all the needed actions mapped to the shoulder buttons on the Switch Pro controller, but speedrunners haven’t settled on one specific button layout.

“I have discovered flight and ruined Donkey Kong Bananza speedrunning forever,” Nicro declares near the start of the video. Sure enough, the IFAT allows players to skip entire portions of the game and beeline straight to bosses. There are some exceptions, as a few areas are hard-coded in a way that requires the player to progress in a specific way. You can’t, for example, move forward without recruiting Pauline near the start of the game.

It’s also a risky move. If you miss an input in the middle of a crossing, DK will fall to his death. Bananza is fairly lenient in how it handles death, so for the average player this won’t matter much beyond some temporary frustration. For speedrunners, it’s relevant because restarting means losing precious time. Helpfully, Nicro links some songs that can help players learn the rhythm needed to maintain airtime. Players will still need the stamina to pull it off, though.

The IFAT’s been seismic enough that it’s shaking up the Bananza speedrunning community. Today alone, a new top-10 record has been set six times. The method also changes the nature of Bananza speedruns in such profound ways that community members are currently debating whether they’re going to split runs that use IFAT into their own category of runs. Some speedrunners might prefer engaging with more portions of the game over skipping most of it by spamming a specific input over and over again. Whatever the case, for the rest of us, Donkey Kong Bananza might’ve just been split right open.