Therapy Bananza!

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #197. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.

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There are times when no combination of anxiety medications is enough. No collection of breathing exercises. No course of guided meditation.

As I learned recently, sometimes you just need to smash some stones. Tear up some turf. Pound and punch and pummel every impediment in your path.

My 7-year-old got a generous Nintendo Switch gift card for Christmas and used it to buy Donkey Kong Bananza. I believe the retail value is $69.99. Prices these days are insane, but in this case, it was quite the opposite – Peter saved his dad hundreds, if not thousands, in therapy bills. Thanks, kid.

I didn’t play Bananza much at first. I was, as my loyal reader knows, obsessively straining the boundaries of Night City. Turns out, the game was just what I needed once the deep sadness of Cyberpunk 2077’s multiple endings set in [see last month’s issue].

I started slowly, playing Pauline in two-player mode, furiously shouting the ground away and laughing maniacally, much to the chagrin of my DK-controlling son. While being annoying is always a great stress reliever, my headache from him yelling at me made it a wash. But the seed had been planted: Maybe I should try playing alone.

I had no idea how cathartic it could be. Bananza is a dead-simple game – the challenges are easy, the bosses are pushovers. But those are merely secondary aims. Pounding your chest to activate a Bananza, then annihilating everything around you at breakneck speed – that is the true joy of the game.

This heightened sense of control – conquering mountains, leveling villages, at one point tearing up a hotel lobby – is immeasurably satisfying. I haven’t mashed buttons so feverishly since being mauled mercilessly by my friend Hannah in Tekken 6. And this time I’m actually having fun!

And it gets better. At one point, players can unlock an Elephant Bananza. Now I’m using my trunk to literally inhale the landscape. I can more or less race across a layer – the ground parting in front of me Biblically – vacuuming up tokens and treasure chests overflowing with gold. Or I can pause and spin around in place, facing upward and downward at my whim, and just shred.

I love this so much I’ve started to forget the real world doesn’t work this way. I imagine ripping apart the pavement with my eyes as I walk the kids to school, or sucking the words right off the pages as I read. As I type this, I’m rearranging the pixels on my screen with my thoughts.

When I was a kid, I used to look out the window of the car and imagine a giant scythe stretching out into the distance, slicing trees and telephone poles along the side of the road as we passed. It was quite relaxing. Calming. Therapeutic, even.

Even then, I was traversing the rocky road to mental wellness. But now I know I simply wasn’t thinking big enough. It only took decades of struggle – and one Nintendo Switch 2 game – to get there.

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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.