

Colossal, immense, and gigantic; beautiful, gorgeous, and grandiose -- these are the words one thinks of when describing Rare's follow-up adventure to Banjo-Kazooie. Keeping consistent with the attitude found in this title, Rare has wittily named it Banjo-Tooie. Banjo-Tooie, simply put, is incredibly unimaginable. The worlds are ludicrous in size, the gameplay is polished and deep, and the soundtrack proves to be an immaculate compliment. When it comes to defining platform-based entertainment, Banjo-Tooie is filled with chapter after chapter of standards. Explore eight giant worlds, solve puzzles and help game characters to unearth jiggys, play as Mumbo, a T-Rex, Submarine, Money-Van, Washing Machine, and more, and learn more than 40 new moves on the way.
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Banjo Tooie is a 3D platformer collect-a-thon. A lot of its charm comes from the humorous dialogue between characters. It’s packed with quite a bit of dark humor and situational comicalities throughout each of the 9 worlds.
The worlds are vast and eclectic, meaning you’re left with very little to be desired and a lot to explore.
Being a sequel to Banjo Kazooie, Tooie has a lot to live up to and it did not disappoint. I didn’t really want to compare the two, but oh well, everyone else is 🤷🏻♂️.
One key difference is that in Kazooie, each session in a world is somewhat discontinuous. What this means is you can collect 99 music notes in a world, leave and come back, and you’ll have to start back at 0. Whereas in Tooie, everything you collect is permanent and you don’t need to worry about losing progress.
Tooie is a lot more legato when it comes to how the worlds are interconnected and honestly that was something I really loved when playing it.
Oh, the camera is much better in Tooie too.
A common complaint I see is that there’s an overwhelming amount of content and people that played Tooie after Kazooie thought that took away from the experience. I actually played Tooie first and felt that Kazooie was lacking.
One significant aspect of games that greatly affects the flow of a game is the feeling of progression. This is something I think Banjo Tooie does extremely well. There are consistently new unlockables whether it’s new combat moves, mobility utilities, worlds, secret paths, etc, there’s always something new. However, because there’s so much, there is a LOT of backtracking, especially if you want to collect everything. For me this was a good thing, but I know it’s not for everyone.
There are many places in each world where you can get stuck due to not having unlocked something elsewhere or just not being able to figure out a puzzle. As a child, this was a fun challenge. I cannot tell what it would be like playing for the first time as an adult.
I’d be lying if I said nostalgia didn’t have something to do with how I feel about this game. But I assure you, both playing (and 100%ing) as a kid as well as in my 20’s I gave this a solid 10/10.
There’s also a multiplayer mode which are all the mini games banjo and kazooie come across in the campaign. I had 3 siblings so we had a ton of fun playing these, but I imagine not many of us play couch multiplayer anymore so this is more of a side note bonus thing.