(Everything I express in this review is simply a personal opinion. Please do not get mad at me. People still have valid reasons to enjoy this game.)
Frankly, I didn't find this game too fun. I'm sorry. Even though I CAN still say it's a good game.

Note: the first part of my review is going to be kind of negative, but I had lots of things I liked about this game, so feel free to skip ahead.

I'm putting "played" here, because I can't say in good faith I've done everything in this game. I got right up to the final boss, but died at the second round, quit, and lost an hour of progress because I forgot to save. It brings me to a feature I would like: if it would save when you select "quit". However, I watched the final boss and ending, so in my mind I've seen everything I wanted to see with this game.

It's my first experience with Banjo-Kazooie. I might be starting off on the wrong foot here. Rare's other games have impressed me ( see the Donkey Kong Country series), which I find ingenious. This one, not so much.

Many have complained about the camera angle, but I just didn't find the core gameplay loop fun at all: collection felt mindless rather than rewarding. It was tiresome to backtrack to certain areas to get these puzzle pieces ("Jiggy's"), mostly because I didn't find the areas notable. Aesthetically, they were the artistic equivalent of Home Depot.

It suffered some from, I think, a lack of meaningful places and NPC's. I'm not asking for this game to be some kind of world building RPG, simply that it makes the areas fun to revisit. There are secrets in each place, sure, but a lot of them are monotonous, like (literally) grey sewage pipes. My favorite was this sand castle in the harbor area, which I found charming because it was made up of these small things that distinguished it from the previous area, the little background details: sea stars, candy wrappers and such, really helped break up the monotony a little, even added some character. The pre-rendered graphics I also found really worked towards a pleasing whole. It was really cool seeing all the little pre-rendered buildings, like the temple. Being able to go through the chimney into a luxurious hotel room, and see the little luxurious, tiger-striped bed, TV, and lamp in all it's pre-rendered glory, on a GBA no less, was a weird kind of liminal (to be pretentious) experience. It was little things like that, the details, that really made this one charming.

Part of the monotony could be broken also, by getting to know the people you meet in the game more. For example there is an ice cream vendor in a truck, maybe in the later worlds, they could come to visit Banjo and Kazooie later on with a new ice cream store. Or maybe they are starting a shaved ice business and getting ice from Freezing Furnace (the ice themed area). These are just examples. I think seeing how the world develops would be cool, of course within system limitations and all that. Maybe even have new plotlines that happen only after you finish an area and go back to it.

I want to try the other Banjo-Kazooie's, however. Simply because of the charm of the world in this one.

It is charming, for some reason the character design and art direction reminds me a little of Wallace and Gromit, in it's kind of playful and lightly caricaturized design (and it has animals with googly eyes, reminding me of Wallace and Gromit)

TLDR: My impressions of this game is that it IS worth trying, just wasn't for me. Partially because of my expectations: I went in expecting something deep, like a real lengthy story-based game. It's not exactly like that, far from a world building action-adventure.

However what this game excels at is it's whimsical, childlike sense of humor, and it's unique attempt at putting a series of 3D platformers on the GBA. If you love collect-athon gameplay, a childlike sense of whimsy, or pre-rendered graphics, I would recommend this to you, with some reservations.

A very overlooked and underrated game in the Banjo Series. It's got it's problems and quirks, but if you want a new portable Banjo experience, this game may just be a nice surprise for you. The game goes for a semi topdown view, but still very much feels like a Banjo Kazooie game, just shorter. There are a couple of headache inducing challenges, and the constant recycling of mini games can get a bit tedious, but it doesn't takeaway the fact that all in all it's still a quick and breezy playthrough. I highly recommend checking it out if you've never tried it before.

Banjo-Kazooie in a bite-sized package! Whether you are a fan of collect-a-thons or goofy cartoon bears, Banjo-Kazooie is a series that, more often than not, delivers an enjoyable experience. Grunty's Revenge is no exception, being the third entry into the series and serving as the iconic duo's foray into the handheld world. As a fan of the series, finding out there were more Jiggies and Notes to collect left a smile on my face. Other fans will share a similar grin, but if the franchise is not one of your favorites, sadly, the game will be mediocre in terms of length and difficulty. Not every Gameboy Advanced title needs to be 10+ hours long, but coming in at a whopping 5 hours of playtime on the first playthrough, even a hardcore Banjo enthusiast will want more.

Rareware efficiently captures the core mechanics of the original and sequel, culminating in an isometric 2.5D platformer that takes place between the games. Gruntilda's lackey Klungo has created a giant mech suit capable of being inhabited by the witch's ghost for her to travel back to the past to prevent the events of the first game. The hag even kidnaps Kazooie! An inspired plot to say the least. Banjo has to travel back to the distant past to save his feathered friend, but during the trip, he loses his memory regarding the repertoire of moves learned from the titular N64 title. Some abilities stay forgotten, like the ability to fly once the brash-beaked companion makes her return, and others get altered somewhat, like Wonderwings requiring a designated pad along with golden feathers to use.

This change is disappointing since an iconic move does not appear until World 4 of a five World game, with the other omitted. Maybe the developers had hardware limitations, but regardless, the move pool felt shallow. Truthfully, most of the game is beatable by utilizing a mixture of the roll and the Talon Trot between moments of forced mechanic implementation. There were never times when the other moves felt necessary.

Equally shallow were the minigames - reskinned versions of either fishing, sliding, or keep away, none of which are overtly enjoyable. Spotty controls tend to make these games, along with some platforming sections, outright agitating. However, the most frustrating element of the entire game is learning that a max rank requires a player to defeat the final boss while finding all collectibles in under 2 hours and 20 minutes. A reasonable goal for the well-informed but ultimately compels a casual completionist into a forced second playthrough.

Issues aside, Grunty's Revenge is a pleasant addition to a beloved franchise long since left to the annals of gaming history (besides the Smash Ultimate DLC). Every quip and rhyme harkened to halcyon days spent nabbing Jiggies in front of a buzzing CRT. Even the music elicits memories of Grant Kirkhope's iconic soundtracks, even without his inclusion. It may have gotten released in 2003, but in 2023 it was a nostalgic surprise and simultaneously a disheartening cap end to an era of Rareware titles on Nintendo consoles, one that evaded this longtime fan's radar far too long. Seek this title out, core fans of the series (casuals, best to pass), and enjoy a brief reminder as to why the bear and the bird hold a special place in the hearts of thousands of players.

I'm kind of sad I never sought this game out sooner because it feels like the sequel to Banjo Tooie I never got as a kid. I mean, it's not on the same level as the N64 titles, but it is damn impressive how they faithfully adapted the gameplay to a 2D isometric perspective. You collect jiggies, notes, jinjos, mumbo tokens and learn a slew of signature moves throughout the game! The writing keeps its charm, too. What more can you ask for? That's Banjo Kazooie, baby! All around a pleasant experience, would recommend if you miss the bear and bird.

The criminally overlooked Banjo game – even by myself. Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie are loved by many, Nuts & Bolts get unfair hate (it’s a brilliant game) but at least it gets some attention. Banjo’s outing on the Game Boy Advance however, barely gets mentioned, and I didn’t even properly play it until now.

Turning a Banjo-Kazooie game into a GBA game sounds like a daunting task to me. The obvious route would be 2D, but I don’t think that would capture the spirit of the game. Instead, Rare went for an isometric-like viewpoint (it’s more head on, so you’re not mainly walking diagonally), and somehow managed to squeeze the feeling of a Banjo game into the tiny GBA.

Most impressive is Banjo and Kazooie’s moveset. Most of the moves from the first game are here and work really well with the limited buttons on the GBA. Firing eggs has been changed drastically, as Banjo now holds Kazooie like a gun (like the first person segments of Banjo-Tooie), allowing you to move around a bit more freely to line up shots, which works really well. You also get access to different egg types like electric, fire and ice.

The gold feathers and red feathers suffer the worst fate. Gold feathers are now only activated from a pad, so are only utilised a few times, while flying is not in the game at all. However, I can see how flying in this would be a nightmare so it’s understandable. Even with these, moving around really does capture the feel of Banjo-Kazooie perfectly.

There is one main flaw with the viewpoint: sometimes it’s difficult to judge where a platform is, as you can’t tell how high it is. One thing that does help is that Banjo’s shadow is visible to help you aim, but you’ll still mess up a fair few times. Grunty’s Revenge is more lenient with lives as it has none, instead allowing you to continue from your last “door”, having saved everything you have collected. This alleviates the unfairness of jumping on platforms as it means it never takes long to try again.

The graphics look lovely on the GBA, it gives the game a 3D feel despite being in 2D, which makes Banjo and Kazooie look more natural and like their N64 versions. Each level is accompanied by catchy music with 10 jiggies to find (one of them being finding all 5 jinjos) with a wide manner of ways to find or earn them. Each level does have a minigame which consists of a fishing game, a shooting game, a slide or a sort of dodgems game. These are easily the weakest parts of the game as the minigames are not fun (the shooting is fine).

Each world can be completed the first time you go through it, with the exception of the swamp level, which needs a later transformation for one jiggy. Transformations also return, with Mumbo providing them. They work slightly differently here: once you have unlocked a transformation, you can then use it in any level. This gives them a bit more time to shine, and it’s usually clear as you explore levels as to which ones you’ll need. They’re all adorable, especially mouse Banjo.

Grunty’s Revenge is a short game, taking between 4-5 hours, but for the most part it’s an incredibly fun experience that captures the feeling of the N64 Banjo games extremely well.

I dunno man, it just doesn't hold up very well. I played it as a kid, and I remember it being better.

I guess it's impressive that it runs at all, and runs well at that, but it's a little bit too short, aimless, and repetitive for me to be in love with it.

Still, it's Banjo. Feels very budget Banjo, but I guess it's an alright replacement if it's all ya got...

I’m not a huge Banjo fan. I never was as a kid either. I felt the game was really tedious and easy. The only interesting parts of the game were the platforming and collecting everything, and even that got dull after a while. I personally feel it’s a very much overrated game and is one of the most nostalgia blind games in existence. I tried out Grunty’s Revenge for GBA, and it’s exactly what I expected. An over simplified version of an already pretty simple game.


The story is mostly nonsense, but Gruntilda has created a robot form of herself and you need to stop her. The end. Yeah, Banjo was never much for story. I do have the say the yapping voice samples are incredibly annoying and repeat themselves over and over again. It’s some of the most annoying voices I’ve heard in any game. It’s just irritating noises, they don’t even sound like voices. Never mind that though, your goal is to run around collecting Jiggies, musical notes, honeycombs, and various other odds and ends to acquire abilities to gain access to new areas. The levels in this game are fairly small but well designed. I have to say the level design overall here is great and I never got lost thanks to memorable landmarks which are key to a game with no map. You talk to a mole fellow who will grant you a new ability once you have enough notes. I never ran into an issue with this as exploring alone will give you more than enough notes. Abilities range from smacking enemies with your pack to a roll. Once you acquire Kazooie you can get the ability to fire eggs, batteries, a jump glide, and an aerial attack.


I do like how the abilities keep coming and in quick succession. It was satisfying to get back to the hub world and gain access to new abilities such as ladder climbing and diving. Thankfully just exploring on its own saw me collecting and completing 100% of each level with ease. There are boss fights and these are painfully easy and never change. The boss has an electric field around it and you just run around dodging attacks. Once the field is down you can attack. The life counter will go down with each attack and you are rewarded afterward. Enemy encounters are pretty much the same and enemies constantly respawn. Some enemies require more than one hit, but I found it annoying that they would get in the way of a platforming segment after I’ve killed them and only got knocked down to come back around have to kill them again. It was hard to judge depth with some platforms and it would lead to cheap falls.

I do have to say that while the game looks decent the pseudo-3D look makes everything look quite bland. While it’s by no means ugly I never cared for the art style of Banjo. Everything is just green and yellow in this game is it gets old after a while. There are only four large levels and the game can be finished in less than four hours. Thankfully you can save anywhere, and dying doesn’t even reset the area. You just start off at the next closest spot or platform so I didn’t see the point in having a life bar if there were no consequences to dying. The only thing that kept me going was the completionist in me wanting to 100% every level and acquiring the next ability was fun.


Overall, Grunty’s Revenge is a decent isometric platformer, but other games did it better such as Spyro. The visuals are kind of muddy and blurry and a bit hard to see when it comes to platforming, but the levels are designed well. The story is nonsense and there’s zero challenge outside of just the platforming. If you want a short and light-hearted pseudo-3D platformer for your GBA then you can’t go wrong here.

Safe to say I am fully gameboy-pilled now. I'm just playing middling gameboy games all the time. I'm fascinated by this era, when we had like, well this is the gameboy version of a big time console game. Now that the Switch is here, there's a lot less of that. Phone games had some of it but now they're kind of their own thing trying to bait whales with microtransactions.

Now, Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel are pretty much defined by being 3D platformers, but I'd have to say Rare was well positioned for this project for a few reasons. First, they had experience in making fake 3D sprites with Donkey Kong Country. Second, they're British so they made a ton of isometric platformers with controls designed for maniacs. Third, they were bought by Microsoft and could therefore unleash their full wrath on the North American audience by not using an isometric view for this one. You thought you didn't like three quarters perspective? See how you like it when you can't tell how tall anything is assholes!

Also, this is an interquel which attempts to expand on the Banjo-Kazooie lore, possibly the most ridiculous sentence possible. It doesn't actually do a good job of that because the time travel plot was invented later in development and doesn't exist beyond the opening story scene. But still, this video game has a plot and that plot is that the villain turns herself into a ghost to possess a robot body that can also time travel to try and prevent Banjo and Kazooie from ever meeting therefore altering the timeline and ensuring she can turn into Posh Spice in the first game.

The game's perfectly fine! It's all a little off model and scaled down but this allows for a level called Bad Magic Bayou that doesn't add any new incredibly racist charicature characters (Mumbo Jumbo is sadly still present). It's short and it's easy but I wish more of Rare's output had this level of restraint. If you made me play either this or Yooka-Laylee again.... this is shorter and I could try and get a maximum five jiggy ranking in it.

For as specific as this sounds, I have a soft spot for GBA titles that try to reproduce the effect of fifth generation 3D platformers on limited 32-bit hardware. Grunty's Revenge is clearly going for that sort of thing here. Banjo-Threeie this ain't, but it's a cute enough companion title to the N64 games.

I do wish there was a little more here, though. The mini-games and boss fights are all solid enough, but I feel like there's an awful lot of repetition within them. The levels are a decent start, but I feel like there could be one or two more to even out some of the pacing. It's honestly admirable that they were able to translate a decent amount of Banjo and Kazooie's moves to the new format, but I wish there were more original moves - Battery Eggs and the Pack Whack are the only two, and the former's just used for a couple lock-and-key puzzles.

But enough translates over from the N64 games that I'm little inclined to complain. The writing's still there, there's some fun with the time travel setup (I like that all you have to do to make it 70s is give everyone lava lamps), Mecha Grunty's a fun new variation on the old hag, and by gum, they snuck in a Furnace Fun. For as middling as most of the game's boss fights are, it's great to see that Grunty still has a phenomenal final boss, doubly impressive on the limited hardware.

Honestly, decently impressed with this one. I think my buddy Gooms put it best - this isn't gonna sustain you for long or anything, but if you've been starving for SOMEthing Banjo-Kazooie, this'll sate you, at least for a little while.

this was fine! charming graphics, an alright soundtrack (probably the worst of the banjo games but also it's a gba game like what do u want), and surprisingly well translated controls all lead to a pretty fun time.

the isometric camera angle is a little odd at times, a bit hard to know what's background and what isn't and if you can jump on specific platforms but otherwise it works well. the worlds were all okay, but bad magic bayou, and especially spiller's harbor were just frustrating and unfun. the rest were good, nothing super special but solid. i liked all the little mini games, and the bosses were alright too. i will say the final boss was a bit much, i only died once, but it's like 5 phases long and if you die at any phase you have to not only restart the fight, but also redo the puzzle to get into the fight! that's just obnoxious!

this game was silly and fun but not a must play or anything. mostly carried by the charm of banjo as a series, and if you don't fuck with that you probably will not have a very good time at all.

When people rant and rave about how good the Banjo-Kazooie series was "until nuts and bolts", I always wonder why they forget to mention this one. I didn't think it was anything special, and I liked the first one. Do people forget or not know that this one exists, or do they like it?

I think doing everything in this game is a lot more frustrating than the first one. The platforming is really janky with the perspective they chose to put the game camera at. They also shove in a few of these mini games that are more frustrating than fun to complete. All of the areas are way less charming too, although it's funny that Grunty's come back yet again but as a giant mecha robot this time. It just wasn't the game for me, unfortunately.

It’s pretty good!

It’s not the BEST Banjo-Kazooie game ever made, but for a Banjo game on GBA? They did a pretty great job of translating the gameplay over.

Lots of neat little lore things sprinkled in help make it more interesting. Like seeing the big stone Jingaling head taken down and replaced with Grunty’s, THATS NEAT! That is NEAT!

So yeah, good Banjo game!

Finally got to finish the last of the Banjo games. Somehow this alluded me in my GBA era, even tho Banjo has a giant home in my heart.

Total runtime for a near 100% run was 4 hours. Which is wild and short. Final boss Grunty is very grindy, so I used the emulation save states to make it less frustrating. I just wish they did more here. You barely need to backtrack with mumbo power ups in previous levels. Also often frustrating because you can't really judge where you are going and what elevation you can travel to with the graphics//stereoscopic 3D.

I'll admit when I first saw this game I expected it to be another isometric game where you can barely tell what's going on half of the time, but the devs over at rare understood the system's hardware and made sure that everything was viewable and nothing was unfairly hidden out of sight. This was a fun little time, I can always count on Banjo to give me a solid collectathon experience and this was no exception. Was pleasantly surprised with this one, completed it in under 4 hours, not a very long game but it doesn't need to be given the hardware.