Reviews from

in the past


Like Oddworld 2 I dont know if this is better than the original or not

This game is infamous for the right reasons. The backtracking and minigames cause this game to be tedious to play.

Too. Much. Backtracking.

Still loved it! just not to the level of the first game.


I have complicated feelings about Banjo-Tooie. It's a game that I love and have 100%ed in spite of some sharp sticking points I have. Quantifying my feelings with a number doesn't exactly do it justice since I do truly enjoy it more than a 3.5/5 would indicate. I really like this game for its ambition, but I think there are some things that hold it back. In the strictest sense, a sequel that looks better, has more content, and expands upon the gameplay mechanics of the original would seem like an easy upgrade from it but sometimes bigger isn't always better.

I enjoy the music, the dialogue, the levels, and all the new moves and skills you can pull off with Banjo and Kazooie. The OST might be even better than the first and the character writing is top notch here, even over Banjo-Kazooie. Split-up is a perfect evolution for the series and I enjoy the puzzles around it and how you're eased into the mechanic starting with Witchyworld. The setpieces are nice, the transformations are much more fun and useful than the first game, and there's a lot more to collect.

However, while it makes for some cool moments, the interconnected world design feels a bit at odds with a 3D Platformer like this and, ironically, makes parts feel disjointed. It ends up feeling more like padding or bloat than a true sense of one large world.

My final grievance that I am shocked doesn't crop up more often is the INTENSE reliance on first person sections and aiming. Doing these on the N64 controller with its oblong notches, rickety analog stick, and uncomfortable plastic is a nightmare, especially with how the game expects pinpoint precision for the objectives that need it. Worst of all, is that the reticle snaps back to center when aiming, a truly baffling design decision that makes the control a practice in patience. I really wish I could ignore these sections but they're so incredibly prevalent that it knocks down my personal scoring for the game more than I wish it did.

In spite of that, I would recommend this game if you're a fan of large 3D Platformers. It doesn't have the same restraint and tight design of the first, and I can respect the ambition for this game. I only wish everything was integrated more smoothly and that, hopefully someday, we'll get a sequel that deftly implements all the wonderful ideas from this entry.
I've definitely not replayed it over and over as much as I have with the first game but I can easily see myself liking Banjo-Tooie more upon a "gut-check of my feelings" replay of the game sometime.

banjo but bad, it was a good run

kazooie is better and dk64 are better than both, have a lot of love for it regardless

just couldn't get into it like I could with the kazooie. the backtracking is too much

Primer Video Juego que toque, al chile nunca lo pase, y siempre me perdia, pero como me divertia

Bigger than the original but a little to bloated because of it. Still a solid play and a classic I love but it just feels a little empty and tedious sometimes.

biased from my childhood, i replayed it and somehow im still stuck right before the dream land after fire and ice, why is dis game so hard even as a grown ass man.

And so my trek back through nastolgia concludes by playing through my favorite-est 3D platformer ever. I'd never 100%'d it before, but gosh I did it this time. It was certainly FAR quicker and easier to do than doing DK64's would've been XP. I only had to use a guide for about 5 minor collectables as well (ones which I know I've found on previous playthroughs, but missed this time), so I found just about everything myself :) . Granted, this is like my fourth or fifth time through this game, but it took me about 13.5 hours. Judging from another save file on the cartridge that had about 18 for the minimum amount of jiggies to beat the game, I'd say I've gotten much faster :P

It's still Banjo-Tooie. Dripping with style, color, and silly dialogue, it's still the best the N64 ever had to offer in terms of 3D platforming. The bosses are also still fantastic as well. I certainly don't remember the final boss being as hard as it was, but all of them were certainly a blast (I even beat Weldar on the first try this time :D ).

Being a Rare game, there are of course some technical issues in terms of framerate. Especially in world 7, the game experiences some really significant slowdown quite frequently. Nothing that ever made the game impossible to control, but definitely annoying now that I'm old enough to notice it. I'm fairly curious if the XBLA versions of the game fix that problem, tbh.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you like 3D platformers even a little, then this game should totally be a must-play. I know they're really not for everyone, but if you enjoy classic collectathons, there's really nothing better than this game.

This review contains spoilers

Banjo-Kazooie has been one of the most enjoyable games I've played this decade, so I went into Tooie with high expectations. I heard it's quite polarizing; I was hoping to fall in love with it. Unfortunately, I don't feel that way but I also don't hate it.

I started playing this last fall and took some hiatuses between playthroughs, especially when I reached Grunty's Industries and Hailfire Peaks. The world's are humongous compared to the first game which made it more intimidating to enter new worlds and get familiar with the geography. The size of some of these worlds is unnecessary; there's a lot of unused space.

The gameplay is fun. Lots of great puzzle-solving, missions and platforming. When I first encountered an FPS stage, I thought I was gonna dread it but it was surprisingly fun. Changing into Mumba and Humba added a nice shift to the gameplay. Some worlds are very disorienting and frustrating to navigate, like Glitter Gulch Mine and Jolly Roger's Lagoon. Grunty Industries is also a chore. Cloud Cuckooland is probably the best world in my opinion, but I also like the dilapidated Witchyworld. Theme park worlds in video games are always fun. The worlds in this game, overall, feel very muted and sombre compared to the first game. Not as memorable and not as enjoyable.

The backtracking is interesting. I like the mole one, but the pool and dinosaur medicine train missions are annoying. Thank god this game has teleporting stations.

All the bosses are great except the final boss. Gruntilda is very frustrating to beat and the quiz is annoying as hell. I struggled to beat the Tower of Tragedy gameshow and when I had to fight her on the tank, I had to take a break and play Mario 64. But, I revisited the game and finally beat Gruntilda after an infuriating 2 hour grind. I managed to get her down to one life and panicked when she wouldn't stop firing her spell with minions still charging at me, then died. This happened twice, but third time I an annihilated her. Yeah, the final boss is awful.

This game hella chugs on this console

WHY DID THEY ADD BACKTRACKING TO EVERY LEVEL?!

Tooie is so frustrating! I want to love it and in some ways it does improve on the original, but oh my god thinking about completing the game again is exhausting.

The stakes are higher (the opening alone is just perfect rare dark humor) and the characters are still amazing and charming.

The backtracking sucks and breaks the pace completely. I had more fun, cheesing the game and trying to get around the backtracking requirements than I did getting some of the collectibles the intended way.

Music isn't as good as the first game, but it still has some really good songs (Jinjo village is a banger).

Play the 360 version over the original again since it runs better and the breegull bash is funny.

This review contains spoilers

Banjo-Tooie is a perfect sequel to the innovative, influential 3D platformer Banjo-Kazooie…in theory. On paper, Banjo-Tooie completes more than the necessary criteria for an exemplary sequel. The factors I’ve always attributed to when it comes to crafting a substantial followup to a celebrated title is expanding upon its world and characters along with using the element of hindsight to oil the hinges that perhaps started squeaking once the game was released, much to the embarrassment of the developers. If you’ll notice the cheeky instance of play-on-words in the title, Banjo-Tooie is a game that revels in its inherent role as a sequel. The game was always in a comfortable position, after all, succeeding its predecessor after only two years and on the same, familiar hardware. Banjo-Kazooie constructed the concrete architecture of the Banjo mansion, and all Banjo-Tooie was tasked with was sprucing up the glorious estate with some voguish furniture or state-of-the-art HDTV complete with surround sound speakers. The question still remains: does Rare’s magnum opus really need these additional luxuries? Banjo-Kazooie made such a monumental splash for the prevailing 3D platformer trend that it stole the proverbial torch away from Mario to guide every subsequent release in the genre with its light. Any game that usurps the throne from Nintendo’s golden boy ain't no slouch, so one can infer the extent of Banjo-Kazooie’s quality merely through this fact alone. Because of Banjo-Kazooie’s high mark of 3D platforming excellence, Banjo-Tooie is another example of a sequel needing to prove the rationale of its existence. In some aspects, Banjo-Tooie knew which of Banjo-Kazooie’s loose bolts to tighten up, but there are some screws that it never should’ve tinkered with.

Even though Banjo-Tooie is screaming its sequel status from the stormy peak of Gruntilda’s Lair, it’ll be damned to be content with being eclipsed in the shadow of Banjo-Kazooie’s glory. Since Gruntilda fell from her tower upon her defeat and was entombed under the crushing weight of a massive boulder, the moral characters from the first game can now relax and play a rousing game of poker at Banjo’s house. During their relatively carefree evening of playing cards, Gruntilda’s two equally unsightly sisters of contrasting body proportions align with her old scientific servant Klungo to tunnel to Gruntilda’s resting place with a military-grade drill. Somehow, Gruntilda defies the laws of biology and still remains alive and well despite her stationary status beneath the earth for who knows how long. The glaring effect being buried has had on Gruntilda is the total removal of her sickly-green skin, reducing her to a skeleton with the same witch garb and squawking voice (personally, I think the new look is an improvement). Before Gruntilda begins her major quest to procure a new epidermis, she can’t help but act on a petty impulse to blast Banjo’s house with a comically-enhanced laser cannon. Bottles the mole is the sole victim of Gruntilda’s vengeance, leaving his wispy soul to roam around Banjo’s front yard until the end of times. That’s right: the game begins with Bottles fucking dying. As the unceremonious onslaught signals a new adventure, the events of the previous night leave the old stomping grounds of Spiral Mountain in ruin, with the overhead entrance of Gruntilda’s lair blocked off by the wreckage. The first cutscene and its aftermath convey a message that the comfort of nostalgia that comes with a sequel has been blown to smithereens, even if the game is still strictly confined to familiarity as a direct sequel developed on the same console.

That cynical attitude seems to persist throughout Banjo-Tooie. Banjo-Tooie behaves the same way as a displeased, ill-natured child does being dragged along on a chore by a parent, committing minor acts of obnoxious debauchery to both alleviate their boredom and spite their parental figure. Banjo-Tooie does its damndest to dump on its predecessor at every waking moment possible. Namely, corrupting Banjo-Kazooie’s guileless presentation and tone as fervently as it can while admittedly being tethered down by the same aesthetic. More cases of murder pop up after Bottles is dispatched among the various NPCs, and the fact that Tooty is missing once again (with a credible search ad on a milk carton to boot) but no one seems to care disturbs me a smidge. Really, the trick that Banjo-Tooie pulls out of its hat in an attempt to ruin its predecessor’s legacy is constantly breaking the fourth wall. Seemingly every line of dialogue references Banjo-Kazooie in some capacity, noting some familiar characters, events, and other nostalgic nuggets to further hammer in its sequel status. The emotional impact of Bottles being fried to a crisp is tainted by Kazooie’s offhand comment that “he wasn’t the most popular character in the last game.” In fact, the snarky bird spits so much verbal venom at the NPCs in Banjo-Tooie that I’m almost offended on their behalf. On top of referencing the previous title, the game features posters with characters from Jet Force Gemini and a jiggie quest involving unfreezing a Rare relic named Sabreman. The second title is too soon to start being meta, guys! The game gives off the impression that a sequel to Banjo-Kazooie was greenlit, but Rare shared the same weary sentiment about sequels that I tend to express. I’m not sure if this flippant direction is an attempt to sabotage the player’s immersion or if Rare genuinely thought it made the game more discernible from Banjo-Kazooie. Still, it indicates that something was stirring at the Rare offices during this game’s development.

However, just because Banjo-Tooie makes a fuss out of having to exist, it doesn’t mean that the game didn’t ultimately make an effort. As I stated before, the quality of life enhancements that usually come with a sequel is certainly apparent. For example, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with Banjo’s combat moves. Here, Banjo’s roll maneuver to mow down enemies is far less stilted, as he can now shift the direction slightly. When in an idle position, Banjo has thankfully stopped trying to attack with his pitiful arm slaps and the game leaves the short-range offense entirely to Kazooie. One glaring issue found in Banjo-Kazooie that encompassed most players' gripes and grievances was the traversal of the hub world. Having to make the trek all the way up Gruntilda’s Lair in the later portions of the game from its entrance at the bottom was a tedious excursion unfitting for the accessible feeling of a hub world, and the teleportation cauldrons were too sparsely placed to amend this issue. Banjo-Tooie’s hub and its levels are divided into distinct districts that all come with a teleportation mechanism. Simply place Banjo into the dome fit for a mole and a menu will appear to select where to arrive at, provided Banjo has already visited that area already. The levels also feature something similar in the vein of a warp pad which transports Banjo across the map, but I’ll touch on that in further detail later on. The developers have corrected every last one of Banjo-Kazooie's minor sniggles and while the amount of these is marginal, at least the developers paid attention and acted accordingly for the little effort required.

Isle O’ Hags is the name of the new nucleus between all of Banjo-Tooie’s levels. Technically, it encompasses the entire eclectic island nation that Banjo, his friends, and the Gruntilda sisters who are apparently a native species. Every area from Banjo-Kazooie also shares the same dominion but for now, let’s focus on the district revealed behind the dirt wall of Spiral Mountain. Isle O’ Hags essentially copies the same design philosophy as Gruntilda’s Lair; a steep ascent where the peak of the climb is the climactic point of the game, with frequent inhibitors in the shape of arbitrarily-assigned jiggy quantities to implore the player to visit the levels and to stretch out the pacing to elevate the scope of the journey. While both hubs share the same overall design and collectathon direction, they differ in the atmosphere. Ironically, for a place named after the pejorative term for Gruntilda, the looming presence of Gruntilda and her sisters is practically absent, never throwing her voice from her chamber to cackle discouraging limericks in Banjo’s ears. That, and the oppressiveness that Gruntilda’s Lair exuded was contributed by the enclosed cavern setting, something that winding seaside cliffs of the isle certainly don’t. Still, I actually prefer Isle O’ Hags as a hub world, and not only because the fast travel domes make climbing it much breezier. The developers have also streamlined the level-unlocking process. Once Banjo collects a certain amount of jiggies, he’ll revisit a jiggy spiritual temple near the base of the hub where solving a jigsaw puzzle will reward him with the monk-like Master Jiggywiggy beaming a ray of light that rivals Gruntilda’s laser beam to the unlocked area. I thought exploring to look for the painting with the missing jigsaw pieces made for an unnecessary additional venture, so I’m content with returning to the same sacred jiggy domain once in a while to further the game.

Banjo-Tooie’s branching areas were an especially exciting prospect because the previous game exhausted all of the typical level tropes seen across 3D platformers of the same ilk. This doesn’t inherently mean that the developers have hit a wall with nowhere to run; rather, scratching off all the boxes on the 3D platformer cheat sheet forces the developers to amplify their creative juices. Overall, the level tropes on display in Banjo-Tooie are a little less conventional. Mayahem Temple’s core inspiration stems from the ancient civilizations from Central America, while the humid, terraform dinosaur biome Terrydactyland takes Banjo further back in time far before the dawn of human civilization. Jolly Roger’s Lagoon separates the sea creatures from the land lubbers when Banjo dives into the basin of the port town and discovers an immaculate underwater world beneath the surface. Hailfire Peaks presents the most classic of contrasts with a fire and ice world coexisting on opposite sides of one another. Glitter Gulch Mine reminds me of one of those hokey prospector attractions where families get their pictures taken at, complete with a train station and shiny piles of counterfeit gold. Speaking of attractions, my favorite area in Banjo-Tooie from a conceptual standpoint is the amusement park of Witchyworld run by Gruntilda, a despondent carnival that makes every Six Flags location look safe and professional by comparison. In fact, the churlish atmosphere found in Witchyworld sort of extends to every other level to some extent as well. None of these levels capture that cheery, captivating vibe that oozed from levels like Freezeezy Peak or Click Clock Wood and instead borrow the same filthy dirge found in an area like Clanker's Cavern. Grunty Industries certainly exemplifies a glum, morale-free factory and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think Hailfire was a censored misprint of the damned afterlife of a certain religious denomination because of all of its scorching fire and brimstone. Still, the variety on display rivals the level selection of the previous game marvelously.

In lieu of Bottles pushing up daisies, who will teach Banjo and the bird new techniques to survive these harsher worlds? Bottles' brother, the army drill sergeant Jamjars, will pop out of his various underground hatches to whip Banjo and Kazooie into shape, promising them that they’ll learn some military-grade shit after Bottles simply taught them the basics. He doesn’t teach Banjo how to sneak up behind a man and snap his neck like Solid Snake, but I’m sure some of these moves are still illegal in at least seven different countries. The developers found a better use of the golden musical notes in Banjo-Tooie as they can be used as an accumulated currency to unlock a new move from Jamjars. Some of these new feats of dexterity come in the form of quality-of-life enhancements, with ledge grabbing and the Breegull Blast seeming like necessary afterthoughts after the first game was released. Kazooie gains a smattering of other egg types alongside the standard ones, including fire, ice, grenades, and birthing a walking cuckoo bomb with a timed or manual detonator. The Beak Bomb is now enhanced with the Bill Drill to crack open large boulders and unscrew bolts. Temporary power-ups that involve the Talon Trot add some moon shoes to bounce high and shoes that can climb up inclines with footprints on them. The most interesting of these new moves are the ones the pair learn for their individual merit. “Split pads” with both characters' faces on them separate both of them until they regroup on the same spot, proving that Kazooie isn’t fused to Banjo like an abominable conjoined twin. Banjo’s individual moves involve his backpack in some capacity, whether it be hopping inside it to mitigate damage or carrying someone else in it for a change like a taxi service. Kazooie mostly performs enhanced versions of her innate abilities without Banjo’s weight to contend with, on top of hatching other creatures' eggs for them. Banjo-Tooie doubles the number of learnable techniques while keeping the old ones intact, and playing as the dynamic duo separately doesn’t feel too much like a handicap.

Beloved character Mumbo Jumbo was present at the card game and did not perish at the scaly hand of Grundtilda, so he doesn’t have an excuse to sit this adventure out like Bottles. Fortunately, Banjo-Tooie had big plans for the pygmy shaman. Visiting Mumbo in his now two-story skull house with the new and easily obtained Glowbo collectible will grant the player the ability to play as Mumbo on the field. His range of movement is fairly limited, and the taser staff he brings to defend himself is more humorous to use than practical. Bringing Mumbo to pads with his face on them triggers him to use supernatural magic to levitate colossally-sized objects, perform a rain dance to create a rainbow bridge, resurrect the dead, etc. A new magical companion Banjo-Tooie introduces is the beautiful native girl Wumba, whose character is probably a more overtly racist depiction than Mumbo. She fulfills the transformation mechanic introduced in Banjo Kazooie, changing Banjo’s shape into an animal or object when he enters her wigwam and takes a dip in the pink, Glowbo-powered pool in its center. Some of the new transformations include a dynamite plunger, a submarine, and even a full-sized fucking T-Rex that bulldozes all in its path. Even the washing machine easter egg from the last game actually becomes a useful mechanic in Grunty Industries. As much as playing as Mumbo and the returning transformations serve as nice additional layers to the gameplay, what interests me more is the strained relationship between Mumbo and Wumba. Considering their feuding attitudes toward each other, these two obviously have some intimate history together, right?

Judging by all of Banjo-Tooie’s exciting new features that are all fun and fluid, it would seem like it’s a sequel that renders Banjo-Kazooie obsolete. However, the way in which Banjo-Tooie utilizes all of these new features in the quasi-open world environment is the source of its downfall. If Banjo-Kazooie's single-world summation of its design is conspicuous, then Banjo-Tooie’s is circuitous. In Banjo-Tooie, exploration is still required to progress the game, but it is rarely rewarded. Oftentimes, excavating the area and finding a jiggy comes with several unnecessary extra steps. As much as I enjoy the lark of being able to play as Mumbo, retrieving him from his perch just to trigger a cutscene in a specific place and then trailing back to his skull house grated on my nerves one too many times. Grunty Industries, the area that exemplifies the worst of Banjo-Tooie’s bloated design, is a languid climb up the five floors of the industrial cesspit with finding the stairs for each following floor as the central progression gimmick. At the apex point of the factory lies a jiggy on a wooden crate, which should’ve been the reward for making it this far. However, this point is still littered with unnecessary obstacles to pad out the levels. Banjo-Kazooie was consistently more engaging because the quicker satisfaction of simply finding a jiggy tickled the player’s sense of accomplishment more frequently. It can take longer to find half of the jiggies in Banjo-Tooie than all of them in any of the Banjo-Kazooie areas. It seems like the new features like the split pads and the alternate characters only enable this circuity even more, as they are often implemented as the extra and not-so-obvious steps to obtaining a jiggy. This level of augmented length also extends to the other collectibles, as the jingos in plain sight will most likely be their evil, bizarro counterparts the minjos who will dupe Banjo and harm him. Most of the jiggies in the game feel as if they’re annoyingly out of reach as if the game is dangling them over the player as a cruel tease. Coupling this with the swollen breadth of each area, I thank the lord for the warp pads because, without them, I’d go as far as to say the game would be unplayable.

Another factor of Banjo-Tooie’s bloatedness is due to the developers attempting to intertwine each area and craft an interconnected world. Considering the game is modeled the same as the sectioned-off playgrounds in the first game, it’s no surprise its execution didn’t work. The adjacent paths between areas require a heavy suspension of disbelief and only seem to be applicable in select situations to make collecting a jiggy more drudgery than anything like delivering food from Witchyland to the struggling cavemen in Terrydactyland. Chuffy, the train that should ideally facilitate the rationale for an interconnected world, only rolls through six of the nine areas. If that doesn’t indicate that the idea was unfeasible, I don’t know what does. What irritates me the most about their decision is that it is the biggest contributor to the fleeting jiggy hunt quandary in Banjo-Tooie as most of the jiggies can’t be obtained until Banjo or Kazooie requires a move at a later level. Approximately half of a level’s jiggies will be kept out of reach initially and in a game with levels that are supposed to foster exploration, being limited to only a few jiggies needed to progress the game is a big kick in the balls from developers. One might raise an eyebrow at my criticism of this direction considering it mirrors the design philosophy of the Metroidvania genre, one of my niche video game favorites that I constantly tout. For one, Metroidvania worlds never have slapdashed interconnectivity when its world doesn’t warrant it. Secondly, finding an upgrade in a Metroidvania game will always put the player on a direct path and make the once-inhibited passage a cakewalk to traverse, something Banjo-Tooie still goes out of its way to reject even when the move and or upgrade is learned.

It seems like most of the jiggies not obstructed by the developer's ill-planned directives come in the form of minigames. As pleased as I was to stumble upon these to finally earn a jiggy in a somewhat fair and natural way, it’s a shame that many of them boiled down to the same task of shooting or collecting objects of three different colors with different point totals. I’ll be seeing objects of red, green, and blue hopping around in my sleep at this point. I greatly missed the variety from Banjo-Kazooie, even if those minigames were easier than grade school arithmetic. While it does seem like I’m complaining, I’ll easily engage with these minigames as opposed to the other option. In a select few areas, entering certain sections will make Banjo cock Kazooie like a gun and the perspective will shift to the first-person view. As amused as I initially was to witness “Banjo-KaDOOMie,” these minigames were more hellish than anything from the pioneering FPS franchise. Kazooie’s targeting is as responsive as a lazy eye and trying to skewer enemies with her beak like a bayonet made me feel like a drunk civil war reenactor.

The jiggy tasks I did enjoy and sought out over the rest were the boss battles. They were few and far between in Banjo-Kazooie, and I’d be lying if I said that the wooden box or Nipper the hermit crab were herculean foes that were hard to conquer. Each level in Banjo-Tooie features a mighty foe worthy of the boss battle title, and they are a varied and challenging bunch. The fights between the twin dragons of the opposite representative of Hailfire Peaks were in some pretty taut arenas, and Weldar featured enough simultaneous offensive tactics to overwhelm me. Popping the monstrous boils off of the angler fish Fak Fak and the stitched patches of the giant inflatable beast in the circus tent by soaring and swimming over them made the bosses seem formidable, and the Targitzan duel managed to make that particular FPS section palatable. Klungo even cements his role as a recurring supporting character through frequent encounters. To my surprise, I ended up enjoying the final boss fight against Gruntilda and her drill tank more than her final fight from the first game because of how involved it is. Those final increments of her health bar had me sweating bullets. Or, perhaps I enjoy it because the developers made the bizarrely-implemented quiz show portion of the finale tolerable this time around, and it's hilariously morbid to boot.

Banjo-Tooie isn’t quite an example of a sophomore slump. However, the game seems to have tacked on a sophomore seventeen pounds due to the developers having ambitions bigger than their stomachs, and it’s enough weight to make the game feel comparatively fatigued and sluggish throughout. Either this was a faulty wish, or Rare took the piss out of the natural evolution of the franchise and this is their idea of a joke, judging from the game’s more negative tone. Behind all that excess fat, Banjo-Tooie feels like the same game as its trend-setting predecessor, and it even makes the Banjo experience more inviting because of the effort of the minor improvements. Banjo-Tooie made me exhausted at simply performing the bare minimum to complete the game, which is certainly not a feeling I got after finishing Banjo-Kazooie.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

This game improved a bunch on the original. But the maze-like levels and sheer length of this game totally destroyed the fun by the end. If this game was half as long it would probably go as high as 4 stars

Oh? You're approaching Banjo-Tooie? Instead of steering clear, you're actually considering playing this game? Even though its flaws, like a persistent itch, gnaw at your patience, making you question your gaming choices?

I can't endure the frustrations of this game without expressing my discontent.

Oh ho! Then collect as many Jiggies as you like.

Banjo-Kazooie is an A++ absolutely stellar experience top to bottom start to finish. Tooie takes everything good about that game and throws it in the garbage. All the levels are way, way too big, and almost every task relies on some kind of bizarre point and click adventure game logic. Most of my time was spent running back and forth through large, empty wastelands trying to figure out why certain things could and could not unlock certain other things. Playing this was a chore.

a LOT of walking around compared to the first game. like, a LOT. the art, writing, and music are a step up from the first game, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is much less snappy than the first, sometimes even becoming a slog. still enjoyable, just less so.

I love Banjo Tooie, I'll defend it to the death, I believe it does some incredibly impressive things and is one of the few games that actually showed off what the Nintendo 64 was capable of (albeit near the end of its life, but hey, better late than never)...but, it's just not as good of a game as its predecessor

Levels were far too vacant for no actual reason (looking at you, Terrydactyland...I understand it needed to be like that for the transformation, but man, talk about diminishing returns), a lot of the types of Jiggy missions got far too repetitive , especially near the end of the game (now many times do we need to go through rings?) and the backtracking and tedium got a bit unforgivable at points, but, dammit, you know what? Again, this is likely 100 percent nostalgia talking, but I still have a lot of fondness for this game

For all of its faults, there were definitely some things it did fairly well; the interconnected levels thing brought on a few clever bits, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy all of the unique boss battles

Overall, it's flawed, but I find it almost as lovable as the first game

This game does Banjo Kazooie bigger, not better. Backtracking and large worlds slow down the reward based gameplay that platformers are known for. a good game definitely, but doesn't outshine its predecessor.

Before I went on holiday I was playing this, and I was like "this could be a 5 or 6 because of some of the fun moments", but coming back off holiday and detoxing while playing some good games and getting back into this! Wow! It is bad. Don't even bother trying to sate your curiosity. I played Banjo 1 some years ago and whilst I don't remember it living up to the dunkey hype, I remember it being nowhere near this bad.

Avoid like the plague.

Avoid like the plague.

The first game, but now too big for its own good. At least Humba and the good soundtrack came out of it.

Oh, also, despite being born in 2006, Tooie released on the day that would be my birthday 6 years prior to that (My birthday: 11/20/2006. Tooie's release: 11/20/2000)


Every YouTuber sold me the lie back in the early 10's that this game was really good. Boring!

a very unfortunate sequel that completely misses the high notes that the original hit by equating scale with quality. everything is bigger but certainly not better. a slog to play through and some puzzles are just stupid, made worse by the fact that so many maps are difficult to navigate due to them having the same textures spread across miles and miles of unidentifiable land that will make you end up lost and frustrated and unhappy that this game just isn't nearly as good as banjo kazooie 1 on the n64. what a damn shame.