Banjo is fun, and that's honestly not something I expected going into this game. After my experiences with super old early 3D games of this era ended up being mostly on the negative end, I was surprised at what a relaxing fun game this was. I ended up really enjoying my first experience with Banjo Kazooie, but it got me pondering: why did I have fun with this but didn't have fun at all with Mario 64? By design I prefer platformers where you can really mess around with their movement and experiment and Mario 64 has that on display ten fold while Banjo is super limited in this regard. So why did I end up not only hating that game but having fun with this one? After thinking it over I came up with a couple of explanations.
For one, the overall handling and ground control is LEAGUES better than 64's overly sluggish almost tank like base movement. Moving around was no problem at all and the levels were all small and compactly built around Banjo's overall relaxed easy going pace and speed, it felt great from the get go. It's simply fun to explore the stages and find collectibles without getting booted out of the stage the moment you collected them. There's overall a lot of fun silly charm the game has that definitely bolstered my enjoyment. Yeah the swimming controls aren't super ideal, it's often hard to tell what object is breakable (specifically windows and doors that lead to different rooms but most of them look like any flat uninteractive texture already in the game) and the final boss sucks, but I overall had a good time. It's not super amazing and didn't blow me away or anything, but it didn't need to. I feel not every game needs to be an 8-9/10 or bust, some games can just be simple and fun to play through and not much more than that, I can vibe with it.
For one, the overall handling and ground control is LEAGUES better than 64's overly sluggish almost tank like base movement. Moving around was no problem at all and the levels were all small and compactly built around Banjo's overall relaxed easy going pace and speed, it felt great from the get go. It's simply fun to explore the stages and find collectibles without getting booted out of the stage the moment you collected them. There's overall a lot of fun silly charm the game has that definitely bolstered my enjoyment. Yeah the swimming controls aren't super ideal, it's often hard to tell what object is breakable (specifically windows and doors that lead to different rooms but most of them look like any flat uninteractive texture already in the game) and the final boss sucks, but I overall had a good time. It's not super amazing and didn't blow me away or anything, but it didn't need to. I feel not every game needs to be an 8-9/10 or bust, some games can just be simple and fun to play through and not much more than that, I can vibe with it.