Flawed and ambitious, Banjo-Tooie is full of so many memorable ideas from the weird 'find the doubloons in this tiny town' of Jolly Roger's Lagoon, to combing a theme park for goodies. What stops these things from feeling merely like little fetch quests is that they usually relate to the moveset in some way - Banjo-Tooie is essentially a point-and-click-puzzle-mechanics adventure expressed through a fairly puzzle and exploration focused platformer. Sure the game is about 50/50 on whether these puzzles feel nice or not, but when things work it's a delight to see your moves put into some new joke or mini-story's context. I like that the moveset never becomes overly powerful: even if some moves amount to keys, the moves' scopes remain constrained enough to still give the levels personality by the end.
The level design goes all over the place, but the theming and little NPCs always pulls the levels together in at least an acceptable way (not all levels are great, of course.) Things feel thought out.
I have to give a hand to Grunty Industries for being so ambitious - we basically get a 3D Zelda dungeon, but far larger and ambitious than any Zelda dungeon ever made. Weaving between a building interior and exterior, spanning 5 floors, themed around all these aspects of a factory - on some ways it feels like a dungeon: it's so complex that it kind of eludes your full spatial comprehension of it, while still being 'logical' enough to somehow keep yourself oriented. Unlike the way some game dungeons give you maps so that you never miss a thing, Grunty Industries is happy to just let you not be able to find everything. "Don't 100% me, just leave the mystery until next time." I like that. The mystery isn't in some meta-layer or 4th-wall trick: the mystery is right in front of you, it's contained in your failure to grasp the ridiculous layout of the level. And in some ways that feels truer to life. When do we ever know the complete depth of anything?
...That being said, if you ever play this, make sure to bind fast-forward to your controller's R2 trigger. I mean you can play it the 'old normal' way if you want but I honestly don't think the added hours you'll spend walking slowly around will add much to the experience.
The level design goes all over the place, but the theming and little NPCs always pulls the levels together in at least an acceptable way (not all levels are great, of course.) Things feel thought out.
I have to give a hand to Grunty Industries for being so ambitious - we basically get a 3D Zelda dungeon, but far larger and ambitious than any Zelda dungeon ever made. Weaving between a building interior and exterior, spanning 5 floors, themed around all these aspects of a factory - on some ways it feels like a dungeon: it's so complex that it kind of eludes your full spatial comprehension of it, while still being 'logical' enough to somehow keep yourself oriented. Unlike the way some game dungeons give you maps so that you never miss a thing, Grunty Industries is happy to just let you not be able to find everything. "Don't 100% me, just leave the mystery until next time." I like that. The mystery isn't in some meta-layer or 4th-wall trick: the mystery is right in front of you, it's contained in your failure to grasp the ridiculous layout of the level. And in some ways that feels truer to life. When do we ever know the complete depth of anything?
...That being said, if you ever play this, make sure to bind fast-forward to your controller's R2 trigger. I mean you can play it the 'old normal' way if you want but I honestly don't think the added hours you'll spend walking slowly around will add much to the experience.