Better than Maz 64 soooooooo ez. Review over.
__________
Okay, okay.
Wow. What a fantastic game - I have a new autistic obsession.
Banjo-Kazooie is a game I missed as a kid because I was in a Playstation family, and we never owned an N64. This is one game that makes me feel like I really missed out.
Banjo-Kazooie is a charming little game by a British development team called Rare that features a wholesome bear trying to stop his little sister, who wants to go on an adventure, getting used as fuel for Gruntilda's bimbofication machine.
Usually I can gush about games I like but I feel as if I can't contribute anything new to the conversation - this game has been praised to the high heavens and beyond and it's easy to see why.
If you're like me and you don't understand the collectathon youtuber hype, you might be a bit confused as to why this game is so popular when you play it. In fact, I can wager your experience might end up a little something like this:
Starting the game - Yeah its alright.
Early Midgame - Eh, i'm not understanding the hype.
Midgame - Okay, I can see why people like this.
Late Midgame - This game sucks, its frustrating and unfair. I'm going to stop playing (this is where I imagine the 6/10s come from for most people, as this is what I was going to rate it).
Lategame / 100% - Holy shit, this is peak gaming.
I think this has to do with a few things - this game is quite brutal at times. It's not afraid to hit you with the learning curve and it hits you hard - hell, at the midgame the beehives (where you heal yourself with honeycombs - it's so charming), will fight back when you break them. At first, this seems stupid, counterintuitive and annoying, but once I figured out how to deal with them (shoot them with an egg to break and then Talon Trot to collect all the pieces), I never got hit by a swarm of bees ever again.
Another huge outlier is the go-to of wall-enemies. By god, they are annoying, and their hitboxes are ruthless, knocking you off edges when you weren't even next to them. And even though theyre in the game from the second or third level, they really ramp it up when they start throwing like 20 into each level later in the game. It really makes you want to stop playing, getting knocked off over and over and killed by cheap hitboxes. That is, until you realise that they are easily killed by a jumping attack from Kazooie. When my wife accidentally done this at the end of the game, my jaw literally dropped and I said "bruh". I had been stopping at these things like traffic lights the entire game and you're meant to just jump into them and kill them right as they leave their tunnel. Bam, never got hit again from that point onward.
This game hugely rewards you for learning its nuance and I think that's something most games just don't do. The game is unforgiving and brutal but if you know how to deal with everything it throws at you you'll knock it out of the park every time, and that's a fantastic feeling when you get it down. Unfortunately, I think it's a hindrance to the enjoyability of the overall package, especially for a first time playthrough, that you can go so far into the game without working some of these things out (maybe its just me being stupid).
There are some genuine issues here though - the camera, my god is it shit. It might be the camera of all time. You start to remember where it happens by the time you 100% the game, but jesus christ, this game likes to hard troll you with the camera mega pivoting to the other side of you against a wall, or enemies being hidden just out of sight of the camera when you're doing a difficult platforming segment. It's a definite, HUGE downside to this game that absolutely warrants a remake.
Another thing that I think is counterintuitive is how poorly the lives system is handled. For some reason, you lose your 1-ups every time you Save & Quit the game - not that this will be an issue, since you'll die so constantly you won't ever get to see that until you've thrashed the game anyway, but I thought it was weird regardless. The bit that is annoying, is that you have 1-ups, but they only serve to save you the hassle of running back to the level. The game gives you ONE chance to get everything in it in one go, the first time you get there. This challenge makes it so unenjoyable in certain levels. You have to collect every note in one run of the level to get all of them, but you have to make sure you do it to a certain extent otherwise you won't be opening any doors. In hindsight, if I was to recommend this game to anyone, I would suggest making sure they get as many notes as possible FIRST before attempting any jiggie challenges to make sure they don't get cucked out of progress, and then come back and hit the jiggies and the jinjos after, if you didn't manage to get all the jinjos whilst collecting the notes. I've heard that the XBOX version of this game saves the notes you've collected but I don't know if I like this or not - I enjoy the challenge of collecting them all in one run, it's just frustrating if you're trying to do the jiggies aswell. If you were to solely focus on getting the notes, it's a lot more manageable and less frustrating.
Overall, this is a challenging, fun, only occasionally unfair, quintessential platformer. In fact, as of this review, I believe this is the best 3D platformer (especially of it's kind, the 3D open-ish world collectathon) to ever exist, and even if it is topped by another someday, it was certainly the best at its time and for a long, long time. The issues Banjo Kazooie has are great in strength but few in number, and the game is massively carried by its beautiful levels, art style, sprawling and fun to navigate hub world, and my god, the British sense of humour in this game has me chuckling even at dialogue i've seen before. If this gets the N.Sane Trilogy treatment with improvements this could easily be improved and tweaked to perfection.
Oh, and the final boss is peak. One of the best in gaming history, especially if we're talking about 3D Platformers - challenging, brutal, but fair and fun to master, as I feel all final bosses should be.
__________
Okay, okay.
Wow. What a fantastic game - I have a new autistic obsession.
Banjo-Kazooie is a game I missed as a kid because I was in a Playstation family, and we never owned an N64. This is one game that makes me feel like I really missed out.
Banjo-Kazooie is a charming little game by a British development team called Rare that features a wholesome bear trying to stop his little sister, who wants to go on an adventure, getting used as fuel for Gruntilda's bimbofication machine.
Usually I can gush about games I like but I feel as if I can't contribute anything new to the conversation - this game has been praised to the high heavens and beyond and it's easy to see why.
If you're like me and you don't understand the collectathon youtuber hype, you might be a bit confused as to why this game is so popular when you play it. In fact, I can wager your experience might end up a little something like this:
Starting the game - Yeah its alright.
Early Midgame - Eh, i'm not understanding the hype.
Midgame - Okay, I can see why people like this.
Late Midgame - This game sucks, its frustrating and unfair. I'm going to stop playing (this is where I imagine the 6/10s come from for most people, as this is what I was going to rate it).
Lategame / 100% - Holy shit, this is peak gaming.
I think this has to do with a few things - this game is quite brutal at times. It's not afraid to hit you with the learning curve and it hits you hard - hell, at the midgame the beehives (where you heal yourself with honeycombs - it's so charming), will fight back when you break them. At first, this seems stupid, counterintuitive and annoying, but once I figured out how to deal with them (shoot them with an egg to break and then Talon Trot to collect all the pieces), I never got hit by a swarm of bees ever again.
Another huge outlier is the go-to of wall-enemies. By god, they are annoying, and their hitboxes are ruthless, knocking you off edges when you weren't even next to them. And even though theyre in the game from the second or third level, they really ramp it up when they start throwing like 20 into each level later in the game. It really makes you want to stop playing, getting knocked off over and over and killed by cheap hitboxes. That is, until you realise that they are easily killed by a jumping attack from Kazooie. When my wife accidentally done this at the end of the game, my jaw literally dropped and I said "bruh". I had been stopping at these things like traffic lights the entire game and you're meant to just jump into them and kill them right as they leave their tunnel. Bam, never got hit again from that point onward.
This game hugely rewards you for learning its nuance and I think that's something most games just don't do. The game is unforgiving and brutal but if you know how to deal with everything it throws at you you'll knock it out of the park every time, and that's a fantastic feeling when you get it down. Unfortunately, I think it's a hindrance to the enjoyability of the overall package, especially for a first time playthrough, that you can go so far into the game without working some of these things out (maybe its just me being stupid).
There are some genuine issues here though - the camera, my god is it shit. It might be the camera of all time. You start to remember where it happens by the time you 100% the game, but jesus christ, this game likes to hard troll you with the camera mega pivoting to the other side of you against a wall, or enemies being hidden just out of sight of the camera when you're doing a difficult platforming segment. It's a definite, HUGE downside to this game that absolutely warrants a remake.
Another thing that I think is counterintuitive is how poorly the lives system is handled. For some reason, you lose your 1-ups every time you Save & Quit the game - not that this will be an issue, since you'll die so constantly you won't ever get to see that until you've thrashed the game anyway, but I thought it was weird regardless. The bit that is annoying, is that you have 1-ups, but they only serve to save you the hassle of running back to the level. The game gives you ONE chance to get everything in it in one go, the first time you get there. This challenge makes it so unenjoyable in certain levels. You have to collect every note in one run of the level to get all of them, but you have to make sure you do it to a certain extent otherwise you won't be opening any doors. In hindsight, if I was to recommend this game to anyone, I would suggest making sure they get as many notes as possible FIRST before attempting any jiggie challenges to make sure they don't get cucked out of progress, and then come back and hit the jiggies and the jinjos after, if you didn't manage to get all the jinjos whilst collecting the notes. I've heard that the XBOX version of this game saves the notes you've collected but I don't know if I like this or not - I enjoy the challenge of collecting them all in one run, it's just frustrating if you're trying to do the jiggies aswell. If you were to solely focus on getting the notes, it's a lot more manageable and less frustrating.
Overall, this is a challenging, fun, only occasionally unfair, quintessential platformer. In fact, as of this review, I believe this is the best 3D platformer (especially of it's kind, the 3D open-ish world collectathon) to ever exist, and even if it is topped by another someday, it was certainly the best at its time and for a long, long time. The issues Banjo Kazooie has are great in strength but few in number, and the game is massively carried by its beautiful levels, art style, sprawling and fun to navigate hub world, and my god, the British sense of humour in this game has me chuckling even at dialogue i've seen before. If this gets the N.Sane Trilogy treatment with improvements this could easily be improved and tweaked to perfection.
Oh, and the final boss is peak. One of the best in gaming history, especially if we're talking about 3D Platformers - challenging, brutal, but fair and fun to master, as I feel all final bosses should be.
B2THEO2THEOBBY
4 months ago