i'm surprised how genuinely solid and well-made this was! it's very obviously heavily inspired by the donkey kong country returns series, and while it never quite reaches the level of innovation, level design quality, and exhilaration highs of especially tropical freeze it's a pretty good alternative! you might think tropical freeze is a bit of an unfair comparison considering it's like THE gold standard for 2d platformers (at least in my opinion) but the level of inspiration kinda demands that comparison in my opinion. I don't think any other donkey kong country inspired indie game really comes close to this one though. it looks pretty good, has some decent music, and movement feels really solid! i don't really have much negative to say, i wish the dojo levels weren't on the map since they just reuse the bonus stages from the real levels and while the controls are pretty great, it feels like the wall jump takes a second to activate and it caught me a couple times.

i'm mainly knocking off points because it's a little TOO DKCR inspired and it could benefit greatly from a few more worlds and a bit more of a ramp up in difficulty within those worlds. i had a pretty consistently good time but it never really had those big over the top and exhilarating moments i love in 2d platformers, especially tropical freeze to take it to the next level for me. considering you can get it for $20 max and often on sale for way less it's a super worthwhile pickup and i'd like to see more from this team, it was a lot of fun!

Mega Man (X/ZX/Zero) is a series indie games very often try to recreate and capture the magic of, I enjoy a lot of them but this is one of the best games to do it. It's most inspired by Mega Man Zero in my experience. The hub, chip system, rescuing civilians in the levels are all very much inspired from that game but in my opinion done even better than it was in the original.

Gameplay and control are the biggest stand out, the movement and level design are super fun and exciting. I wouldn't say too many level gimmicks are super original but it's just very refined and done super well. Kai feels great to control, the combat takes a little to make sense but once you start to understand it and learn how to use it alongside your grapple hook it's incredibly satisfying! There's also a lot of chips to slightly change how combat/movement feels and you can use those to better hone in how you want Kai to feel. I personally used chips that gave me an extra jump mid-air, and made my attack have extra range/faster and it felt amazing. The bosses were exciting too, the only complaint I would have is they honestly felt a bit easy once I got a better grasp of the game + had some upgrades. The attacks and patterns were super fun though, and I loved the burst attacks they get. I won't spoil it but this game has a really cool way to do a boss rush that I thought was creative and fun!

Graphically I adore how this game looks, super stylish and amazing pixel art. If I had to say one negative thing, the character designs while not bad I think are pretty generic. Namely the main 8 bosses, they're fun fights and don't look bad or anything but also aren't super memorable and don't stick out. Overall though the game is a bit simple but it works in the games favor and is great. The music wasn't bad by any means but much less memorable than the games it's inspired by. Obviously that's a really insane bar but it stuck out way less and I don't particularly remember any song.

This game rocked! I had been following it for a while and it lived up to all expectations I had going in, even exceeded them! If you're a fan of Mega Man, Mega Man X, or Mega Man Zero/ZX you absolutely will have a great time here, and even if you felt those games were a bit too intense you might find some enjoyment here. It's a lot more accesible and easy to jump into IMO and has some nice QoL stuff that make it a super easy reccommend if you're a fan of action platformers.

i'll start with the good here, and there's a good bit! i think this game looks phenomenal for the era, i know it chugged on n64 but with the update keeping the performance solid it just looks so great for the console. the music and sound design still is phenomenal but i'll say not a lot music stood out as much as the original game. still great, but not quite on the same level. the writing stood out as really funny here! the bit at the start where (SPOILERS) bottles dies and then you go to his house and his wife/kids talk about how much they love him and can't wait for him to get home while banjo is too scared to tell them about what happened was one of the funniest things i've ever seen in a game. it just kept getting worse and it was hilarious. there were a lot of genuinely funny moments here, the first one was good about this too but it stood out as extra funny here. i could do with a little less fourth wall breaks (something that i know is really bad in nuts and bolts lol) but it was still funny. the biggest plus by far is everything i complained about controls wise was fixed here in this game! you leave talon trot quicker, you can jump attack out of it, everything just feels even better! it still has that unique weight and feel of banjo that i liked but everything is faster and you're locked out of moves significantly less. on top of that, the movesets banjo and kazooie get when they're separated are so fun!! the double jump with banjo led to some fun sequence breaking that i loved, and genuinely make kazooie a little less slippery and build a game around her she was so fucking fun to control solo in this game! that was by far the best thing in this game, the control updates to the main characters and even the transformations generally feel better here. speaking of transformations, i liked a good bit of the little mini games here! i'm kind of a sucker for weird completely out of nowhere mini games and this game has a good bit of it that's fun and silly. some were terrible (any first person maze was bad and jesus christ the mary canary rematch was so absurdly difficult for no reason and so bad) but most were fun to do and i was excited to see them! there's some solid worlds here too, hailfire peaks is genuinely a top 3 world in both games but i'm also a huge sucker for a fire/ice motif. witchyworld, cloud cuckooland, and jolly roger's lagoon were all great too. jolly roger's is so visually interesting and impressive, it's not the most fun to navigate but i'm such a sucker for the ocean aesthetic and it's so gorgeous that i loved it anyways. bosses also were way more prevalent and they were generally charming and fun. the grunty fight was significantly less fun but otherwise the bosses felt like bigger deals and generally were more fun to battle. some were annoying but i appreciated the effort regardless.

negative wise, man are these worlds way too big LOL. there's such an absurd amount of back tracking and going between worlds you have to do, and while it's admittedly pretty cool to find ways the world connect (albeit in small rooms with single jiggies for the most part) there's so many jiggies that go between multiple worlds and they're pretty exhausting. the worst example for me was the lost dinosaur. you have to free her from her prison in witchyworld, find the train station, summon the train to witchyworld, then she has to get on that train, you then have to run all the way back to the dinosaur world and send the train there. the coolest part is that's just 1 third of that specific jiggy mission!!! it's absurd! on top of that you have 2 different character swaps now, you control mumbo jumbo now (who is very boring to control and just does a couple lame spells) and get transformed by humba wumba which usually is alright to control but the worlds are so massive that you probably have to go back and forth between her tent way too many times a level because you find something else you need to do. the washing machine was the worst here, you need to clean 6 bunnies outfits all throughout the entire level + press a switch, that also requires a mumbo spell to help you press it. it's exhausting sometimes. it really weighs some of the worlds down. cloud cuckooland found a solid middle ground here, not many connections to other worlds and it's all relatively self contained. it helps you have all the powerups you need in that world, which is another lame thing. there's a lot of jiggies you need to return to with new powerups, that works in a metroidvania but in here it just is kind of frustrating. kazooie was very good about this, only 1 powerup was in a later world, everything else you could get every collectable within that level. i much prefer that system. regardless, every level generally has this problem and it's pretty exhausting. and as much as i like how each character controls individually, there's a lot of moves you get for the individual character, but you can only get them while you're separated which is really annoying to! so many times i'd walk up to an upgrade silo, and get told i needed to ditch one of the characters. why?? just teach it to me but let me know it only works for a specific character, it's not like it was ever really a puzzle to get to the upgrade individually it was mostly just running back to an old room to separate and then come back and get the upgrade. sorry this was a bit rambly but it was pretty frustrating and by far the biggest issue i had with this game. the only other negative really is i generally preferred the more cheery and happy colors and tone of banjo-kazooie. i'm fine with this game being a bit darker but it's just a preference for me.

i heard some mixed things about this one going into it, and realistically it's like a 3.75 but instead of rounding down i decided to round up because i find these games soooo damn charming and silly. this was still a really good time and i don't regret playing it, but the worlds were just way too massive and required so much backtracking. if you just could turn into your humba wumba transformation at will and have mumbo jumbo show up at his switches without having to run to him and run back, genuinely this game is 10x better. levels would still be a bit too big but it'd be way more tolerable. good game, just too ambitious for its own good! really desperately wish we got the banjo threeie that was teased at the end here. could have been something very special.

btw i made a world tier list from both games and this is it hehe: https://imgur.com/gallery/XkH9weQ