I've replayed Banjo once or twice a year for the past 10 years and not once has it gotten boring. That's the best compliment I can give to any game really

For most people who grew up playing video games, myself included, I didn't really appreciate them until much later when I matured past the age of roughly 12. I was given random slop as a kid because I wasn't really able to discriminate what I wanted and didn't want and ended up getting random Wii, GameCube, DS and GBA shit like Wall-E on the Wii and the Titanic game on the DS from my family and friends without me having any say in the matter. On rare occasion, I would get good games like Smash Bros. Brawl and my cousins entire fucking GameCube collection FOR FREE, which was pretty much every best selling title on the system. In real life I would go around calling random DSiware slop peak because I was a dumb little baby boy and my friends all thought i had severe mental deficiencies (they still do) and it wasn't until i walked into GameStop and saw that they had a stack of n64 games that I got to choose what game I wanted. Guess what. I chose Mario 64 because it had fucking Mario on it However my dad actually pointed out Banjo-Kazooie from the stack and guilt tripped me into buying it with birthday money by saying "but its going to be here all alone and nobody will ever play it if you don't" so I googled some gameplay on my dads iPhone and was like Oh yeah. This is fucking awesome and i bought it.

I feel like this was the first game where it was like a touched by God moment for me where I recognized that I was playing a peak video game. I was able to notice small details that I hadn't noticed with any game before. One of my friends had a similar experience and said it was akin to them taking adderall for the first time. I was mind-blown that a game could be this good, and the first video game opinion that I remember having was that this game felt better than Mario 64, something that I still hold the opinion of to this day. Also, when I say I was addicted I mean that I 100%ed this game which is an achievement beyond comprehension because the only other game I did that with was Donkey Kong 64 a year or two prior. Don't ask

Rare had achieved a lot of shit that Nintendo otherwise thought was impossible on the N64. I remember reading somewhere that they said facial animations or something along those lines would have been impossible on the N64, which is why they weren't able to do that with ocarina of time but ending up doing it with Wind Waker. However, Rare actually did this exact thing and more with conkers bad fur day and if doctorissa or reyntime like this review they didn't actually read it. Even with Diddy Kong racing they did what Nintendo couldn't and made the game fully 3D while Mario Kart 64 had 3D environments and 2D character sprites. With Banjo, rather than a technical marvel it just feels like an evolution in gameplay, unless you consider the fact that getting a jiggy doesn't boot you out of the level while getting a star in Mario 64 does. It feels highly refined in almost every way, almost as if the developers studied Mario 64's sandbox approach and found every single grievance I specifically had with the game and ironed it out until it was gone. I won't compare and contrast the two for much longer, but more than half of the levels in Mario 64 fucking suck and the movement is even worse especially if you're not playing on an original controller. On the contrary, Banjo's level design and movement still remains as some of the best I've seen in 3D platforming. It feels like Banjo's movement constantly works with me instead of against me. It never felt nearly as slippery and while it can be a little sluggish, I think they struck the perfect balance.

There's a lot more I could say, but I'll end the review by saying that I nearly had a heart attack when Banjo got revealed in smash bros. Like my vision was fading and i felt tingles all over my body i thought i was going to die because of how much i was screaming. Never felt that before and will never feel that again. Love this fucking game to death