It's really funny that Rare got the whole 3D platformer collectathon thing so perfect here on their first try that every time they went back to the genre for another attempt they could never get it quite as good again.

This is one of those games where you can tell the entire dev team was passionate about having their product be the best one on the shelf. They stuffed everything they possibly could into this game, and yet you never feel lost or overwhelmed. Sure some of it hasn't aged great (the camera, Rusty Bucket Bay, and pretty much everything about the ending to name a few things) but in the face of everything Banjo-Kazooie gets right these are relatively small annoyances.