Tooie also seemed to be slightly more standardised as a game. In practice, it just meant more downtime as you went from place to place – and the developers knew this, as evidenced by them including teleporters to try and mitigate it. The issue was the same one as many sprawling game worlds – the amount of actual gameplay didn’t see an equal increase. ‘Bigger’ was quite literal: Tooie’s overworld and individual levels were bumped up in size significantly, making the original seem rather cosy by comparison. Tooie, as you’d expect from a sequel, was aiming to be bigger and bolder than its predecessor – although this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Two years later saw the franchise return with a sequel, Banjo-Tooie. As recently as 2019 – 21 years and three console generations later – it was still making lists of the best games of all time. AllGame called it “raw gaming bliss”, and Gamepro went so far as to say it had surpassed Mario 64, its obvious model. This resulted in characters like Leaky the Bucket, Trunker the Tree, and Loggo the Toilet, most of whom needed your help with something or other (to Kazooie’s withering disgust).īanjo-Kazooie went down a storm with the critics and the public alike. In the fanciful world of Banjo Kazooie, everything could talk back – given life by nothing more than a pair of cartoon eyeballs and some muffled sounds that passed for speech. It would be little more than mice running mazes to find cheese if it wasn’t for easy-on-the-eye graphics, some excellent sound design, and above all, the characterisation.
![xbox banjo kazooie rom xbox banjo kazooie rom](https://cdn.ome.lt/CPO7Fx-CS9b3H-3U9oXvKqdRrx0=/970x360/smart/uploads/conteudo/fotos/banjo-kazooie-header.jpg)
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Outside of jumping around and defeating enemies, Banjo-Kazooie was primarily a collectathon, with the game worlds full of various magical MacGuffins – the most important being Jiggies (golden jigsaw pieces that unlocked new levels) and notes (golden musical notes that unlocked new moves).
![xbox banjo kazooie rom xbox banjo kazooie rom](https://vgboxart.com/boxes/DS/2618-banjokazooie-ds.jpg)
To reiterate, it showed you this every time you stopped playing. In a relic of early game design, simply saving and quitting would actually give you this bad ending, which really must be seen to be believed: And likewise, the story was straight out of fairy-tale, with an evil witch having kidnapped Banjo’s sister to steal her youth and beauty. The levels ran the gamut of well-worn platformer themes – desert, ice world (here with a side of Christmas), sea-side, haunted house – big, bold, familiar stuff. The Originals (Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie) Banjo-KazooieĪs I’ve written before, the original Banjo-Kazooie was a bit of a parody of the 3D platform game form, in particular of its Nintendo 64 neighbour Super Mario 64 – but it was the Mel Brooks kind of parody, the kind that’s done with such obvious love for what it’s parodying that it can’t help but be a pretty good example of the form itself.
![xbox banjo kazooie rom xbox banjo kazooie rom](http://media.vandal.net/i/1280x720/9-2019/20199511242783_1.jpg)
Instead of just one talking animal, eternally riffing to themselves, Banjo-Kazooie has two: a bear who’d crammed a bird into his backpack. It’s not just the well-constructed gameplay, the wit and humour of the story, some world-beating soundtracks, it’s all of these things put together.
![xbox banjo kazooie rom xbox banjo kazooie rom](https://i.pinimg.com/200x/49/1d/d2/491dd2e94471f9a9289bf420e81df09f.jpg)
There’s plenty of examples of platformer games fronted by cheerful talking animals out there – Crash Bandicoot, Earthworm Jim, Sonic the Hedgehog – but even in a genre well-stuffed with classic and beloved titles, Banjo-Kazooie is a cut above the rest.