Banjo-Kazooie is a platform video game developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64 in 1998. The game was a critical and commercial success, selling nearly two million copies in the United States. In 1999, it received two awards from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences: Console Action Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Art/Graphics, and though limited, it did kick off the Banjo-Kazooie franchise. It follows the story of a bear, Banjo, and a bird, Kazooie, as they try to stop the plans of the witch Gruntilda, who intends to switch her beauty with Banjo’s sister, Tooty. The game features nine nonlinear levels where the player must use Banjo and Kazooie’s wide range of abilities to gather jigsaw pieces.

Pros:

This is a classic platform and completionists dream come true. It’s a big game, or as my friend Alex referred to it: “Beefy”, and he was right. There are a solid nine, non-linear, worlds each with various things to collect, different ways to achieve the various goals and themed in all their own cool way. For the majority of them, you learn a few new movies in each too. Now when I first started playing this it seemed kind of imposing, just because of how much stuff there was to do. All the things to collect, all the moves to unlock, but it’s introduced to you in such a way that it always feels manageable at least and unlocking something new is always fun. In most levels, you can meet the shaman and if you collected enough skulls he transforms into different creatures each with their own specific abilities too. I did, however, find myself still messing up a few of the button combination moves towards the end of the game so the amount of stuff in this game might be on the limit for some. In EACH level you can collect; 100 music notes to unlock doors, 10 puzzle pieces to unlock levels, several skulls for the shaman, honey comes for extra life and you can even find these hidden characters called “Jinjos” too. There are hidden secrets, a guidebook that hooks you up called “Cheato” and when you beat the game it even tells you about other hidden areas you missed and should go explore! That’s awesome. However, one of my favorite parts of this game is the music actually. Now I don’t think that is any one song that was like jaw-dropping, but I’m talking more about the seamlessly changes from the various environments within the level. In each level, the song would change in regard to where you are. So when you dive underwater the song slides into an ambient variation of the existing melody. If fly up high, the melody climbs too. Pretty awesome and really well done for an earlier game like this. Red Dead Redemption does a very similar thing, but that’s all the way on PS3.

Here is a video about the world of underwater music in video games where they talk about how this really great musical feature in Banjo Kazooie worked so well. It’s a great video you should seriously watch the whole thing.

Cons:

Alright, so let’s get the common ones out of the way. The flying and swimming mechanics are a bit difficult, like all early games, though there are a few extra button options that make this a bit more bearable in this game at least. We have the same classic camera angle issues as with many N64 games, where if you want it behind you, but it won’t go behind you and you kind of need to rethink your buttons to make your character go where you want them to go. This can be particularly bad when you are running out of air underwater. Also, some of the “voice” actings, through creative, can get a bit annoying. Now for game issues, when you die in a level you have to start totally over with your collecting of notes, which sucks because if you got 99/100 you need to collect all 99 again and then find that last one you were missing as well… that’s fucking tedious. Also, the world select map is pretty big, and though they have strategically placed “teleportation cauldron” it still takes a while to get to where you are going. Especially when you start to get towards the end of the game. If you restart your game you start all the way at the entrance of the witches tower and have to walk and teleport your way through every room to finally get to go play the game. Again super tedious. However, all these and any other issue all pale in comparison to the piece of shit trivia level that seriously almost wrecked the game for me. Towards the end of the game, you have to play a kind of trivia game show level, which sounds fun until you realize how demanding it is. you have to answer a mountain of questions, many of which are specific to your game so you can’t look up the answers online, if you get them wrong you lose life, on some of them you lose so much life you can die on that one challenge, and finally some of them are insta-kills. This would be not so bad if you did have to start all the way over again every single time. Also, you might think that then its easy to play it again and just not down the questions and answers, wrong, it randomized so even though you might have the same subject, you will rarely have the same question or challenge. This sucks on so many levels because it really doesn’t test your ability to play the game or anything like that, you just walk from square to square and waist a tone of the feathers or eggs you have collected so far and when you die and have to play it all again you have to either totally restart or go around replenishing your shit. This is such a shit part of the game that when I thought about replaying this game, I said nope, cause I just don’t want to play that one level again. Which sucks because this game has a great potential for replay value… at least it did.