This is easily my favorite collectathon game and one of my favorite games ever. It blows anything the predecessor did out of the water. Banjo and Kazooie now feel like they have their own game with its own structure, instead of the Peach Castle-like level selector of the first. The world is MASSIVE for the time and full of life. Every character that you encounter is memorable and the tasks are super fun. Honestly, I don't see the problem with Backtracking. Each time you're learning new moves and you unlock new areas using them. This is a metroidvania style of gameplay loop that I really like and I personally think that fits the game wonderfully. You can clearly see that Rare's next big project would be Conker, it is like the natural step after this. The humor in the game got darker than the first entry and there are some sexual innuendos here and there (Lord Fak Fak). The world is massive as I said and every area is interconnected to the other much like in the same vein as Dark Souls (ha ha). It is an epic and long journey through these lands full of charm. There are a bunch of minigames that I found fun, especially the fps sections. A super ambitious game for its time and even now. In short, a Masterpiece and Rare's very best. I love It!

Don't get me wrong, I like this game...I just don't love it like the first one. And that is entirely because this game is TOO DAMN LONG! I understand that on the heels of Banjo-Kazooie, the next logical step in the developers' minds would be "Bigger levels, more open world", but it feels like Tooie is open to its own detriment. "Too much of a good thing" and all of that. I hate backtracking in any game I play, especially collectathons. I hate having to go back to a level after learning a new ability. There are so many moving parts in this game, and don't get me wrong, it is ambitious and charming, but it pushed me away from really enjoying it as much as the first game, especially since unlike the first game this was my first playthrough and there was a lot of confusing portions and puzzles. This entire game feels like its populated with levels similar to the the final world of Banjo-Kazooie, Click Clock Woods, which is by far the most tedious level in that game, spread out even longer. That being said, I love it, and I think if you take it slower or don't try to 100% complete it you may honestly find it more enjoyable. Overall not a bad game, just not as well-rounded and enjoyable as Banjo-Kazooie. But then again, are any of us?

I love Banjo Tooie, I'll defend it to the death, I believe it does some incredibly impressive things and is one of the few games that actually showed off what the Nintendo 64 was capable of (albeit near the end of its life, but hey, better late than never)...but, it's just not as good of a game as its predecessor

Levels were far too vacant for no actual reason (looking at you, Terrydactyland...I understand it needed to be like that for the transformation, but man, talk about diminishing returns), a lot of the types of Jiggy missions got far too repetitive , especially near the end of the game (now many times do we need to go through rings?) and the backtracking and tedium got a bit unforgivable at points, but, dammit, you know what? Again, this is likely 100 percent nostalgia talking, but I still have a lot of fondness for this game

For all of its faults, there were definitely some things it did fairly well; the interconnected levels thing brought on a few clever bits, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy all of the unique boss battles

Overall, it's flawed, but I find it almost as lovable as the first game

I thought with the game's darker aesthetic compared to the original, along with its sort of weird pre-occupation with death (skeleton Grunty, zombie Jinjo), that it could be a fun thing to revisit around Halloween.

Jumping into a half-finished save file you haven't touched in over a year is ill-advised in a lot of games, this is maybe the worst example. The game is fucking huge, it is basically completely structureless, and there's actually fewer jiggies than in the first game. You will have no idea where you're going, let alone what objectives you've already completed.

A weird thing I don't know if other people have is like, when you're a kid, and your parents don't like a thing, or don't let you see a movie or something, and that makes you want to like it out of spite? When I rented this game as a kid, my parents thought the humor in this game was stupid and juvenile, and even at that young age I thought they were right.

I don't know whether this is worse than DK64, but I'm not playing it long enough to find out.

Bigger and grander than its predecessor in just about every way. Mumbo's claim at the end of the first game that Tooie would make Banjo-Kazooie "look like joke" Is apparent from the get-go, between its ambitious 20 minute(!) opening cutscene, the jaunt through ruined Spiral Mountain with the first game's moveset nearly intact, and that moment the player steps into the much, much larger Jinjo Village. I can't even begin to imagine the sheer amount of programming tricks required to pull off half of what Tooie's going for with stuff like rendering the ginormous worlds, handling the gameplay shift to its FPS segments, accommodating all the mini-games, the split characters, the cutscenes...

Banjo-Tooie is a very ambitious game. This has both upsides and downsides. The huge worlds lend themselves to a lot of experimentation, but the game sometimes runs into conveyance issues as a result. It's suuuuper easy to get turned around in places like Terrydactyland, and as cool as the inter-level connections are, that a Jiggy in one world can require a puzzle being solved in another (for example, clearing Stomponadon in Terrydactyland to get a Hailfire Peaks Jiggy) means that a player simply searching a given level for solutions can be left high and dry.

Grunty Industries is commonly pointed to as a world with this issue, but I have to side with my friends at Designing For here - Grunty Industries is brilliantly-executed. Having to sneak in, the slow opening of the factory floors, the building sense of scale, pay-off for B-K's WISHYWASHYBANJO, that moment towards the end when you finally unlock flight pads... so much to love there. I know this is the most likely thing to be overhauled in a theoretical remake, but I'd hope they wouldn't change too much.

There's also a sense of incompletion to Tooie that just wasn't present for Kazooie. Part of this was unavoidable - Tooie had to do SOMEthing to fulfill the promise B-K made with Stop 'n' Swop, and with Ninty quashing Rare's initial plan to literally yank out the N64 Game Pak, the team had to make some sort of compromise. But there's no dodging the feeling that a full world's missing, between that suspicious 900 Notes/90 Jiggies count and how nothing Cauldron Keep feels. B-K famously left a lot on the cutting room floor as well, but it had a far more complete illusion; Rare clearly just ran out of time and did their best to put a bow on the game. They did a great job, but there's no arguing with the numbers.

I think, if you only know the first two Banjo-Kazooie games by reputation, it's easy to lump them together as similar ideas. But both end up having very different identities. B-K is a pure expression of 3D platforming and exploration - perhaps less mechanically difficult than something like Super Mario 64, but still derivative of that general formula and its gameplay goals. B-T is less interested in posing mechanical challenges for the player and more interested in encouraging exploration through characters, skillsets, and world integration. Everything in Tooie feels less like "more Kazooie" and more like "commentary on Kazooie" (and other Rare trends, given the FPS segments). They're great complementary titles because they're so dissimilar, really; I'd rather have Tooie be like Sly 2 rather than Super Mario Galaxy 2. I prefer Kazooie all the same, but both are great times.

One last note - Banjo-Tooie would be the last title developed by Gregg Mayles' team during Rare and Nintendo's collaboration. This wouldn't be the team's last effort - Grabbed by the Ghoulies was only a couple years away - but Tooie feels like it carries a ton of weight as the terminus of this team's golden years. This is the same creative effort behind Donkey Kong Country 1 & 2 as well as the first Banjo-Kazooie - all absolutely incredible, ground-breaking releases. I feel like of those four titles, Tooie had the least impact on the industry (modern throwback 3D platformers are more likely to do genre work broadly or Banjo-Kazooie specifically than Banjo-Tooie soecifically). But this shouldn't be confused for Tooie being unimportant. Far from it: Banjo-Tooie is the summation of lessons learned by some of the industry's greatest talents at the tops of their games.

Before I went on holiday I was playing this, and I was like "this could be a 5 or 6 because of some of the fun moments", but coming back off holiday and detoxing while playing some good games and getting back into this! Wow! It is bad. Don't even bother trying to sate your curiosity. I played Banjo 1 some years ago and whilst I don't remember it living up to the dunkey hype, I remember it being nowhere near this bad.

Avoid like the plague.

Avoid like the plague.

I still enjoy this game a lot but it really frustrates me, it tried to make Banjo Kazooie bigger and better in every way but it made it a little too big and to better (?), the leves have really great theming and charm, but most of them are giant and feel cumbersome to navigate, specially since you have to constantly revisit areas due to things like the wumba transformations, having to play as mumbo, Banjo or Kazooie individually or coming back after learning a new move, wich there are a lot of in this game, some of them are great, while the separatiom gimmick is a little badlyutilized i love Kazooies solo moveset, but many of the new moves feel like just STUFF TO DO, same with playing as Mumbo, is it really that fun? No, but its stuff to do so do it. However its not all bad, i love the atmosfere of Isle O' Hags, it feels like its own interconected and interactive world in a very Banjo-Kazooie way, the first games levels were also great but they were mostly limited to themselves so having the levels interact with eachother is a very natural next step to take, the charm and character of the first game is multiplied by ten in this one, part of the fun of doing the tasks asked of you in each area is getting to meet the silly characters behind them, especially the bosses, wich were my favorite adition here, the first game had one amazing bossfight aggainst Grunty and that was kind of it so this time around every level has one of them and theyre all great! Except old king coal but just because hes dumb and easy. In conclusion, while this game delivered on a ton of what i was hoping for in a sequel to my favorite 3D platformer, it also stumbled a lot (i would delete the 4 hours i spent on grunty industries from my life if i could) i feel like making banjo bigger is a good idea but they had a little too much ambition with this one, this is the main reason i want a Banjo-Threeie, a sequel to this could find the perfect balance between the simple fun of Kazooie and the excitting new ideas of Tooie.