One of my favorite games of all time. To this day it's really the closest thing we've got to a proper Banjo-Kazooie styled game made after Rare stopped. What's great is they managed to not feel derivative despite the obvious influences. They put a lot of effort into making the game world feel like it had a lot of history, and was a land that was currently being lived in. Every level is perfectly sized. Feels big in scope but densely packed. And everything is truly physically connected. Huge mission variety unique to this game as well as genre staples done masterfully. Nailing variety without becoming sloppy and unfocused. The graphics and animation work are top notch and have held up extremely well. What they were able to pull off on the PS2 while also featuring NO loading screens is technical wizardry. Movement has an extremely high skill ceiling, as do level routes in speedrunning. A game that effortlessly grows with the player.

Never gets old, I've 100% this game on all 4 save files an obnoxious number of times. This game blew my mind as a kid and it's honestly no less impressive today. And the lore elements that got doubled down on in the sequel retroactively make this game's simple plot even cooler.

I wanna just babble on about how cool it all is but that's pretty much it, it's all amazing. 'Boutta drop a couple hundred on a PSVita just to play a version of this game with bad framerate and get all achievements in it for the 4th time.

Solid collectathon. Fairly easy to 100%. Not nearly as visually impressive as the sequels, but the art direction is strong and the animation in particular holds up really well. Music is pleasant enough, but not particularly memorable for me. The PS3 version is not 100% accurate. For instance, the specular effects on some precursor structures are missing. It's relatively minor stuff, though, and there are also improvements over the PS2 version, such as increased LoD and texture filtering. Also, the performance is basically flawless. If you're willing to switch to SD resolution from the system menu you can play in the original 4:3 aspect ratio, which has a higher field of view. Had a good time, would recommend.

This one is a strange one. I initially kind of loved the first few levels but as the game went on I found myself constantly frustrated. If you wanted to 100% this game it is way more of a pain than I thought. Having to collect a number of those eggs each level gets incredibly cumbersome. I really wish they had an item in the later sections of the game that would tell you where the eggs are as I don't want to have to scour every tiny section of the level to find that last little egg I need to 100% the level.

In the end I genuinely just shelved this one. I just found it way too frustrating.