Finally beat this game after dropping it and restarting it more than once. Overall I think I enjoyed my time with the game and I really love everything about its style and personality, but this game is so damn clunky at times it really brings the game down for me. Some levels like Rusty Bucket Bay I could genuinely consider being made for the purpose of a rage game, trying to get all 100 notes in every level can get extremely annoying, especially when dying causes your count to reset.

I think the last couple hours of the game, including the final level and boss sequence is really enjoyable though and really made me appreciate the game more right before the end.

Played on N64/replayed on Xbox One(Rare Replay)

Classic in every sense of the word, great graphics and tight, varied gameplay, a staple for both Rare and the N64 as a whole .

Grunty's castle just begs to be explored to it's fullest, every stage brims with life and interesting characters and is sharply written overall, with Grunty being a standout villian you love to hate, music is also fantastic and iconic

Minor complaints would be having to recollect musical notes on death (remedied in the Xbox version) not a big fan of the end game quiz section and the final boss does ask alot of the player in regards to collectables but I didnt mind as that's kind of the point of the game, final boss really tests your skills which is appreciated and very satisfying to complete

Maybe someday we will get a true successor to this franchise but this is one I love to return to time and time again, a must play for any N64/Xbox owner and an example 3d platformers should strive to follow

10/10

Banjo and Kazooie are a hilarious duo, with one being an easy-going bear who's okay with the cartoon hell he exists in, and the other a very cynical bird who makes people hate her almost as fast as she'll hate them.

The two are a hilarious duo in a creatively worked out collect-a-thon that still feels good to play in the modern day. With each puzzle being creatively planned, yet challenging and each world having a fun theme within a witches castle, it's no wonder Banjo-Kazooie still manages to be a classic game that just feels fun

Banjo-Kazooie é uma aventura mágica do início ao fim. Impressiona o fato desse jogo tão carismático e com tanta personalidade ter sido lançando em 1998, uma época que jogos 3D estavam em uma fase de descobrimento e dificuldades para adequar nesse cenário.

Suas fases são muito criativas com temas interessantes até mesmo quando estão dentro cenários básicos como grama e deserto. Além disso, seu sistema de coleta de itens é um salto gigantesco e ambicioso quando comparado a Super Mario 64. Chega ser assustador como absolutamente tudo nesse game tem personalidade forte para te fazer recordar e rir em certos momentos.

Obviamente o jogo tem alguns problemas como a sua câmera tenebrosa em certas partes, mas não é tão ruim quanto comentam não. Também, o sistema de coleta as vezes dificulta o jogador saber em qual lugar do cenário perdeu uma nota musical ou outro colecionável. Por isso, recomendo fortemente jogar a versão do Xbox que melhora alguns aspectos.

Por fim, Banjo-Kazooie é uma joia rara no mundo dos vídeo games que até o momento não existe um jogo que conseguiu capturar essa energia. Em breve pretendo jogar sua continuação.

In my personal opinion I enjoy this game the same amount as sm64 but I still love it. There really was nothing like it back in the day it's just brimming with so much character and love that you just didn't see back then. Everything from the characters to the levels to even the textures are just so memorable and each level is just a blast to go through. The controls are just perfect and just makes sense which was pretty uncommon back then and the moveset is just fun to use. The soundtrack also is killer.

I got this for 250 yen in a resale shop a few days back and wanted something fun but a little different to play through. I love looking at how games originally in English are translated into Japanese, so a game like this that I have so much nostalgia for seemed like a great fit. It took me about 8.5 hours and I 100%'d the game like I did the last time I played it.

The writing, which I was most interested in, is admittedly noticeably inferior to the original. There's a lot of character to the original dialogue that just didn't translate over in many cases, and often just feels generic. I would say they should've just done their own thing with it, but the most noticeable case of when they DID do that, with Grunty's speech, is one of the most noticeable negative changes.

Instead of Grunty's taunting rhyming speech (which admittedly would've been very hard in a language like Japanese where rhyming doesn't really exist in the same way it does in English), she simply talks with tons of ~~ in her speech, dragging out syllables all the time. At least for someone like me whose reading ability isn't super fantastic in Japanese, all it usually accomplishes is making her speech far harder to understand because the 2-line limit of text in a speech bubble is still present, so at least for me it went a bit past not being as memorable and into a negative space of straight-up harder to understand. There's still plenty of humor in the writing in a way reminiscent of the original, but I still think the English original's writing is superior. At the very least, the Furnace o' Fun Quiz was SUPER hard because of my less-than-perfect knowledge of vocab and Grunty's speech style, but I was pretty proud of myself for being able to win it in one try ^w^

The other notable thing about this playthrough is that it was the first real test I've given to the replacement N64 joystick I bought on eBay a few months ago. It's one based off of the GameCube joystick design, and it certainly felt solidly built, but I didn't have a good idea of just how well it worked. As far as a usable joystick, it definitely does the job. The only really notable issue is that it mainly only has two modes: dead stop and full tilt. There is a window for the gradual levels of running (at least in Banjo-terms of maneuvering), but they're SO tiny as to be very awkward to get onto. It made some of the platforming along more slim platforms far more difficult than on a normal N64 joystick, and I have to imagine it'd make a racing game FAR harder to play if you wanted any precision level of control over steering. I'll have to see if I can't get Mario Kart 64 someday for cheap and see how well that plays.

I've already done a standard review of Banjo-Kazooie on the site, so I won't really comment on the overall quality of the game or how it plays because I've already done that. The only thing I will comment on (if only for my own future reference) is that I definitely don't recall the game's framerate being quite so bad so frequently. I couldn't tell if it was the frame-stuttering or the joystick I was using, but it definitely felt more difficult to play more often than I recall from when I played through it a year or two ago. Perhaps it's something more present in the Japanese version of the game, but Future Partridge should note that the framerate this go around was fairly dire quite frequently.

Verdict: Recommended. I'd usually give the game Highly Recommended, but given the notable step down in the writing in the Japanese version, I'm giving it just a Recommended. If you can understand English, that version is definitely superior, but this is still the fantastic N64 collectathon it always has been, no matter the language~