Before they were bought by Microsoft and banished to the purgatory of making Kinect games (and also Sea of Thieves) for the rest of their days, Rare was known for making quality games on Nintendo's home consoles. Because of this, I wanted to play Banjo-Kazooie ever since I was a kid, but I've been especially interested in checking the game out after spending the past few years becoming well acquainted with Rare's 2D platforms and first-person shooters, and I wanted to see their take on the 3D platformer genre. After beating the game with a total of 95 out of 100 Jiggies, I can honestly say that I had a lot of fun with Banjo-Kazooie, and while I did end up having some gripes with it here and there, I still thought that Banjo-Kazooie was a great game overall.

Aside from being an early 3D platformer, Banjo-Kazooie was also one of the first collectathons with its emphasis on having to collect as many Jiggies and music notes as possible in order to progress to the next area, and so it's a good thing that Rare made everything involving that exact process feel so fun and rewarding. Each of the game's nine levels is brimming with life thanks to the game's atmospheric, yet playful music, expressive artstyle, and especially the eccentric cast of characters and enemies, with the dry, sarcastic sense of humor making the moments where you help these characters out all the more memorable. Even the slightly more generic level themes, such as the desert and snow levels, ended up feeling unique thanks to their NPCs, as I went from being a great stand-in Dad to three polar bear cubs to feeling incredibly bad for Gobi and how he can never catch a break from Kazooie's Beak Buster. On top of having a generally fluid and snappy set of moves (including the additional ones that are learned throughout the game), Banjo-Kazooie would also occasionally give you the opportunity to transform into an animal with the help of the skull-faced shaman Mumbo Jumbo, and these opened up new opportunities for exploration in each level while also adding more variety to their challenges, puzzles, and minigames.

The general gameplay loop of exploring a level from head to toe in order to find all of its secrets was one that never really got dull for me, and while some of the requirements got a bit demanding towards the end (with me having to backtrack all the way to the first stage just to find a few of the Jiggies that I had missed just to open the final portrait), the satisfaction of collecting all the Jiggies and music notes in a level was strong enough to keep me going. Despite how solid the controls were, I felt that the game's camera could've been a lot better, because while it was definitely an improvement on the camera controls in something like Super Mario 64, the fixed viewpoints made aspects like the already wonky swimming controls feel even less reliable to deal with. The only level that I straight-up disliked here was "Rusty Bucket Bay", as it not only had some genuinely bad music, but it also had an entire segment filled with cheap instant deaths and its inclusion of oil water made traversal feel tiresome. Speaking of which, dying during a level in Banjo-Kazooie means that you have to recollect all of the music notes that you already got (along with the five Jinjos if you hadn't already found them by that point), and this made levels like the aforementioned "Rusty Bucket Bay" feel flat-out tedious. Even with all of this in mind, I still had a great time with Banjo-Kazooie, and although I think it'll be a while before I check out Banjo-Tooie, I might give Conker's Bad Fur Day a go some time soon.