so to start off I like this game a fair bit, maybe slightly more than the first one but I prefer it due to its more polished gun play and addition of strafing rather than it having more interesting planets (although the giant destroyed gadgetron facility was a really cool opening shot), I found the music a lot less memorable than the first game and also not as atmospheric, in the first game the music really set the tone and vibe of planets and had me turning my game volume up at several points just to be able to hear them to their fullest,

the game has sudden and abrupt difficulty spikes in the latter half that kinda come out of nowhere, I had been steamrolling everything up until the planet Snivelak and speaking of Snivelak the boss fight on this planet was absolutely abysmal and unfun despite the impressive technical aspect of it being accomplished on the PS2 and I felt very similarly about the spaceflight sections, while they are cool concepts and were smoothed out much more in later games I had alot of difficulty locating enemies and even hitting them as they are incredibly small targets,

the story of this game also kinda goes all over the place likely due the rewrites the game underwent and it felt incredibly inconsistent, arenas were introduced in this game and arenas having always been my favourite I was kinda excited to visit a PS2 ratchet arena that I had no experience with, I was sorely disappointed with the variety but had alot of fun with it nonetheless and really enjoyed some of the more specific challenges like surviving a ton of rounds with only 300 lancer bullets,

all in all I do like this game but it trades a lot of blows with the first game and I found its planets less memorable but its arsenal of weapons much more interesting, I didnt like space combat, but I really liked the hoverbike sections this time around and so on. I can understand why this is a lot of peoples favourite ratchet & clank game and absolutely do not hate it despite the issues I had with it.

I have a lot of mixed feelings on this game, I really enjoy the level concepts a lot more here first than the first game and the music is also similar in this regard, I think as a follow-up game its 100% worth playing. but there's some things to be aware of heading into it, it loses a lot of the simplicity that made the first banjo such an enjoyable experience and went more in the direction of padding runtime with unnecessary and poorly implemented backtracking, I cant count how many collectibles I straight up never collect in regular playthroughs due the tedious nature and that's just to start, notes were given a reduced presence and instead of collecting a single note at a time you instead collect bundles which sounds great on paper however less notes means less notes to direct the player to where they actually need to be going which in this game is devastating in some areas

Banjo & Kazooies Moveset (both together and seperately) has greatly expanded but some of the movies feel like integral new parts of the movesets and others can feel like bloat, the split pads were also poorly used in my opinion and kinda groaned whenever I encountered them.

all in all I'd recommend it if you liked the first one but just be aware that its a much longer and tedious collect-a-thon


p.s: this game loses an entire star to Grunty Industries*