Banjo-Kazooie, which was released during the Summer of 1998, takes a unique approach to the 3D platformer genre. 3D platforming had already been established by now with games like Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot but those games took a more episodic approach to level design and exploration. While all three games have the same basic collect-a-thon idea, none do so as seamlessly as Banjo-Kazooie. As we follow our lovable anthropomorphic duo through various levels of unique design and charm, we get to enjoy what will later become a much beloved and fondly remembered game developed by Rare Ltd and published by Nintendo.

The premise of Banjo-Kazooie is fairly simple. The wicked witch, Gruntilda, is jealous of Tooty’s beauty which was proclaimed by her magic cauldron. So Gruntilda kidnaps Tooty and it falls to our titular heroes to save her. Banjo the bear and brother of Tooty, and Kazooie the bird that resides within Banjo’s backpack set off to stop Gruntilda from stealing Tooty’s beauty and to bring her home. The plot hook has a short and silly presentation and is effective. This game has a through-line of silly undertones that are present in each area of the game. There’s lots of fourth wall breaking and an overall sense that the game does not take itself seriously.

The characterization in Banjo-Kazooie is both fun and unique. The gibberish that accompanies each character’s message does a good job conveying the character’s personality and does well as a companion to the dialogue. Banjo is characterized as a goofy bumbling bear that likes to sleep in. Kazooie is a sarcastic bird that isn’t afraid to bust the chops of anybody. Whether it be a mole that wears glasses or an aggressive and large hermit crab, Kazooie has a backhanded nickname at the ready. The game starts with a charming exchange of trash talk between Kazooie and the mole named Bottles. They go back and forth throughout the adventure as Bottles is the character that teaches you your abilities that you can unlock as you explore each world. This created a fun experience for me as I was more interested in the character interaction and the dialogue and less concerned about the gameplay itself. No single character is alike and all are favorable in their own respect. Even Gruntilda is lovable in her own despicable way as she taunts you in between levels in her lair. Just the fact that Gruntilda speaks strictly in rhyme makes her a joy whenever her wart ridden face appears on screen.

The controls for this game are simple, yet effective. Most of your interactions are going to be met with the A button or the B button. There is some camera manipulation and it’s a bit rigid and uncooperative but thankfully the game is usually pretty open and accommodating to where you can effectively control the character. This is one of the few games where I do believe that using an Nintendo 64 controller would have benefitted. Using the right analog stick as the replacement for the C buttons works well enough given where controller technology is. Though, I would have struggled less with certain aspects of the game had I not been accidentally turning the camera while trying to rapid-fire eggs. I can’t harp on this subject too much, however, because when the game was developed and published it was for a controller that wouldn’t have exhibited an issue like that. I liked how the game slowly drip fed you abilities throughout your adventure and gave you the proper space to learn and practice the techniques. With the exception of one area the developers did a good job allowing you access to all of the collectables in a level without having to backtrack once new abilities were learned.

There are nine levels offered in Banjo-Kazooie. Each level has a unique and interesting design and soundtrack based on some sort of theme. There is a pirate themed island, a swamp, an arid desert, a frozen peak, and more. Each level has 100 collectable music notes, 1 jigsaw puzzle pieces called “jiggies,” two honeycomb pieces (which are used to expand your health) and a hidden witch switch to make a jiggy appear in Gruntilda’s Lair which serves as the hub world for all of the levels. Out of the nine levels, the first seven of them took me anywhere from 45 minutes to 75 minutes to complete. These levels were the core experience that made me enjoy the game. My favorite of these levels is Mad Monster Mansion. The centerpiece is a haunted house but the level has all of your spooky staples. There’s a hedge maze, a chapel, a court with a fountain, and a nice variety of enemies ranging from ghosts, to headstones, to bats. You get to enjoy a fun little minigame where a ghost hand is playing the organ and you have to follow along and repeat each key that it plays. Each level is full of fun minigames that play with the physics of the game and make use of your character’s abilities. Each level usually has a boss encounter that also challenges you in some way shape or form.

Levels eight and nine were the most frustrating for me. I loved the concept ideas of the levels but the execution of segments led to a sour experience. Level eight is named Rusty Bucket Bay. When I first entered this world and started looking around I was having a great time. I liked the idea of the oil polluted water making you lose air even if you were at the surface and consumed air twice as fast when you were under the surface. I thoroughly enjoyed the shipyard theme. It was shaping up to be my favorite level until I went inside the ship. While I eventually learned how to make my way through this part of the level. I found it to be excessively punishing. Basically there’s no floor. You have platforms connected by a series of rotating pipes that have platforms that also rotate. In the back of the room you have a platform with fan blades that are guarding a jiggy. Something I should mention is that collecting music notes in this game goes on a scoring system. So whenever you leave a level or die, the game notices how many notes you’ve collected and does a leaderboard style. In order to walk out of a level with 100 notes, you have to collect all 100 notes in a single life without leaving the level. So imagine my frustration when I go inside the ship with 73 notes collected and die from a single badly timed jump and have to start over. Mastering this area took me an extra 30 minutes beyond the hour I had already spent here. It then took me another 45 minutes to clear that room and then collect everything else in the level. As I mentioned earlier, each level had taken me around an hour to complete. Having a single level double that time was less than enjoyable, especially with how needlessly difficult that area was. It’s not like the ship didn’t have a bottom to it.

Level nine is called Click Clock Wood. This is a level dedicated to the four seasons. It had a lot of charm to it, the jiggies were interesting to find, and the quests related to the characters were fun. Something I enjoyed was how certain actions spanned across the seasons. If you break a boulder for Gnawty in the Summer, you’ll be able to collect a jiggy as a reward in the Fall. There’s also an Eagle that you hatch and raise to maturity. This level took me three hours to complete. Part of that is because I died at 93 notes and that’s completely my fault. But the biggest time suck in this level is climbing the tree that takes up the majority of the level. I can’t tell you how many times I either fell out of the branches, or was struck by an enemy and knocked back to the bottom. While I recognize that those are skill related issues, it doesn’t change the fact that I probably spent the majority of my time climbing the tree over and over again. By the time I reached the end of the level I was ready to move on. Dying when I was 7 notes away from completing the level was the worst feeling.

Once you’ve collected enough music notes to progress, you gain access to the last challenge before getting to do battle with Gruntilda. It’s a trivia game titled Grunty’s Furnace Fun. It’s a stretch of tiles above a lava pit. Each tile requires you to answer a piece of trivia about the game. Seems easy enough, we’ve just spent the last 12 or so hours playing through the game. Hopefully we remember some simple trivia. The board consists of several different tile types so that you have a variety of questions or timed challenges to complete. One of these tiles is a sudden death tile. This tile can be any question or timed challenge or more difficult version of a minigame that you’ve already experienced. If you get the question wrong or fail the challenge then you are automatically ejected from the board and you have to start the entire board over. There are tiles that, should you get the question right, will grant you skip tokens. I opted to use those to skip the sudden death tiles to play it safe. My biggest hangup with this was the trivia questions specifically about Gruntilda. Throughout the game you can spot Gruntilda’s sister, Brentilda, and she will tell you facts about her wicked sister. I wasn’t interested in learning a bunch of random details about Gruntilda so I neglected to seek her out. I thought it was just a bit of added flavor to the game. I can appreciate that. When I reached this part of the game I was ready to finish the game and be done with it. So the last thing I wanted to do was backtrack and write down all of this silly trivia about the character. I wish I had. I probably spent more time trying to guess my way through the trivia questions than it would have taken to just do the backtracking. You can’t look the answers up online either because while the three answers available are always the same, the correct answer is randomized to your save file so that no save file is alike. I do appreciate that the game made these bits of trivia relevant and overall I like the concept of Grunty’s Furnace Fun. I wish the segment was a bit shorter and I also wish that one path across the board wasn’t clearly more favorable than the other. I believe that there should not have been so many questions related to Gruntilda because even if you wrote all of the answers down, you only get ten seconds to answer the question. It’s not like you can scan through 20 different bits of trivia in that amount of time and I don’t like the idea of having to memorize randomized character trivia. If I had at least entertained Brentilda and read through the trivia I might have stood a better chance at making it through the segment in a shorter amount of time.

Once you’ve cleared Grunty’s Furnace Fun, you rescue Tooty and you go home to celebrate. Some of the credits roll, it gives you a sense that the game is completed. But then Tooty reminds you that Gruntilda is still in her lair and she shouldn’t get away with what she’s done so you go back to finish what you started. By the time you’ve reached this part of the game, you have had the opportunity to collect every possible collectable. Four additional health pieces, 900 music notes, and 100 jiggies. If this is the case you are rewarded with doors that lead to fillups for all of your resources (eggs, red feathers, and gold feathers) and a door leading to a room with one last puzzle. When you fill in the missing puzzle pieces you are rewarded with a doubled health bar. This seemed frivolous to me but I still appreciated the recognition of accomplishment. Then I challenged Gruntilda and I fully understood why this was such a blessing of an upgrade.

Gruntilda is straight up, hard. Her attacks have a homing effect, the battle is resource heavy, and there are multiple phases. I had moments where I truly wondered how I would have accomplished beating this fight had I not found the character named Cheato where he gave me the ability to double my red feather capacity. I almost felt like I needed to go find him again so I could use his cheat code to double my egg capacity. After breezing through most of the game, and then struggling up through the last quarter of the game, it was great to experience a boss that truly challenges your mastery of the characters. From start to finish you have to use just about every ability you’ve learned throughout your journey. There’s dodging and attacking, there’s shooting eggs, there’s flying combat, and then there’s dodging while trying to fulfill another objective. All of her attacks have a recognizable pattern. She predominantly attacks using her wand to sling explosive spells at you. At first it felt like you couldn’t avoid them but once you figure out that you can dodge them by changing your direction after she’s cast the spell then you basically never get hit by them again. You slowly go from needing sixteen chunks of health to get through phase one, to only getting hit once or twice and she drops health between phases. The last phase of battle is the most intense. While you’re trying to activate the giant Jinzo statue Gruntilda is rapid-firing her spells at you and throwing in a homing spell at the end of each onslaught. When the cutscene plays and the giant Jinzo statue defeats Gruntilda once and for all, I was filled with joy and a sense of accomplishment.

Completing the game and defeating Gruntilda felt cathartic. After struggling over the past seven to eight hours the game was finally over. Your gang of friends get to relax on the beach while the credits roll. Mumbo shows you some pictures of things you missed unless you collected all of the jiggies prior to defeating Gruntilda. Then he shows you some images from a feature that wasn’t fully realized until the game was later rereleased for the Xbox. By the end of the credits I was left feeling satisfied with my platforming adventure. I appreciated the different style that Rare took when approaching the game’s design. Banjo-Kazooie was clearly well fleshed out and a sequel was already in the works by the time the game was published. Banjo-Tooie sounds like a promising sequel to a game that was already a joy to experience.