Banjo Kazooie, like most of Rare's glory day output, is better than it has any right to be. Standing on the shoulders of a particular giant, Banjo Kazooie manages to both clean and dirty Mario 64 at the same time. The results are both stupid and addictive. There is only one feature of Banjo Kazooie for which I will stand my ground enough to argue that it is actually good at least SOMEWHAT on purpose rather than by happy accident, and that's the level design. Each of Banjo Kazooie's worlds is memorable, inventive, compact, and fun to traverse in ways that DK64, Banjo Tooie and Yooka Laylee all would completely fail to reproduce. Technical limitations really can be a godsend.

An RPG where absolutely none of the systems were properly thought out. It has some cool ideas but falls flat on its face in execution. The encounter rate is absurd and combat is both shallow and slow. The tedium is made even worse by how grindy the game ultimately reveals itself to be. Total lack of balance means that character building is a series of non-decisions. The structure of the plot from town to town is completely formulaic and predictable, and the story is almost nonexistent, so there's no salvation there either. This was pretty much the only RPG available on the N64, but even with that massive advantage, this was never worth anyone's time.