Better than Maz 64 soooooooo ez. Review over.




__________

Okay, okay.

Wow. What a fantastic game - I have a new autistic obsession.

Banjo-Kazooie is a game I missed as a kid because I was in a Playstation family, and we never owned an N64. This is one game that makes me feel like I really missed out.

Banjo-Kazooie is a charming little game by a British development team called Rare that features a wholesome bear trying to stop his little sister, who wants to go on an adventure, getting used as fuel for Gruntilda's bimbofication machine.

Usually I can gush about games I like but I feel as if I can't contribute anything new to the conversation - this game has been praised to the high heavens and beyond and it's easy to see why.

If you're like me and you don't understand the collectathon youtuber hype, you might be a bit confused as to why this game is so popular when you play it. In fact, I can wager your experience might end up a little something like this:

Starting the game - Yeah its alright.
Early Midgame - Eh, i'm not understanding the hype.
Midgame - Okay, I can see why people like this.
Late Midgame - This game sucks, its frustrating and unfair. I'm going to stop playing (this is where I imagine the 6/10s come from for most people, as this is what I was going to rate it).
Lategame / 100% - Holy shit, this is peak gaming.

I think this has to do with a few things - this game is quite brutal at times. It's not afraid to hit you with the learning curve and it hits you hard - hell, at the midgame the beehives (where you heal yourself with honeycombs - it's so charming), will fight back when you break them. At first, this seems stupid, counterintuitive and annoying, but once I figured out how to deal with them (shoot them with an egg to break and then Talon Trot to collect all the pieces), I never got hit by a swarm of bees ever again.

Another huge outlier is the go-to of wall-enemies. By god, they are annoying, and their hitboxes are ruthless, knocking you off edges when you weren't even next to them. And even though theyre in the game from the second or third level, they really ramp it up when they start throwing like 20 into each level later in the game. It really makes you want to stop playing, getting knocked off over and over and killed by cheap hitboxes. That is, until you realise that they are easily killed by a jumping attack from Kazooie. When my wife accidentally done this at the end of the game, my jaw literally dropped and I said "bruh". I had been stopping at these things like traffic lights the entire game and you're meant to just jump into them and kill them right as they leave their tunnel. Bam, never got hit again from that point onward.

This game hugely rewards you for learning its nuance and I think that's something most games just don't do. The game is unforgiving and brutal but if you know how to deal with everything it throws at you you'll knock it out of the park every time, and that's a fantastic feeling when you get it down. Unfortunately, I think it's a hindrance to the enjoyability of the overall package, especially for a first time playthrough, that you can go so far into the game without working some of these things out (maybe its just me being stupid).

There are some genuine issues here though - the camera, my god is it shit. It might be the camera of all time. You start to remember where it happens by the time you 100% the game, but jesus christ, this game likes to hard troll you with the camera mega pivoting to the other side of you against a wall, or enemies being hidden just out of sight of the camera when you're doing a difficult platforming segment. It's a definite, HUGE downside to this game that absolutely warrants a remake.

Another thing that I think is counterintuitive is how poorly the lives system is handled. For some reason, you lose your 1-ups every time you Save & Quit the game - not that this will be an issue, since you'll die so constantly you won't ever get to see that until you've thrashed the game anyway, but I thought it was weird regardless. The bit that is annoying, is that you have 1-ups, but they only serve to save you the hassle of running back to the level. The game gives you ONE chance to get everything in it in one go, the first time you get there. This challenge makes it so unenjoyable in certain levels. You have to collect every note in one run of the level to get all of them, but you have to make sure you do it to a certain extent otherwise you won't be opening any doors. In hindsight, if I was to recommend this game to anyone, I would suggest making sure they get as many notes as possible FIRST before attempting any jiggie challenges to make sure they don't get cucked out of progress, and then come back and hit the jiggies and the jinjos after, if you didn't manage to get all the jinjos whilst collecting the notes. I've heard that the XBOX version of this game saves the notes you've collected but I don't know if I like this or not - I enjoy the challenge of collecting them all in one run, it's just frustrating if you're trying to do the jiggies aswell. If you were to solely focus on getting the notes, it's a lot more manageable and less frustrating.

Overall, this is a challenging, fun, only occasionally unfair, quintessential platformer. In fact, as of this review, I believe this is the best 3D platformer (especially of it's kind, the 3D open-ish world collectathon) to ever exist, and even if it is topped by another someday, it was certainly the best at its time and for a long, long time. The issues Banjo Kazooie has are great in strength but few in number, and the game is massively carried by its beautiful levels, art style, sprawling and fun to navigate hub world, and my god, the British sense of humour in this game has me chuckling even at dialogue i've seen before. If this gets the N.Sane Trilogy treatment with improvements this could easily be improved and tweaked to perfection.

Oh, and the final boss is peak. One of the best in gaming history, especially if we're talking about 3D Platformers - challenging, brutal, but fair and fun to master, as I feel all final bosses should be.

masterclass in how to screw up a time-tested gameplay formula that at this point probably should've been failproof for capcom

the overall pacing is bad - it's a 12 hour game that should only be around half its runtime

level design is wonky - you're either constantly backtracking from location to location or you're moving around an entire facility with no real way to get from point A to B concisely. it's an ordeal to grab one item needed for progression (in a game series about resource management and planning routes effectively!). comparing the maps in this to the RE1 mansion or the RE2 police station is such a stark contrast

for some reason the game gives you way too many bullets and resources? the way enemy placement is laid out encourages you to use them too. by the time you've explored a map once, you've killed all the zombies and then you're just running around empty corridors with no tension or need to plan ahead with your loadout - again, bad pacing. you can argue this can happen in the other classic REs but their level design guarantees youre not really visiting those same places over and over and over again. CV wants to be an action game but without all the mechanics to make that actually work

and even with that abundance of resources they never seem to be in the place where you actually need them - like, before boss fights?? i've seen more than one post here from people saying they had to restart the game completely because they ran out of healing items or explosive arrows or what have you (it all comes back to bad pacing...). to be fair - this can be mitigated by just rotating your saves but if it comes down to it that often that feels like bad game design on the devs' part

steve fucking sucks ass

the art direction overall isn't... great? it's softer and lends itself to being a lot less, idk, spooky, but i think there are individual parts of the game that are pretty cool - the victorian stylings of ashford residence, the cabin on the island, etc. and before it sunk in just how fucking long this game was, some of the backtracking felt almost comfy - like a walking sim pure vibes game.

and then i beat the tyrant on the plane and claire went to antarctica. and then after another hour the perspective shifts and theres a whole other half to the game. okay jesus christ

plot's bombastic and ridiculous but it's a different bombastic and ridiculous than other titles - and i do think a lot of it is genuinely really fun because of it. alexia and alfred are goofy weirdos, the first meeting with neo wesker is fun, it's INSANELY contrived in a way that works in its favor because of how goofy RE is as a series already so all the plot beats are just seeing how quirky the writers can get with it

this game would probably benefit from a remake like a lot of code veronica defenders say - but i don't see why capcom would feel the want or need to when the source material just isn't quite there. better to move on to revamping one of the best-selling games in the series in RE5 rather than a complete overhaul of a game that most folks don't really care about - and for good reason

Pretty good game with one fatal flaw. Code Veronica has all the classic Resident Evil gameplay we love with the exploration and puzzles and looks pretty good with fully 3D environments for the first time in the series.

The one huge thing that brings this game down is the progression. There is lots and lots of back tracking in this game and all the items and puzzle solutions feel like they've been put through a randomizer so the way forward feels really obnoxious because the item you'd need is back 2 areas ago.

Another thing is the game requires lots of unnecessary trial and error to progress. There's lots of things you need to do but won't know about them until you've died to it. I liked the Claire section of the game more than the Chris section because of the larger emphasis on puzzles rather than the clunky combat.

Personally I think the best way to enjoy this game is with a guide or walkthrough on hand so you can be best prepared for the trail and error and backwards randomized progression. If you do have a guide or have played it before and know how to prepare for what's ahead than I think this game is a pretty fun experience.