I got this for 250 yen in a resale shop a few days back and wanted something fun but a little different to play through. I love looking at how games originally in English are translated into Japanese, so a game like this that I have so much nostalgia for seemed like a great fit. It took me about 8.5 hours and I 100%'d the game like I did the last time I played it.
The writing, which I was most interested in, is admittedly noticeably inferior to the original. There's a lot of character to the original dialogue that just didn't translate over in many cases, and often just feels generic. I would say they should've just done their own thing with it, but the most noticeable case of when they DID do that, with Grunty's speech, is one of the most noticeable negative changes.
Instead of Grunty's taunting rhyming speech (which admittedly would've been very hard in a language like Japanese where rhyming doesn't really exist in the same way it does in English), she simply talks with tons of~~ in her speech, dragging out syllables all the time. At least for someone like me whose reading ability isn't super fantastic in Japanese, all it usually accomplishes is making her speech far harder to understand because the 2-line limit of text in a speech bubble is still present, so at least for me it went a bit past not being as memorable and into a negative space of straight-up harder to understand. There's still plenty of humor in the writing in a way reminiscent of the original, but I still think the English original's writing is superior. At the very least, the Furnace o' Fun Quiz was SUPER hard because of my less-than-perfect knowledge of vocab and Grunty's speech style, but I was pretty proud of myself for being able to win it in one try ^w^
The other notable thing about this playthrough is that it was the first real test I've given to the replacement N64 joystick I bought on eBay a few months ago. It's one based off of the GameCube joystick design, and it certainly felt solidly built, but I didn't have a good idea of just how well it worked. As far as a usable joystick, it definitely does the job. The only really notable issue is that it mainly only has two modes: dead stop and full tilt. There is a window for the gradual levels of running (at least in Banjo-terms of maneuvering), but they're SO tiny as to be very awkward to get onto. It made some of the platforming along more slim platforms far more difficult than on a normal N64 joystick, and I have to imagine it'd make a racing game FAR harder to play if you wanted any precision level of control over steering. I'll have to see if I can't get Mario Kart 64 someday for cheap and see how well that plays.
I've already done a standard review of Banjo-Kazooie on the site, so I won't really comment on the overall quality of the game or how it plays because I've already done that. The only thing I will comment on (if only for my own future reference) is that I definitely don't recall the game's framerate being quite so bad so frequently. I couldn't tell if it was the frame-stuttering or the joystick I was using, but it definitely felt more difficult to play more often than I recall from when I played through it a year or two ago. Perhaps it's something more present in the Japanese version of the game, but Future Partridge should note that the framerate this go around was fairly dire quite frequently.
Verdict: Recommended. I'd usually give the game Highly Recommended, but given the notable step down in the writing in the Japanese version, I'm giving it just a Recommended. If you can understand English, that version is definitely superior, but this is still the fantastic N64 collectathon it always has been, no matter the language~
The writing, which I was most interested in, is admittedly noticeably inferior to the original. There's a lot of character to the original dialogue that just didn't translate over in many cases, and often just feels generic. I would say they should've just done their own thing with it, but the most noticeable case of when they DID do that, with Grunty's speech, is one of the most noticeable negative changes.
Instead of Grunty's taunting rhyming speech (which admittedly would've been very hard in a language like Japanese where rhyming doesn't really exist in the same way it does in English), she simply talks with tons of
The other notable thing about this playthrough is that it was the first real test I've given to the replacement N64 joystick I bought on eBay a few months ago. It's one based off of the GameCube joystick design, and it certainly felt solidly built, but I didn't have a good idea of just how well it worked. As far as a usable joystick, it definitely does the job. The only really notable issue is that it mainly only has two modes: dead stop and full tilt. There is a window for the gradual levels of running (at least in Banjo-terms of maneuvering), but they're SO tiny as to be very awkward to get onto. It made some of the platforming along more slim platforms far more difficult than on a normal N64 joystick, and I have to imagine it'd make a racing game FAR harder to play if you wanted any precision level of control over steering. I'll have to see if I can't get Mario Kart 64 someday for cheap and see how well that plays.
I've already done a standard review of Banjo-Kazooie on the site, so I won't really comment on the overall quality of the game or how it plays because I've already done that. The only thing I will comment on (if only for my own future reference) is that I definitely don't recall the game's framerate being quite so bad so frequently. I couldn't tell if it was the frame-stuttering or the joystick I was using, but it definitely felt more difficult to play more often than I recall from when I played through it a year or two ago. Perhaps it's something more present in the Japanese version of the game, but Future Partridge should note that the framerate this go around was fairly dire quite frequently.
Verdict: Recommended. I'd usually give the game Highly Recommended, but given the notable step down in the writing in the Japanese version, I'm giving it just a Recommended. If you can understand English, that version is definitely superior, but this is still the fantastic N64 collectathon it always has been, no matter the language~