Banjo-Kazooie worked as a platformer despite Banjo not being the most fun character to control because levels were generally small, dense, and self-contained with only one instance of necessary backtracking to 100% a level.

So naturally for this game Rare decided to make levels larger while keeping the same amount of Jiggies per level, remove the "breadcrumb" aspect of Notes that lead the player through the level and instead just make them a collectible scattered throughout, and create more instances of backtracking with split-up pads, character swapping and scenarios that activate things beyond their own levels. Considering Rare developer Gregg Mayles has admitted he got "carried away" with Tooie's world design and even called it "bloated", it really makes you wonder if this was for the best.

At least it has more bosses and instances of dialogue to add some charm into the game.