You know that joke in the intro of Banjo nuts and bolts, where they make fun of collectathon platformers by pretending to start the game...And it's a bit where they fill every inch of spiral mountain with a floating nothing maguffin and go "yeah it's banjo tradition to collect as many pointless objects as possible" only to go "No this is too painful to watch no one wants this anymore". That joke is upsetting in the context of Banjo because the og games weren't like that in the slightest. They were adventure games that were fun to explore, not mindless collectathons where you're just guzzling down meaningless collectibles by the hundreds. That annoyingly reductive perception of the genre, is what this game genuinely is like.

I could easily ramble on about the overall unpolished nature of Clive 'n' Wrench, but I honestly can't say I find stuff like that to effect a game's quality. There's not a single game that has me going Wow it would be so great but ooo the glitches man it ruins the whole thing I have it in my heart to defend this game and say it controls well, your moveset is fun, and there's occasional aspects of this game that feel like someone put their heart and soul into it for ten years (because that's what happened). I love unloved 3D platformers man. Like yeah the swimming controls were clearly never figured out so they just never did any real swimming sections...And the final collectible refused to spawn until the third time I completed the mission....And after getting the achievement for 100%ing the game, it still said I was missing one collectible. To get my reward I had to find out online that there's a pot that infinitely spawns that may or may not be an intentional failsafe for that situation...And load times are somewhat bad even on PS5... So yeah, it's rough as hecc, I mean what other game in this genre has a glitchy collectibles counter like that? What other game in the genre doesn't have a level stats page for that matter...But anyway, literally none of that matters to me. Poorly made games can be fun. This game though, is pretty miserable.

My experience was a bit of a roller coaster. Starting with me ignoring this game due to its Nick Jr. mobile phone game lookin' artwork. Then I snagged it physically for like 3$ at gamestop and I found that it had an earnest albeit amateur style to it that I was kind of vibing with. And the first level taking place in a house while you're tiny had some Toy Story 2 game vibes and I was all for it. But very quickly I realized this game's fatal flaw that would get worse and worse as I got further.

This game is designed like Spyro Enter the Dragonfly. Which is to say, as I alluded to at the start, the main collectible is scattered by the literal thousands in every single inch of every map. Sometimes not even spaced 2 feet apart. It wants you to just arbitrarily step on every single possible location to collect them all. There's such a balance to a good collectathon, stuff like Banjo keeps every collectible feeling satisfying and important to collect. BK is designed AROUND the collectibles. 100 notes per level let's make sections specifically to hide a few notes in, or a platforming section for a jinjo, y'know some kind of game design. This game feels like they made a boring featureless map and filled it to the brim with as many collectibles it could fit to hide how little is going on. This game will really ask you to find ONE THOUSAND floating timepieces in a SINGLE level and has the gall to not actually design anything around collecting them. As far as I know there's no gates or anything, they're truly pointless unless you're going for 100%. Which makes me wonder if an any% playthrough of the game would be more enjoyable. I imagine it would leave me feeling less actively negative but no less unimpressed, as the star/jiggy equivalent here is also treated pretty poorly. Occasionally they feel good to find but there's a lot of repeat challenges and otherwise they're often just sitting out in the open. Something about them just doesn't feel that fun to collect.

Like I said, I have it in my heart to stick up for this game and say it's actually alright. This is the exact kind of thing I WOULD be into. I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm NOT joking. But good heavens man don't make Spyro Enter the Dragonfly your blueprint for collectathon world design. I almost want to try again and just ignore everything but the required coins, just so I can come back and give this a more respectable score like a 2 1/2 or something. But running around, my eyes glued to the featureless floor, picking up worthless floating things for 7 hours was pretty miserable I cannot lie. And if collecting things in your collectathon platformer with very little platforming in it is boring, there's only so much I can really say.

No series filters me quite like Mega Man. I'm already a hater of how lives are implemented in both normal and X MM games. I usually love lives in old games, I love being forced to git gud, I'm a heckin battletoads fan man. But Megaman's lives system has tormented me to no end. But to find out that getting a game over in this one locks you out of completing the stage? It's SO rare for me to say this but I find this truly makes the game entirely unplayable beyond all reason. I hesitate to say because it's such a tired trope to compare difficult things to this particular series, and thus feels like it invalidates anything I say, but like...Imagine if in Dark Souls you died once on the lead up to the fight, then died to the fight 2 times. Then the game said lol you failed idiot you're locked out of this content now and as a result are now weaker going into the rest of the game. Forgive the brief tangent but how is it that people hold decades long grudges against incredibly forgiving Sonic games for having an ounce of difficulty at points but Mega Man's allowed to be actively sadistic at all times and be applauded while doing it? MM fans truly built different, more power to 'em. This is where I draw the line tho I'd sooner learn hardcore Kaizo Mario stuff, this is just cruel and unusual.

But yeah I was able to beat this through the modern collection which added built in save points. Makes the game at least playable. Then it's just the typical MM formula of having extremely easy, nothing levels, capped with trial and error boss fights that are 50 times more challenging than anything leading up to them. Nothing too memorable, there's only like one song in the ost I actually like, the story's really not worth it either. If I was reviewing the modern release I'd probably say like a 2 maybe a 2.5. But playing on actual GBA hardware as was originally intended is truly miserable.

One of the many examples of your average megaman game being impossible to play and X6 being better in every way. Time to do another no-armor X6 run 'cuz that's a solid enjoyable challenge instead of the psychotic, poorly designed trainwrecks seen in so much of the franchise elsewhere.