This website is named after Banjo-Kazooie, so I figured I should write about the game at some point. The premise here is that there are five Banjo-Kazooie games and while the original is pretty much 3D platforming perfection, that doesn’t mean the others don’t have aspects that could be used in creating the Perfect Banjo-Kazooie Game.
The Games
I’ve played to the credits: Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, and Grunty’s Revenge.
I’ve played a fair amount of: Nuts & Bolts
I’ve never played: Banjo Pilot
Pilot is a racing game, and racing will come into play later on, but I don’t feel like I’m missing much as far as this article goes.
Nuts & Bolts has some fun stuff, but I don’t really want to fold in a full on vehicle builder mechanic, so I will safely ignore this as well.
Grunty’s Revenge is a surprisingly good game which takes Banjo-Kazooie and puts it into an isometric view. Really, go play it, it’s quite fun. However, it doesn’t add a lot to the BK formula.
So, this will be a discussion about which aspects of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie should be used in the ultimate BK game. I think that’s fair given the series is so tightly tied to N64 memories for so many people, myself included.
The Moves
The moves from Banjo-Kazooie are canon and immediately known at the start of Tooie (I love that touch, by the way). So the old favorites are all in: Talon Trot, Rat-a-Tat Rap, Feathery Flap, Beak Barge, etc…
Things start to get interesting with Tooie. It adds a lot. We will save the eggs and some others for later. The majority of the new moves in Tooie are specific to either Banjo or Kazooie. Glide, individual attacks, taxi and snooze pack, etc… I personally enjoy the split-ability puzzles in Tooie so I will allow most of those moves to make the cut. The exceptions are the highly specific stuff like Shack Pack and Hatch which require very specific designs to ever be necessary. If the move isn’t generally useful, I don’t want it in the game.
Grip Grab is a great ability that should definitely be utilized in the perfect BK game.
For The Moves, we will take everything from Banjo-Kazooie, throw in the best solo moves from Tooie, and round it off with Grip Grab.
Verdict: Kazooie with a dash of Tooie
The Eggs
This deserves its own section although they could probably fit under movesets. The boring result here is that eggs, grenade eggs, and clockwork eggs make the cut while fire and ice don’t.
This goes back to the same reasoning as above: fire and ice eggs are so very context-specific that they simply aren’t needed. You don’t need ice eggs in a fire level and vice versa, a grenade will do the trick, I promise.
Grenades clearly make the cut as they are used to find secrets and blow up things. Fun gaming stuff, you know?
Clockwork eggs were the toughest decision. They were introduced in Tooie and offer a remote controlled robotic bird that you have 20 seconds to run to a destination before they explode. On one hand, this does fall under the “very specific level/puzzle design” case I mentioned above, however, I genuinely enjoyed the use of these so much that I will allow them in the Perfect BK Game.
Verdict: Blue, Grenade, and Clockwork (another mix of both games)
Notes
I eased us into this discussion with some fairly safe topics. I mean, who really likes the Hatch ability, right? Now it’s time to get serious: note collecting.
To recap; Banjo-Kazooie has 100 individual notes in each level and your count for a level is equal to the most you have ever gotten in one run of that level. When you leave and return, all notes are back in their original spots and you must collect more than last time for any of them to count.
Banjo-Tooie quite lazily leaves the N/100 note tally, but there are only 16 normal notes in each level (each worth 5 out of that 100) along with a single super note worth 20. The total is 100, but you only get to find 17 notes.
One of my strongest Banjo-Kazooie takes is that note collecting is great. I genuinely missed finding so many notes in the Tooie levels. It was extra painful because the massive levels lend themselves so well to exploration that I would have loved the reward of finding notes to be a constant. 17 just isn’t cutting it, friends.
However, not everything in this category will go to Kazooie. The “need to rebeat your high note score” is a supremely dumb way of counting notes. This is amplified by the notes being blocking requirements for advancing to new levels in the game. If you are 10 notes short of opening a door, instead of going into a world and finding 10 notes, you have to go into a world, find as many notes as you’ve found previously, then find 10 new notes after that.
Verdict: 100 notes, but ditch the “high score” counting (mix of Kazooie and Tooie)
The Minigames
Kazooie had a few, including a sled race, copying organ songs, and having a vegetable eating contest. Tooie, however, really leaned into this aspect and added a bunch of these. The legit first-person shooter jiggies are minigames, the various races in Cuckoocloud Land, and even the puzzles you need to complete in a certain time to open the next level.
This is one area I will mention another game; Grunty’s Revenge had some really nice minigames such as Egg Scramble and Sheep Dip.
While not all of Tooie’s minigames were great (that first Canary Mary race: ugh), I like the diversity and also how much more in-depth some of them were. Those FPS sections were a chore at times, but ultimately a fun diversion from a fairly long 3D platformer.
Verdict: Tooie wins here
Level Design
The short of it is that Kazooie had small, self-contained levels. Tooie had massive levels, most of which had connections to other levels (outside of the train, which was a way to travel between levels).
It’s key to match level design and other factors (more on that soon), but I very much enjoyed Tooie’s larger levels. I was not a big fan of the interconnectedness, but I enjoyed the feeling of entering a new level and exploring for a while to start to see everything it offered.
Verdict: Another win for Tooie
Metroidvania-Ness
One of the quips I remember seeing about Tooie before I played it was “it’s a Banjo-Kazooie Metroidvania.” While that line intrigued me, it doesn’t quite hold up.
Yes, Tooie has you gain new abilities which allow you to return to prior levels and get previously impossible jiggies. That certainly fits the description of a Metroidvania and is a big point of contention among the Banjo fandom. The secret here, though, is that you can make it through the entire game with very, very little backtracking. You need 70 jiggies to reach the final boss in Tooie. There are 8 levels, each with 10 jiggies, and 10 additional jiggies available outside (9 of these being related to finding Jingos). I won’t break down each level, but in most of them, you can get at least eight jiggies without any intra-level mingling or backtracking. That has you in the low 60s, at least. Then, you’ll find a few of those full jiggy families along the way (some are families of one, by the way), plus the free jiggy to start…you’re already in the upper 60s now. You can knock out the last two or three by backtracking, but is it really a major aspect of the game if it accounts for something like 5% of the required jiggies? Of course, it’s a much bigger deal for completionists, but those people like the pain anyway.
Having spent too many words defending Tooie’s Metroidvania-ness, I will wrap up here by saying that I don’t like it and it would not find a home in my perfect Banjo-Kazooie game.
Verdict: Kazooie
Complexity
While I loved the larger levels in Tooie, I hated how complicated the jiggies were. The first few levels got the balance right; I needed to explore for a bit (say, 30 minutes or so) to learn the level and see what was out there, but once I did I could start collecting jiggies pretty easily. The game lost the script somewhere about half way through, however, when I would spend 90-120 minutes in a level and get no jiggies. Nothing was “go find and beat the boss” or “help this dinosaur.” It was “find the sacrificial creature to feed Mumbo Jumbo, go across the level to lower a bridge, return to the hut, change back to BK, find another sacrifice for Humba Wunba, change into a 1983 Craftsman power drill, unscrew the fourth bolt on the bridge, return to the hut, change back to BK, do twelve beak barges to destroy the bridge, run to the other side of the level where there will be a turtle waiting to thank you for destroying the bridge and reward you with a jiggy.” Only a slight exaggeration there.
This kind of convoluted sequencing really padded out Tooie’s playtime to unnecessary lengths. Contrast that Kazooie where simply advancing through the level was enough to get many of the jiggies. Explore and be rewarded for doing so, simple but perfect.
I like my 3D platformers to keep things simple, so Kazooie is the easy choice here. The larger levels I argued for earlier will add a little bit more exploration to the jiggy finding, but will fall well short of Tooie’s.
Verdict: Kazooie
Finale
Both games have really good, tough, rewarding final boss fights. I will give the slight edge to Tooie here because it doesn’t require flying and shooting, but both are good and offer a nice summation of the skills you used throughout the game.
The lead up to those fights, however, is a bit of a mess. I don’t like the trivia game in either, but again I will side with Tooie here because the trivia questions are all about the game you just finished putting 20 hours into and not about the random bits of trivia Grunty’s sister gave you throughout the game. Unless you wrote those down in Kazooie, your final trivia game gauntlet was a series of trial-and-error where you definitely wrote down the correct answers as you found them. To throw a bone to Kazooie here, I liked the timed minigame portion of the quiz show, and it did incorporate actual in-game trivia along with the sound/sight tests. It’s really a better setup overall, except for those blasted Grunty tiles!
My decision here is to take the Kazooie setup, remove the Grunty questions, and call it a day. I would be totally happy dropping it completely, but it is deeply part of BK’s DNA.
Verdict: Kazooie’s quiz show (mostly), Tooie’s final fight
Final Score
We have eight categories. Four results were mixes between the two games while two went to Banjo-Kazooie and two went to Banjo-Tooie.
Breaking it down a bit further, one of the mixes was mostly Kazooie, another was mostly Tooie. The other two were basically right down the middle.
This is closer than I thought. I prefer Kazooie by a decent amount over Tooie as standalone games, I didn’t expect Tooie to have such a strong showing in the exercise. If I wanted to really get into it, I would put some weights on each category and that would highlight the parts of Tooie I liked least (hello, complexity!), but this has gone on long enough already, I’d say.
There you have it; the Perfect Banjo-Kazooie Game is actually a split right down the middle between the two N64 classics. Glad we could settle this debate once and for all today.
Nice! I really like both of these games, especially Kazooie. Your knowledge for each far exceeds mine. For the most part I agree, especially about the notes. I didn’t realize there were so few notes in Tooie and I even recently replayed it. Also, props for the 1983 Craftsman power drill reference. That made me chuckle.