Why, hello everyone! I’m enjoying my holidays and playing lots of video games. I found the time to finish Banjo-Tooie, right after doing Kazooie earlier. The Super Banjo cheat helped it go faster, and made the whole thing less frustrating. It was still annoying in parts, but I’ll get to that.

Banjo-Tooie is a good sequel. It expands on the original and follows on from it in most ways, and has a very different feel. It’s not retreading the same ground at all, really, apart from obviously the core mechanics. Everything builds upon Kazooie, starting with the plot which picks up two years after the previous game’s ending. Grunty is still under her boulder and Klungo is still trying to move it. B-K, Mumbo, and Bottles, now firm friends, are hanging out playing poker. Everything that happened happened and now their lives have moved on.

In terms of mechanics, it’s similar: our heroes still have all the moves they learned last game, and this one simply expands on what they can do as they progress. Of course, when we look at the list of moves they get we start to see why this approach has flaws: this game has 5 types of eggs, the ability to split up and for Banjo and Kazooie to get seprate abilities apart from each other, and Mumbo is now playable. My point is that the new moves and stuff add options, but as you go on the options become very numerous. It becomes an extremely varied and complicated game.

The worlds this time around are much bigger. And you can’t just run through and do everything in turn. Many items or areas are locked until you get abilities from later worlds, and there are now connections between the worlds. It’s a different approach, almost getting a bit Metroid Prime-like, but it gives a very different play experience to the first game’s “do a world in one sitting then never go back” style. This is not a bad thing, but the sheer size and complexity of these worlds can be daunting. I like being forced to revisit the worlds, as they have a lot of character, but if you don’t have a walkthrough it’s just so much aimless wandering.

I did use a walkthrough with this game, and the BK wiki. I remembered how much of a pain backtracking was if you didn’t have the prerequisites. I made it my mission to get the bare minimum Jiggies to unlock new worlds, prioritised new moves and actions that would affect other worlds, then backtracked later on. I liked this approach, there were less moments of feeling useless. Having guides was also very frustration-averting in the labyrinthine levels like Grunty Industries or, well, most of them really.

Having just come off the back of Kazooie (not literally), I readily noticed all the differences this game brought. Things are less shiny, and less permanent. Items disappear and enemies respawn. The text looks different, and characters and locations are more detailed. The biggest difference was the amount of slowdown. All that extra detail and massive worlds really makes the hardware chug at times. More often than you’d like, too.

It really is necessary to play these games in order though, not only because of the evolution of the mechanics but all the callbacks too. Many characters return and will refer to the previous adventure. It’s so great to see old faces in new places, and the dialogue is perhaps even better than the original (except for the loss of Grunty’s rhymes. At least that is referred to in-game, as her sisters demand she stop because it annoys them). Even older faces turn up too, in cameos that I totally didn’t get at the time. Captain Blackeye, from the project Dream that became Banjo-Kazooie, shows up, and Sabreman of Rare’s old MSX games is a significant character. I appreciate these much more now, and it really helps build the Rare Universe. Great stuff.

So I talked about the complexity of the mechanics. This game also succumbs to something DK64 fell much more foul of, that of introducing many “mini-games” and bits with totally different playstyles. It’s common in these 3D platformers to step outside their core gameplay—it’s overused in DK64 but perhaps not quite here. But apart from the one-off minigames, new abilities help you aim in first person to shoot eggs while swimming, flying, and even walking (while in specific shooting arenas). These arenas are interesting as they ape the gameplay of Rare’s bestselling Goldeneye quite closely. I find this cool too, and the way they make it fit in this world with holding birds like guns is amusing (it’s a multiplayer mode too). But when a minigame has unique controls and is very hard to do, the frustration is at maximum. I’m glad to say that happened only a few times in this game.

So I liked Tooie, it’s so important to the Banjo series. But, it’s still obvious that Kazooie is a much more tight, focused experience and a better game overall for it. Tooie is sprawling, messy, and flawed, but ambitious, evolutionary, and more varied. Things like real bosses and more involved tasks are a mixed blessing but overall much of what it tried to do worked well, and the bits that are more of the same are actually more of the same cool, fun, things.

So I liked playing Kazooie better, but this was still good. Now I have to slog through DK64. Hrm. See you in six months, I guess. No, actually, I have more updates to do. Also I will start on Grunty’s Revenge very soon, the midquel of the Banjo series on GBA. Never played that, so it should be interesting. Yay Banjo!