It’s very rare you can find a game that perfectly encapsulates the appeal of its genre. Sure, you can usually find some sterling examples of what makes a type of play appealing, and each genre definitely has it stand out titles, but can you really say that there is a definitive first-person shooter when the format can be used to create drastically different experiences?

You inevitably need to thin things down to subgenres, and even then things can be muddy. You would think Rogue would be the definitive Rogue-like but the perception of the genre has strayed from the original’s design too far, and while you may have a case for a nascent genre like the Souls-like being exemplified by the game that popularized it, time will tell if Dark Souls keeps its spot atop the pile as the genre continues to be explored. One subgenre that has certainly had time to settle though is the collectathon, a subset of 3D platformers kicked off by Super Mario 64. A case could be made for Super Mario 64 being an excellent embodiment of the gameplay style, it introducing the concept of entering small worlds to perform different goals for the game’s vital items, but Rare would see the groundwork set by Nintendo and hone it into a game that better displays the potential of this subgenre, and that game is one that stars a dopey honey bear who carries a bird around in his backpack.

Banjo and Kazooie are the kind of strange protagonist that might not make sense out of the gate, but their self-titled game not only makes excellent use of the odd duo’s combined abilities, but their quest to save Banjo’s sister from the wicked witch Gruntilda retools the collectathon to a more freeing and enjoyable form. Rather than setting off into a world with one goal in mind like in Super Mario 64, the player tackles a new level based on what interests them, their efforts and curiosity rewarded quite often with a Jiggy, the game’s main collectible taking the form of these jigsaw pieces needed to progress. There is much more to finding items than just grabbing these yellow tokens when you spot them though, and to describe why this might be the best face for the collectathon genre as a whole would take more than a few small paragraphs. To better understand what makes this platformer an amazing classic, we’ll take a look at the game not as just rigid systems working well together, but through the lens that makes it more endearing than just a series of well-designed obstacle courses. Banjo-Kazooie is a game overflowing with character and overflowing with actual characters, so for each section describing what works so well, we’ll introduce it by way of a character featured in the game.

BANJO AND KAZOOIE, THE UNEXPECTEDLY APPROPRIATE PROTAGONISTS

At the core of a strong platform game is a character who is perfectly fit for navigating the world. Their skills need to be up to the task of exploring it without completely shattering the challenge of getting around, and since neither the bear or bird would be a good fit for it on their own, Rare slapped them together into a duo that makes 3D platforming enjoyable before you even factor in its goals.

While the two heroes will learn new abilities over the course of the game, Banjo and Kazooie start off with the most important skills towards making level exploration not just possible, but open to the player in a way that doesn’t feel like a sequence of obvious ability-focused challenges. The main skill that makes the levels so enjoyable to navigate is the duo’s double jump. Banjo’s basic leap is serviceable but not that exciting, a way of getting around like any platformer protagonist requires. However, when Kazooie pops out of the back pack and starts fluttering her wings, you’ve got a surprisingly versatile navigation tool. It can give you extra height, extra distance, break a fall right before you were going to hit the ground hard, allow for course correction, and can even let you get around moments that might otherwise be difficult tight rope walks. It almost feels silly not to use it every time you take a leap, the extra control, the ability to adjust your jump, and the extra speed afforded by staying airborne longer incredibly convenient for almost any task you encounter. It’s a simple, fast, but vital maneuver and one the game is happy to test since it so fluidly becomes part of the natural language of your movement options, and it’s just part of your basic skillset.

As the game continues you’ll find Bottles the Mole, a friendly bespectacled critter who will teach you new skills in each level. Most of the abilities you get out the gate are important movement options like a backflip for additional height or attacks meant to defeat the game’s enemies, but Bottles will introduce slightly more complex and situational skills to your repertoire, and the levels are often an excellent fit for their introduction. By the second level you are already introduced to the ability to fly pretty much wherever you like, it featuring some limitations like requiring a flight pad and expending red feathers as fuel so it can’t be abused but still allowing for the degree of freedom you’d hope to find from exploring the sky. The first flight pad you find already lets you head to the heavens in Treasure Trove Cove, a level that knows most players will immediately test how high they can go and the game makes sure to reward that natural urge. A lighthouse sits atop the tall arch in the center of the level, one of the collectable Jiggies waiting for you to spot it from above. Flying over and grabbing it is a breeze, but the game goes the extra mile in making snagging this simple Jiggy satisfying as you see the lighthouse area up close. It DID have an option to climb up it without flight, a jumping challenge around its exterior that would take time to complete now completely skipped by your use of your ability, and while you can’t always skip past challenges the game lays out for you in this way, Banjo-Kazooie is flaunting the player’s freedom with this single collectible. There WILL be cases where the right skill used intelligently can simplify a challenge or solve it in an interesting way, and while Flight itself won’t be appearing in every stage after Treasure Trove Cove, it even becomes a natural part of level navigation while also still allowing some moments where it can serve as a different solution to a puzzle.

Admittedly, not every skill fits fluidly into the gameplay. Banjo’s basic claw swipe is an awkward and slow attack, but the ease with which you can use the superior attacking methods prevents moments of battle from being bothersome. Jumping up to have Kazooie do the three beak strikes known as Rat-a-tat Rap is simple and effective for most every enemy, and Banjo packs a roll he can use instead if you need to approach and strike in a hurry. Swimming is a little awkward, overshooting collectibles underwater likely to come up but the skill never getting pushed to the point its imprecise controls would ever lead to outright failure. Not being able to grab edges is also an odd choice, but unsurprisingly all three of these negligible issues would be fixed in the follow up Banjo-Tooie despite not really harming the experience here.

The situational skills are definitely good additions and rarely hit those small quirks in the weaker basic maneuvers. Besides an aerial divebomb that is hard to target, your abilities are enhanced by the versatile egg shot that gives you a long range projectile good for flipping switches and holding enemies at bay, conditional invincibility that can allow you to breeze through baddies or hazards if you have the feathers for it, and the Turbo Trainer shoes give you a brief speed boost to overcome time sensitive challenges. Banjo-Kazooie features Jiggy puzzles that often require the correct use of your acquired skills without outright declaring they’re the proper way of solving things. It does have to put a pad in the right place to use things like your special high jump, but a Turbo Trainer puzzle will sometimes require you to bring them to the challenge instead of just performing a perfectly laid out task. This can get even more involved when you factor in a character named Mumbo Jumbo, a shaman who will turn you into special forms for a price. While more limited in their abilities than Banjo and Kazooie, turning into things like a termite, alligator, or bumblebee opens up new opportunities that are often not spelled out but will clue you in to the necessity of these silly forms with level geometry or… a giant alligator head whose nostril you climb inside. While I did say they didn’t spell it out, the signal can be fairly obvious without outright saying “turn into a gator to enter this gator-specific subsection”.

Banjo and Kazooie’s last contribution to this excellent adventure, funnily enough, has nothing to do with their skills or movement options. The 3D platforming angle and collection quest are incredibly vital to the experience, but the pair provide an extra layer of personality to the affair by the way they interact with the other characters they meet and each other. Banjo is a bit dim but good-hearted, happy to help the many hapless people the duo encounter along the way with little thought of what the reward might be. Kazooie, on the other hand, is brash, brazen, sassy, and even a bit raunchy. Even before you find the Flight ability that is given extremely early she’s heckling Bottles to teach her how to fly, all while calling him rude nicknames and bickering over wanting to make progress without effort. She’s quick to point out the silliness in the world and is one of many characters who openly acknowledge the fact they are experiencing certain obstacles because it’s part of video game design, but she doesn’t come off as overbearing despite this. She mostly sticks to a quick quip or silly nickname for the latest odd personality encountered while Banjo keeps the conversation moving so the exchange doesn’t drag on. One of the cuter touches though are their idle animations, where if they’re left to stand around doing nothing, Kazooie will lightly pick on Banjo, the lighthearted squabble showing the bird’s mischievous nature while the bear tolerates his partner’s behavior but not without light objection. After all, she is the one repeatedly slammed into objects for moves like the ground pound, and she doesn’t seem mean-spirited so much as feisty and perhaps a bit too savvy to accept the world around her as naturally as the friendlier Bear whose back she’s stuck riding.

A good hero certainly gives Banjo-Kazooie the core it needs to be an excellent 3D platformer, but the area they play in is just as important, as is the structure by which its experienced. Which is why we must now go visit the game’s main antagonist…

GRUNTILDA, AND THE CHALLENGES YOU FACE ALONG THE WAY

The warty green witch who kicks off the events of the game, Gruntilda’s ego is so great she’s constructed an entire lair seemingly just to house multiple sculptures of herself. The wicked witch doesn’t seem to be causing any immediate problems for people despite being so disgusting there is an entire character in the game whose purpose is to tell you the gross and ridiculous ways in which Grunty behaves, but we soon see her self-image challenged when she gets a fairly predictable response to asking who the fairest one of all is. Angered to learn that a young bear named Tooty is considered prettier than a wretched witch, Gruntilda sets out to capture her and prepares to steal her looks, Banjo and Kazooie having to head off into her lair to stop the process before it’s too late. Grunty isn’t just sitting back and waiting for you to find her though, watching your every move through her lair and calling out to you with rhyming insults to keep her a constant presence whose taunts both motivate you to want to beat her while making her more than some generic bad guy who exists just to get the ball rolling.

Getting to her requires gathering the Jiggies in nine worlds you access throughout her lair, these unlocked both by completing little navigation challenges within the overworld while also having set amounts of Jiggies you need to have earned in previous levels to unlock. Each level introduces new trials while having a pronounced them to the activities, but they all adhere to a design mentality first seen in the tutorial area Spiral Mountain. Most every level in Banjo-Kazooie is open to exploring in whatever way you deem fit, many having some central object that the rest of the level is built around. A giant snowman stands tall in the center of Freezeezy Peak, Click Clock Wood’s enormous centerpiece is a tree that extends higher than you can fly, and Clanker’s Cavern takes the cake presentation wise with an enormous metal shark that the game calls a whale for some odd reason. The central object will have its own Jiggy challenges tie to it while other tasks exist in the area built around it, some heading off into their own devoted areas while others are be more akin to minigames you need to complete within the introduced rulesets. No matter how things spin off though, the level attempts to make the challenges an organic part of the world, no floating platforms or disruptive setpieces as the game fluidly blends its presentation and platform design.

The aspect that makes these so inviting and interesting to engage with is the level of freedom you often have in picking what to do. Some do require finding the area-specific abilities first or completing one Jiggy task to have another open up, but once you enter a level, you aren’t told where you need to go or forced into any one task. You are free to pursue what you find interesting, whether that be the big obvious setpieces or something that caught your eye off in some small alcove. Almost every level is self-contained, only one case involving the Turbo Trainers existing where you must return to the level later with that ability you get elsewhere, so you almost always know that going into a stage you will be able to wrap it all up so long as you are up to whatever tasks are placed out for you.

While level geometry often tells you where a point of interest might be, Banjo-Kazooie also uses its smaller collectibles to guide you around. To use your egg shot and flight you need to top off your eggs and feathers, the game placing these in spots you will need to go slightly out of your way to grab only to see that some new task awaits you if you keep going from there. It can be used to draw attention to an area of interest for a later puzzle or it might fill out an area that could have seen empty until you spot something else useful in the mix like the tokens used to pay Mumbo or other vital collectibles. 100 music notes are scattered around every level for example, these needed to open doors to new areas of Grunty’s Lair and often filling small side areas with more to do than whatever Jiggy task needs to be completed. They’ll guide you around challenging areas as well to motivate you to be thorough, there being yet another collectible to find in the game’s besting hiding spots. Jinjos are little beaked something-or-others that will call out when you’re near, encouraging a more literal quest to find them than the challenges that are laid out for all but the simplest Jiggies. With five Jinjos in every level and a prize for finding all of them in a stage, you are encouraged to get to know the levels intimately, although there is an unfortunate choice in having the amount of music notes and Jinjos found reset in a stage after a death or after you’ve exited the level. The Xbox 360 rerelease makes the obvious improvement of allowing you to keep these between deaths and visits and is mostly an improvement over the Nintendo 64 release save for the small hitches in cutscenes, but the original release is still extremely well put together despite the little worries for those wanting to find every item in a stage.

The number of collectibles may seem daunting after that previous paragraph, but Banjo-Kazooie keeps things manageable by condensing its levels down to where there is very little wasted space. You aren’t very likely to get lost and finding everything usually just requires going over the areas of interest more closely, and while the camera can sometimes have issues when you’re too close to walls, there are few cases where it feels like the last important item you’re looking for is too difficult to find.

The worlds all have their own appeal to them, many strong themes like the Christmas level Freezeezy Peak concocting Jiggies tied to the concept pretty well, and while it would be possible to dissect every level and every challenge therein, even a Quality Time needs to maintain focus, and areas like Bubblegloop Swamp are mostly just a continuation of the excellent design ethos found in other stages rather than bringing something radically different from the other nine. There are some highlights and tripping points worth pointing out though, so let’s first take a trip to the game’s starting world Mumbo Mountain.

Spiral Mountain may be the tutorial area, but Mumbo Mountain introduces you to Banjo-Kazooie’s stage design masterfully. Its main point of interest is more to the side rather than central like most stages and its theme is more generic than things like the haunted Mad Monster Mansion or the desert world Gobi’s Valley, but you start right next to a massive slope you can’t quite get up yet. A Jinjo draws your attention to it and you see that slope is littered with even more goodies like music notes, but it’s not until you find the Talon Trot later in the level do things open up. This move not only lets you get around at a quicker clip but opens up the option to overcome more types of level geometry, and your reward for getting it from Bottles is a level that is suddenly your oyster. You are restricted initially just to show you the game is happy to open up the entire level to you, only sometimes requiring a certain skill or form to make navigation truly free. Naturally you’ll first meet Mumbo here as well as the game teaches you the usefulness of his transformations and the Jiggies here are often simpler than most, many existing out in the open to be found with little struggle, but the game also introduces the characters of Conga and Chimpy to you, two individuals who only matter within the context of their Jiggy challenge but set a precedent that will be followed up on in greater frequency in subsequent stages.

The beach level Treasure Trove Cove serves as the proper introduction to the increased focus on characters and the freedom the game allows you, with subsequent levels like the sewer where Clanker resides excellently showing off the central setpiece formula with paths branching away from it and areas like Bubblegloop Swamp and Freezeezy peak taking those ideas and introducing tighter skill requirements and a small increase in task complexity to keep up the difficulty curve. Mad Monster Mansion deserves an aside though for the pumkpin transformation, not because it is noteworthy, but because it is still enjoyable despite its simplicity. Sure, the alligator form is more impressive for having a bite attack and the bee even packs free flight, but the pumpkin is just a smaller form that can only jump and overcome certain hazards like the thorns on the mansion’s hedges and yet it is still a joy to use. Part of it is just the excellence in level design and movement in general, getting around as the little hopping gourd just as good as doing it regularly, but the expressiveness in its bounciness give it that extra bit of character that makes it enjoyable for the brief bit of time you’ll need it for perhaps the most unusual task in the entire game: heading down a talking toilet to find the Jiggy that was flushed down it. If Kazooie’s sass and Gruntilda’s character weren’t doing it for you on their own, the comedy built into the levels will dish out absurd situations that make the new levels more fun than just jumping challenges.

Wrapping up the game’s nine worlds are two that feel almost at odds with each other. The grimy port Rusty Bucket Bay and the four season forest Click Clock Wood feel like a culmination of the game in two different ways, one almost forgoing most of the established ideas and the other turning them up in the most ambitious level featured. Rusty Bucket Bay gets off to a rough start when you need to do a water level puzzle to get in, the need to switch the height of the water’s surface mixing with the awkward swimming controls and leading to fiddling with the water switches to get to different areas of interest. Once you get in, Rusty Bucket Bay isn’t really bad but does feature odd breaks away from the core design. Rather than the level being easy to get around and tackle how you wish, a giant ship serves as the centerpiece that, if you fall in the water around it, is hard to get back on. The surrounding areas that usually have a clear path to the center now are limited by toll bridges that have to be activated from one side and reset on death, this level featuring the hardest Jiggy challenge in the game in the form of a tightly timed dash from the difficult and deadly engine room to the ship’s exterior. Getting around requires a lot of linear movement when most of the game emphasized tackling it how you desire and there are side areas with no explicit purpose besides giving the giant ship extra rooms, but Rusty Bucket may mostly feels inferior to its kin for breaking away from the formula rather than being truly awful.

Click Clock Wood technically shifts up the formula as well but in an incredibly effective manner. Here you experience the level across the four different seasons of the year, seeing how the level changes shape over time and able to influence things like the growth of a baby eagle or help a squirrel collect nuts for its winter hibernation. It’s the most complex stage and requires thinking across four different versions of the stage, but the thought put into earning your Jiggies here make them some of the most satisfying to snag. It’s the ultimate test of your understanding of the game so far and mastery of its platforming as the level is more hostile than before and features tighter platforming than any other all while providing a creative and engaging theme to that more difficult action.

Once you’ve finished the ninth world, you head towards a platform with Tooty’s face on it, ready to head off and face Gruntilda in the final battle, and in perhaps the game’s best comedic moment, you find yourself facing her… in a game show.

There is a proper fight with her after that is an appropriately hard confrontation where collecting all the notes and Jiggies can give you an extra advantage in the game’s most difficult fight and perhaps only true boss battle, but first you engage in a silly but personality-filled quiz game. Grunty’s Furnace Fun not only features the music my mind still goes to for a game show situation but a reincorporation of almost everything you’ve experienced in your adventure. The goofy gross facts Grunty’s sister Brentilda told you seemingly without purpose become answers to a deadly quiz game where you take damage for a wrong answer, the game board featuring spaces with different question types that might ask you to remember those or details about the different levels, characters, and even sounds encountered throughout Banjo-Kazooie, the game’s tightly packed design making these already memorable enough before we account for a brilliant bit of design that can only be represented by one character… Histup.

HISTUP, AND HOW CHARACTERS GIVE BANJO-KAZOOIE PERSONALITY

Histup is not an important character. His role is small, just being a snake in a basket that rises up to take you to a Jiggy after you help a snake charmer… and yet, even before the age of fan wikis, this character was cemented in my mind and those of many other Banjo-Kazooie players. This is because Banjo-Kazooie doesn’t just make a sequence of Jiggy challenges you need to beat to win a game, it creates its own little worlds inhabited by characters with personality even when they could have just been silent obstacles. Histup didn’t need a name or even attention drawn to him, and neither did Leaky, a little pail with googly eyes who you feed a few eggs to make a sand castle rise up from the water. Leaky could have been a switch, the sand castle could have just been above water already since it still has a challenge inside, but instead you talk to a small character to get the ball rolling on this Jiggy quest, and therein lies the brilliance of Banjo-Kazooie’s characters.

While many of them are just objects with faces and punny names, the characters you help in Banjo-Kazooie serve vital roles. Finding tasks in a level isn’t just about spotting some interesting object or items that lead you to it. Sometimes you’ll spot a character hanging around waiting to talk to someone, the challenge being introduced to you by way of an exchange with a silly character that is quick and gets you moving on something that otherwise might have to be explained with a tutorial. The minigame to eat some creatures in Bubblegloop Swamp could have just been some score challenge to overcome, but instead a mean crocodile named Mr. Vile turns it into a competition, both adding a character you want to beat and one that you can outmaneuver rather than just needing to hit a score cap. A Jiggy held by a mummy’s hand that retreats when you get too close seems to be based on a similar enemy featured in the rest of Gobi’s Valley, but then it starts speaking to you, turning the simple exchange of trying to get it before it escapes a silly moment where he claims to have been guarding that treasure for a thousand years, presumable just by sitting there like he was before you approached.

Perhaps the best way of showing the importance are two similar tasks featuring the goal of growing a plant. In Gobi’s Valley you encounter a camel named Gobi who I guess owns the valley, but this camel is vital towards both of these plant-growing Jiggies. When you enter Gobi’s Valley you notice an out of place plant in an oasis named Trunker, attention drawn to him because he is alive and presented to you as a character. You can’t get him any water from nearby, but when you get Gobi over to him you can water him by slamming the camel’s hump and spraying out spit, Trunker rewarding you with a Jiggy. Gobi reappears in Click Clock Wood near a patch of dirt that doesn’t feature any other character, but because Trunker being thirsty made you experiment with slamming Gobi back in the desert, you know now this camel can be used to water a new plant as well. Quick bits of conversation lay out important rules and prime you for important solutions without completely giving them away. The obese polar bear Boggy has swallowed a Jiggy and hitting his belly to get it out seems obvious, but you need to find the method that works. The shifting sand in Gobi’s Desert might seem safe at first, but then you touch it and sand eels inform you that this form of ground is damaging to the touch.

Every location in Banjo-Kazooie has characters to speak with and puzzles based around how they behave, are designed, or where they’re placed. Again though, Rusty Bucket Bay breaks away from this by having few characters while Click Clock Wood features it in spades, learning the year in the lives of the characters in the final world pivotal to solving their problems. The game is so proud of its cast of characters it features a parade of them during the credits, but before you hit that point you see just how effective the game was in cementing these characters in your head. Characters in Banjo-Kazooie speak in text boxes with unique gibberish voices, these distinct enough that during Grunty’s Furnace Fun it can not only ask which character voice is speaking, but it’s not too difficult to remember them. Other little touches like having menus feature character icons who make their little noises when hovered over prepare you even more for this, but mostly, just by drawing attention to them and making them key to many Jiggy puzzles, the game makes it cast more memorable than other entire games can manage, to the point where I can remember Histup still to this day while some games will have even the most important characters hard to remember over the course of that game.

There is one more excellent detail that makes Banjo-Kazooie such a memorable experience, and it’s one that has no practical gameplay use despite being so exemplary, this aspect best represented by… a turtle.

TIPTUP, THE ROLE MUSIC PLAYS IN BANJO-KAZOOIE

While Tiptup is interesting for his own reasons, mainly debuting alongside Banjo in Diddy Kong Racing in a strange bit of cameoing early, this choir instructor turtle is mostly here to represent the wonderful music of Banjo-Kazooie, and while I considered just having an abrupt picture of the real man who made it all, it felt important to stick to my review’s theme instead of Rusty Bucket Bay-ing this section.

Grant Kirkhope is the man behind Banjo-Kazooie’s soundtrack and while I don’t often go in-depth about game music since music isn’t my strong suit, it would be criminal to overlook his work here. Already with its comedic tone, colorful worlds, and kooky characters, Banjo-Kazooie creates an inviting world, but the music is what really brings everything together, even helping to redeem Rusty Bucket Bay in its own way. Even when playing the level that breaks most of the game’s conventions, you still have a wonderfully catchy song that not only gives that stage bouncy energy but integrates the feel of the level perfectly through its instrumentation. The prominent trombone matches the industrial griminess while the steam and whistle sound effects punctuate breaks in the song. Seagulls and water sounds sell the watery location, and a xylophone breaks up the tune with a delightful sound that still fits the deliberately off-putting ugliness of the level.

Meanwhile, the friendlier Treasure Trove Cove is happy and bubbly with its song, the steel drums carrying things along before it gets its own xylophone piece that is used much more to carry the adventurous feeling of the stage instead. Freezeezy Peak has a wonderfully monumental sound to it like climbing a large mountain while adding in Christmas elements and oompah-brass to keep up the common theme of constant energy that invites the player to go out and explore.

Click Clock Wood features one of the most memorable songs melodywise, but it also shows off Banjo-Kazooie’s innovation in dynamic music, a feature far more common now than it was when Kirkhope introduced it. Depending on your location in a level, certain songs will be retooled to match the tone. Click Clock Wood is the most obvious case of this, each season having its own twist on the song that matches the energy of the season. A calm lobby keeps things subdued until you enter spring and hear its lively tune filled with animal noises, summer settling into a more waltz-like tune where the wildlife is still present in the song and joined by bees but with a slower tone to represent the heat of the season starting to reduce the exuberance of the breeding season. Autumn begins the drop towards winter as the instruments become plainer and the tune is carried by frogs and woodpeckers more than chittering birds, things finally concluding with the winter tune that focuses on icy sounds as the animals have all begun to hibernate. All of this achieved without losing any of the driving energy that keep the level song exciting, and this carries over to the smaller instances where the music will be filtered so that Treasure Trove Cove sound even more piratey when you approach Captain Blubber’s ship, swimming underwater leads to the music becoming somewhat muted, or in the most affective instance, nearly disappearing when you fly so high above the level you’ve practically escaped both it and its theme.

Almost every song on the soundtrack is enjoyable in some way, the bounciness and adventurousness to it present in most every tune. Even Gruntilda’s lair has the same up and down rhythm despite trying to be a bit foreboding, the silliness of adapting the children’s song Teddy Bears’ Picnic into a villain theme matching the tone of a game where that same villain happily boasts about her grossness while simultaneously thinking she was already the most beautiful in the land before Tooty was brought up.

Speaking of Tooty though…

TOOTY, OR THE CONCLUSION WAITING AT THE END

There are many more things that could be said about Banjo-Kazooie’s creativity and game design. The developers tried to integrate cross-game secrets with Stop n’ Swop, a feature that was meant to share items across games before Nintendo 64 revisions made the mechanism for swapping these hidden items impossible despite setting the young internet ablaze with theorizing their use. Cheats exist natively in the Sand Castle to do silly things like turn Banjo into a washing machine, practical things like up your ammo capacity, or even break the sequence of the game to let you get to later worlds early. They even manage to make an interesting platforming segment out of a giant advent calender!

While an occasional Jiggy challenge might not be as well designed as the others and I’ve been happy to bash Rusty Bucket Bay throughout what is otherwise a highlight of the many amazing things Banjo-Kazooie does right, it’s undeniable a lot of love and craft went into making this experience the embodiment of what makes a collectathon not just enjoyable, but memorable beyond the substance of its gameplay. Characters, music, and a feeling of adventurous joy permeating the game make Banjo-Kazooie the stand-out member of its subgenre. Even its sequel would stray away from the tightly packed quality of this game that refined what Super Mario 64 started but hadn’t quite perfected, and while it would certainly benefit developers to introduce their own ideas and concepts to the genre if they choose to make a game within it, Banjo-Kazooie is still a strong reference point for the things that not only just make a game satisfying to play but ensure it has a lasting appeal and lovable personality.

Banjo-Kazooie isn’t just some goofy adventure about a bear and a bird saving a little girl from a witch. It’s one of the best video games ever made.