Banjo-Tooie

Banjo-Tooie was perhaps the peak of Rareware's obsession with making their collectathons increasingly huge and complex. The essence of the masterful Banjo-Kazooie is here, but it's somewhat lost under the noise and tedium.

Oh boy is this game all over the place, I think even as a kid this would've overwhelmed me with its different mechanics but as an adult, this has an identity crisis usually reserved for the tenth game in a long-tired franchise.

I guess this was done to address criticisms of how generic the first game was even for its time, well I can comfortably say this game is anything but generic as there's so much more variety with the levels and what you can do with them that I can't even list them all here without it becoming monotonous, so I’ll stick to the highlights. The biggest change here is that banjo and Kazooie can now play independently from each other, with banjo controlling much better than Kazooie as she runs way too fast in this game which leads to her running off edges that banjo can navigate with ease. She's also crap at defending herself as she relies on using her wings to attack as opposed to the hand-to-hand combat banjo resorts to. It's clear that the game prefers him as a protagonist over her as not only does he acquire all of the coolest moves (except perhaps for free flight) but she's also much snarkier here than she was in the first game, it's like she's suddenly a Karen which makes her meta jokes seem like something from a modern Disney film rather than the charming observations she made in the previous game. I'm guessing her gameplay was why the levels are so much more spacious this time around as they're ginormous compared not just to the first game but most 3d platformers even in the modern era. At least the locations are interesting this time around and not just the standard locations used in kids’ games, a mine shift and a factory being among the more generic locations with the most interesting being a prehistoric area that's separated by a volcanic area and a tundra area. These levels are interconnected with one another in addition to being accessible from the main hub, although they require a set number of jiggies to gain access to just like in the first game. The game is generous enough to give you a teleportation system where our heroes can warp from one area to another provided they've activated the warp pad in said area, making backtracking a lot easier than other games with locations too spacious for their own good.

I could go on with the positives and negatives, but I think you get my point, it basically throws anything and everything at the wall to see what sticks, some of it does and some of it doesn't, making for a game that may be far more interesting than its predecessor but is ultimately far more of a mess and thus not nearly as good.

Banjo-Tooie is a perfect sequel to the innovative, influential 3D platformer Banjo-Kazooie…in theory. On paper, Banjo-Tooie completes more than the necessary criteria for an exemplary sequel. The factors I’ve always attributed to when it comes to crafting a substantial followup to a celebrated title is expanding upon its world and characters along with using the element of hindsight to oil the hinges that perhaps started squeaking once the game was released, much to the embarrassment of the developers. If you’ll notice the cheeky instance of play-on-words in the title, Banjo-Tooie is a game that revels in its inherent role as a sequel. The game was always in a comfortable position after all, succeeding its predecessor after only two years and on the same, familiar hardware. Banjo-Kazooie constructed the concrete architecture of the Banjo mansion, and all Banjo-Tooie was tasked with was sprucing up the glorious estate with some voguish furniture or state-of-the-art HDTV complete with surround sound speakers. The question still remains: does Rare’s magnum opus really need these additional luxuries? Banjo-Kazooie made such a monumental splash for the prevailing 3D platformer trend that it stole the proverbial torch away from Mario to guide every subsequent release in the genre with its light. Any game that usurps the throne from Nintendo’s golden boy aint no slouch, so one can infer the extent of Banjo-Kazooie’s quality merely through this fact alone. Because of Banjo-Kazooie’s high mark of 3D platforming excellence, Banjo-Tooie is another example of a sequel needing to prove the rationale of its existence. In some aspects, Banjo-Tooie knew which of Banjo-Kazooie’s loose bolts to tighten up, but there are some screws that it never should’ve tinkered with.

Even though Banjo-Tooie is screaming it’s sequel status from the stormy peak of Gruntilda’s Lair, it’ll be damned to be content with being eclipsed in the shadow of Banjo-Kazooie’s glory. Since Gruntilda fell from her tower upon her defeat and was entombed under the crushing weight of a massive boulder, the moral characters from the first game can now relax and play a rousing game of poker at Banjo’s house. During their relatively care-free evening of playing cards, Gruntilda’s two equally unsightly sisters of contrasting body proportions align with her old scientific servant Klungo to tunnel to Gruntilda’s resting place with a military-grade drill. Somehow, Gruntilda defies the laws of biology and still remains alive and well despite her stationary status beneath the earth for who knows how long. The glaring effect being buried has had on Gruntilda is the total removal of her sickly-green skin, reducing her to a skeleton with the same witch garb and squawking voice (personally, I think the new look is an improvement). Before Gruntilda begins her major quest to procure a new epidermis, she can’t help but act on a petty impulse to blast Banjo’s house with a comically-enhanced laser cannon. Bottles the mole is the sole victim of Gruntilda’s vengeance, leaving his wispy soul to roam around Banjo’s front yard until the end of times. That’s right: the game begins with Bottles fucking dying. As the unceremonious onslaught signals a new adventure, the events of the previous night leaves the old stomping grounds of Spiral Mountain in ruin, with the overhead entrance of Gruntilda’s lair blocked off by the wreckage. The first cutscene and its aftermath conveys a message that the comfort of nostalgia that comes with a sequel has been blown to smithereens, even if the game is still strictly confined to familiarity as a direct sequel developed on the same console.

That cynical attitude seems to persist throughout Banjo-Tooie. Banjo-Tooie behaves the same way as a displeased, ill-natured child does being dragged along on a chore by a parent, committing minor acts of obnoxious debauchery to both alleviate their boredom and spite their parental figure. Banjo-Tooie does its damndest to dump on its predecessor at every waking moment possible. Namely, corrupting Banjo-Kazooie’s guileless presentation and tone as fervently as it can while admittedly being tethered down by the same aesthetic. More cases of murder pop up after Bottles is dispatched among the various NPCS, and the fact that Tooty is missing once again (with a credible search ad on a milk carton to boot) but no one seems to care disturbs me a smidge. Really, the trick that Banjo-Tooie pulls out of its hat in an attempt to ruin its predecessor’s legacy is constantly breaking the fourth wall. Seemingly every line of dialogue references Banjo-Kazooie in some capacity, noting some familiar characters, events, and other nostalgic nuggets to further hammer in its sequel status. The emotional impact of Bottles being fried to a crisp is tainted by Kazooie’s offhand comment that “he wasn’t the most popular character in the last game.” In fact, the snarky bird spits so much verbal venom at the NPCs in Banjo-Tooie that I’m almost offended on their behalf. On top of referencing the previous title, the game features posters with characters from Jet Force Gemini and a jiggie quest involving unfreezing a Rare relic named Sabreman. The second title is too soon to start being meta, guys! The game gives off the impression that a sequel to Banjo-Kazooie was greenlit, but Rare shared the same weary sentiment about sequels that I tend to express. I’m not sure if this flippant direction is an attempt to sabotage the player’s immersion or if Rare genuinely thought it made the game more discernible from Banjo-Kazooie. Still, it indicates that something was stirring at the Rare offices during this game’s development.

However, just because Banjo-Tooie makes a fuss out of having to exist, it doesn’t mean that the game didn’t ultimately make an effort. As I stated before, the quality of life enhancements that usually come with a sequel are certainly apparent. For example, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with Banjo’s combat moves. Here, Banjo’s roll maneuver to mow down enemies is far less stilted, as he can now shift the direction slightly. When in an idle position, Banjo has thankfully stopped trying to attack with his pitiful arm slaps and the game leaves the short range offense entirely to Kazooie. One glaring issue found in Banjo-Kazooie that encompassed most players' gripes and grievances was the traversal of the hub world. Having to make the trek all the way up Gruntilda’s Lair in the later portions of the game from its entrance at the bottom was a tedious excursion unfitting for the accessible feeling of a hub world, and the teleportation cauldrons were too sparsely placed to amend this issue. Banjo-Tooie’s hub and its levels are divided into distinct districts that all come with a teleportation mechanism. Simply place Banjo into the dome fit for a mole and a menu will appear to select where to arrive at, provided Banjo has already visited that area already. The levels also feature something similar in the vein of a warp pad which transports Banjo across the map, but I’ll touch on that in further detail later on. The developers have corrected every last one of Banjo-Kazooie's minor sniggles and while the amount of these is marginal, at least the developers paid attention and acted accordingly for the little effort required.

Isle O’ Hags is the name of the new nucleus between all of Banjo-Tooie’s levels. Technically, it encompasses the entire eclectic island nation that Banjo, his friends, and the Gruntilda sisters who are apparently a native species. Every area from Banjo-Kazooie also shares the same dominion but for now, let’s focus on the district revealed behind the dirt wall of Spiral Mountain. Isle O’ Hags essentially copies the same design philosophy as Gruntilda’s Lair; a steep ascent where the peak of the climb is the climactic point of the game, with frequent inhibitors in the shape of arbitrarily-assigned jiggy quantities to implore the player to visit the levels and to stretch out the pacing to elevate the scope of the journey. While both hubs share the same overall design and collectathon direction, they differ in atmosphere. Ironically, for a place named after the pejorative term for Gruntilda, the looming presence of Gruntilda and her sisters is practically absent, never throwing her voice from her chamber to cackle disencouraging limericks in Banjo’s ears. That, and the oppressiveness that Gruntilda’s Lair exuded was contributed by the enclosed cavern setting, something that winding seaside cliffs of the isle certainly doesn’t. Still, I actually prefer Isle O’ Hags as a hub world, and not only because the fast travel domes make climbing it much breezier. The developers have also streamlined the level unlocking process. Once Banjo collects a certain amount of jiggies, he’ll revisit a jiggy spiritual temple near the base of the hub where solving a jigsaw puzzle will reward him with the monk-like Master Jiggywiggy beaming a ray of light that rivals Gruntilda’s laser beam to the unlocked area. I thought exploring to look for the painting with the missing jigsaw pieces made for an unnecessary additional venture, so I’m content with returning to the same sacred jiggy domain once in a while to further the game.

Banjo-Tooie’s branching areas were an especially exciting prospect because the previous game exhausted all of the typical level tropes seen across 3D platformers of the same ilk. This doesn’t inherently mean that the developers have hit a wall with nowhere to run; rather, scratching off all the boxes on the 3D platformer cheat sheet forces the developers to amplify their creative juices. Overall, the level tropes on display in Banjo-Tooie are a little less conventional. Mayahem Temple’s core inspiration stems from the ancient civilizations from central America, while the humid, terraform dinosaur biome Terrydactyland takes Banjo further back in time far before the dawn of human civilization. Jolly Roger’s Lagoon separates the sea creatures from the land lubbers when Banjo dives into the basin of the port town and discovers an immaculate underwater world beneath the surface. Hailfire Peaks presents the most classic of contrasts with a fire and ice world coexisting on opposite sides of one another. Glitter Gulch Mine reminds me of one of those hokey prospector attractions that families get their pictures taken at, complete with a train station and shiny piles of counterfeit gold. Speaking of attractions, my favorite area in Banjo-Tooie from a conceptual standpoint is the amusement park of Witchyworld run by Gruntilda, a despondent carnival that makes every Six Flags location look safe and professional by comparison. In fact, the churlish atmosphere found in Witchyworld sort of extends to every other level to some extent as well. None of these levels capture that cheery, captivating vibe that oozed from levels like Freezeezy Peak or Click Clock Wood and instead borrow the same filthy dirge found in an area like Clanker's Cavern. Grunty Industries certainly exemplifies a glum, morale-free factory and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think Hailfire was a censored misprint of the damned afterlife of a certain religious denomination because of all of its scorching fire and brimstone. Still, the variety on display rivals the level selection of the previous game marvelously.

In lieu of Bottles pushing up daisies, who will teach Banjo and the bird new techniques to survive these harsher worlds? Bottles brother, the army drill sergeant Jamjars, will pop out of his various underground hatches to whip Banjo and Kazooie into shape, promising them that they’ll learn some military-grade shit after Bottles simply taught them the basics. He doesn’t teach Banjo how to sneak up behind a man and snap his neck like Solid Snake, but I’m sure some of these moves are still illegal in at least seven different countries. The developers found better use of the golden musical notes in Banjo-Tooie as they can be used as an accumulated currency to unlock a new move from Jamjars. Some of these new feats of dexterity come in the form of quality-of-life enhancements, with ledge grabbing and the Breegull Blast seeming like necessary afterthoughts after the first game was released. Kazooie gains a smattering of other egg types alongside the standard ones, including fire, ice, grenades, and birthing a walking cuckoo bomb with a timed or manual detonator. The Beak Bomb is now enhanced with the Bill Drill to crack open large boulders and unscrew bolts. Temporary power ups that involve the Talon Trot add some moon shoes to bounce high and shoes that can climb up inclines with footprints on them. The most interesting of these new moves are the ones the pair learn for their individual merit. “Split pads” with both characters' faces on them separate both of them until they regroup on the same spot, proving that Kazooie isn’t fused to Banjo like an abominable siamese twin. Banjo’s individual moves involve his backpack in some capacity, whether it be hopping inside it to mitigate damage or carrying someone else in it for a change like a taxi service. Kazooie mostly performs enhanced versions of her innate abilities without Banjo’s weight to contend with, on top of hatching other creatures' eggs for them. Banjo-Tooie doubles the amount of learnable techniques while keeping the old ones intact, and playing as the dynamic duo separately doesn’t feel to much like a handicap.

Beloved character Mumbo Jumbo was present at the card game and did not perish at the scaly hand of Grundtilda, so he doesn’t have an excuse to sit this adventure out like Bottles. Fortunately, Banjo-Tooie had big plans for the pygmy shaman. Visiting Mumbo in his now two-story skull house with the new and easily obtained Glowbo collectible will grant the player the ability to play as Mumbo on the field. His range of movement is fairly limited, and the taser staff he brings to defend himself is more humorous to use than practical. Bringing Mumbo to pads with his face on them triggers him using supernatural magic to levitate colossally-sized objects, performing a rain dance to create a rainbow bridge, resurrecting the dead, etc. A new magical companion Banjo-Tooie introduces is the beautiful native girl Wumba, whose character is probably a more overtly racist depiction than Mumbo. She fulfills the transformation mechanic introduced in Banjo Kazooie, changing Banjo’s shape into an animal or object when he enters her wigwam and takes a dip in the pink, Glowbo-powered pool in its center. Some of the new transformations include a dynamite plunger, a submarine, and even a full-sized fucking T-Rex that bulldozes all in its path. Even the washing machine easter egg from the last game actually becomes a useful mechanic in Grunty Industries. As much as playing as Mumbo and the returning transformations serve as nice additional layers to the gameplay, what interests me more is the strained relationship between Mumbo and Wumba. Considering their feuding attitudes between each other, these two obviously have some intimate history together, right?

Judging by all of Banjo-Tooie’s exciting new features that are all fun and fluid, it would seem like it’s a sequel that renders Banjo-Kazooie obsolete. However, the way in which Banjo-Tooie utilizes all of these new features in the quasi-open world environment is the source of its downfall. If Banjo-Kazooie's single-world summation of its design is conspicuous, then Banjo-Tooie’s is circuitous. In Banjo-Tooie, exploration is still required to progress the game, but it is rarely rewarded. Oftentimes, excavating the area and finding a jiggy comes with several unnecessary extra steps. As much as I enjoy the lark of being able to play as Mumbo, retrieving him from his perch just to trigger a cutscene in a specific place and then trailing back to his skull house grated on my nerves one too many times. Grunty Industries, the area that exemplifies the worst of Banjo-Tooie’s bloated design, is a languid climb up the five floors of the industrial cesspit with finding the stairs for each following floor as the central progression gimmick. At the apex point of the factory lies a jiggy on a wooden crate, which should’ve been the reward for making it this far. However, this point is still littered with unnecessary obstacles to pad out the levels. Banjo-Kazooie was consistently more engaging because the quicker satisfaction of simply finding a jiggy tickled the player’s sense of accomplishment more frequently. It can take longer to find half of the jiggies in Banjo-Tooie than all of them for any of the Banjo-Kazooie areas. It seems like the new features like the split pads and the alternate characters only enable this circuity even more, as they are often implemented as the extra and not-so-obvious steps to obtaining a jiggy. This level of augmented length also extends to the other collectibles, as the jingos in plain sight will most likely be their evil, bizarro counterparts the minjos who will dupe Banjo and harm him. Most of the jiggies in the game feel as if they’re annoyingly out of reach, as if the game is dangling them over the player as a cruel tease. Coupling this with the swollen breadth of each area, I thank the lord for the warp pads because without them, I’d go as far to say the game would be unplayable.

Another factor of Banjo-Tooie’s bloatedness is due to the developers attempting to intertwine each area and craft an interconnected world. Considering the game is modeled the same as the sectioned-off playgrounds as in the first game, it’s no surprise its execution didn’t work. The adjacent paths between areas require a heavy suspension of disbelief and only seem to be applicable in select situations to make collecting a jiggy more drudgery than anything like delivering food from Witchyland to the struggling cavemen in Terrydactyland. Chuffy, the train that should ideally facilitate the rationale for an interconnected world, only rolls through six of the nine areas. If that doesn’t indicate that the idea was unfeasible, I don’t know what does. What irritates me the most about their decision is that it is the biggest contributor to the fleeting jiggy hunt quandary in Banjo-Tooie as most of the jiggies can’t be obtained until Banjo or Kazooie requires a move in a later level. Approximately half of a level’s jiggies will be kept out of reach initially and in a game with levels that is supposed to foster exploration, being limited to only a few jiggies needed to progress the game is a big kick in the balls from developers. One might raise an eyebrow at my criticism of this direction considering it mirrors the design philosophy of the Metroidvania genre, one of my niche video game favorites that I constantly tout. For one, Metroidvania worlds never slapdash interconnectivity when its world doesn’t warrant it. Secondly, finding an upgrade in a Metroidvania game will always put the player on a direct path and make the once inhibited passage a cakewalk to traverse, something Banjo-Tooie still goes out of its way to reject even when the move and or upgrade is learned.

It seems like most of the jiggies not obstructed by the developers ill-planned directives come in the form of minigames. As pleased as I was to stumble upon these to finally earn a jiggy in a somewhat fair and natural way, it’s a shame that many of them boiled down to the same task of shooting or collecting objects of three different colors with different point totals. I’ll be seeing objects of red, green, and blue hopping around in my sleep at this point. I greatly missed the variety from Banjo-Kazooie, even if those minigames were easier than grade school arithmetic. While it does seem like I’m complaining, I’ll easily engage with these minigames as opposed to the other option. In a select few areas, entering certain sections will make Banjo cock Kazooie like a gun and the perspective will shift to the first-person view. As amused as I initially was to witness “Banjo-KaDOOMie,” these minigames were more hellish than anything from the pioneering FPS franchise. Kazooie’s targeting is as responsive as a lazy eye and trying to skewer enemies with her beak like a bayonet made me feel like a drunk civil war reenactor.

The jiggy tasks I did enjoy and sought out over the rest were the boss battles. They were few and far between in Banjo-Kazooie, and I’d be lying if I said that the wooden box or Nipper the hermit crab were herculean foes that were hard to conquer. Each level in Banjo-Tooie features a mighty foe worthy of the boss battle title, and they are a varied and challenging bunch. The fights between the twin dragons of the opposite representative of Hailfire Peaks were on some pretty taut arenas, and Weldar featured enough simultaneous offensive tactics to overwhelm me. Popping the monstrous boils off of the angler fish Fak Fak and the stitched patches of the giant inflatable beast in the circus tent made the bosses seem formidable, and the Targitzan duel managed to make that particular FPS section palatable. Klungo even cements his role as a recurring supporting character through frequent encounters. To my surprise, I ended up enjoying the final boss fight against Gruntilda and her drill tank more than her final fight from the first game because of how involved it is. Those final increments of her health bar had me sweating bullets. Or, perhaps I enjoy it because the developers made the bizarrely-implemented quiz show portion of the finale tolerable this time around, and it's hilariously morbid to boot.

Banjo-Tooie isn’t quite an example of a sophomore slump. However, the game seems to have tacked on a sophomore seventeen pounds due to the developers having ambitions bigger than their stomachs, and it’s enough weight to make the game feel comparatively fatigued and sluggish throughout. Either this was a faulty wish, or Rare took the piss out of the natural evolution of the franchise and this is their idea of a joke, judging from the game’s more negative tone. Behind all that excess fat, Banjo-Tooie feels like the same game as its trend-setting predecessor, and it even makes the Banjo experience more inviting because of the effort of the minor improvements. Banjo-Tooie made me exhausted at simply performing the bare minimum to complete the game, which is certainly not a feeling I got after finishing Banjo-Kazooie.

The very few genuinely inspired design decisions – a much more interactive and intricately designed hub world; connections between individual levels and elaborate setpieces that depend on them – are offset massively by Rare's failure to balance scope and scale. There's some impressive stuff around the midpoint/endgame – Hailfire Peaks and Grunty Industries are great – but the experience is frontloaded with miserable busywork. Revisiting Banjo-Kazooie is a joy because I know I can dash straight off to scooping up a given level's jiggies; here, though, genuinely engaging exploration, platforming challenges, and minigames are overwhelmingly gated behind tedious errand-running. I remember being hyped about getting to play as Mumbo when I read about it in magazines, only to be deeply let down when it turned out those sequences rarely amounted to more than slowly retracing your steps to a spell pad you found earlier, pressing B, watching a cutscene, and trudging all the way back to his hut to switch back to BK.

Also the tone of the writing leans a little too far into self-aware cynicism and frequently strays out of tongue-in-cheek territory and into outright meanness. Think the tonal difference between Simpsons season 6 and season 11. It's just vaguely upsetting in a way I don't know how to articulate more specifically.

At its best, Banjo-Tooie is a far better game than Banjo-Kazooie, with only Click Clock Wood eclipsing the best moments of Tooie. At its worst, Banjo-Tooie is just awful.

The main new mechanic of the game is splitting up Banjo and Kazooie. I thought this was dumb as shit to start, because the two could barely do anything apart. Once I got all the moves, however, I started to appreciate the new puzzles.
Without Banjo, Kazooie is much lighter and can move faster and fly further. Without Kazooie, Banjo can use his backpack to carry things, hide in, and more.
The problem is that Banjo has to be told by Jamjars that he can put things in his backpack. It's annoying that you have a puzzle where you need the taxi pack in the third level, but you arbitrarily can't get that ability until the fifth, for example. The original Banjo-Kazooie did a much better job with this, giving you all but one ability as soon as you needed it.

One of my favourite puzzles in the game is also plagued by this. In Witchyworld, you can get burgers and fries from concession stands, but you can't take them out of the park. There are cavemen in Terrydactyl Land who are starving, and the only food in the game is in Witchyworld. There is, however, one secret path out of Witchyworld, which leads straight to Terrydactyl Land. Unfortunately, you need the claw clamber boots, which you need to wait to get, since they're in Grunty Industries. It's annoying and arbitrary. (you can actually skip this by entering from the Terrydactyl Land side and then dying, which will warp you right to the entrance, but that's not intended)

Grunty Industries is one of the best levels in this game, but I absolutely hated it the first time I got there. It's a confusing labyrinth that you need to learn front-to-back. There are two systems in place to help you move quickly between the floors of the factory, but only one can be used at a time. Normally, you use the warp pads to go to each floor. When Humba Wumba turns Banjo into a washing machine, however, he can no longer use the warp pads, and must use the elevator. You've really got to learn the factory's layout in order to succeed here.

The worst level in the game, by far, is Jolly Roger Lagoon. I thought I was going to love this level the first time I got there. The pirate town aesthetic was top-notch, and the idea of collecting doubloons to trade for goods and services was something I really wanted to do. Unfortunately, the pirate town is just a small part of the level, and the meat of the level is godawful.
The two N64 Banjo games have awful swimming controls. Kazooie softened this by making there be no enemies underwater. Tooie decides that Kazooie was far too reasonable, and adds underwater combat to the barely-improved swimming. Jolly Roger Lagoon is mostly a water level, and features the new horrible underwater combat heavily. I was absolutely pissed.

Another thing I hated in this game was the new minjo enemies. In both Kazooie and Tooie, a game-spanning objective was to rescue the jinjoes. They'll yell and whistle for your help, and then you pick them up and it's all good. Minjoes yell and whistle for your help, then they'll attack you. If you kill them, they respawn, and continue to annoyingly yell and whistle at you.

In Kazooie, the main antagonist, Grunty, would always talk to you in rhyme. It was her most memorable and defining trait, hearing her constant rhyming taunting in the overworld. Tooie introduces Grunty's sisters, who force her to stop rhyming. The writers completely removed the most memorable trait of their villain, and it seems incredibly lazy, regardless of their intention. Imagine if a Paper Mario [ペーパーマリオ] game made Bowser mute. People would be up in arms. oh wait

Banjo-Tooie feels like a huge improvement if you look at it from the outside, the levels are bigger, it has a bigger variety of mini-games, it has more story, more sarcastic humor, more abilities, and it has more bosses. But once you play it, you realize Kazooie was just such a fine tuned game that this just feels like a downgrade even if it sounds like a better game on paper.

So the first problem with Tooie is it is way too big. The levels just have so much open space and are designed with too much space. Too many levels in this are just too big and hard to navigate, and a chore, especially since many of the mini-games require going back and forth between the different areas of each map. Compared to the first game where the levels were smaller but easy to navigate and figure out where everything was. There is one level that is almost entirely underwater and the controls for that segment are just awful. The mini games in this are mostly a mixed bag with most of them being fetch quests which depended on the map, there were some really awkward ones, like the FPS missions where you have to go into an area and find things to shoot with your eggs under a time limit, which just controlled bad and felt out of place in this kind of game. There were some fun mini games, but I'd say most are just bland. You do get more abilities, but the problem with this is you have to backtrack a lot. For instance many jiggies in this game require you to have an ability you haven't learned so you need to backtrack back to that level once you've learned that ability in a future level. The first game only had one jiggy you needed to backtrack for, this has at least 2 jiggies per each stage that require you to backtrack. This just got incredibly tedious and annoying, and made the game feel like more of a grind.

Now the game does do some thing better things than the first. You do get some new abilities that are fun to play with, even if some of them do feel like novelty abilities that are only used to solve puzzles. There are boss fights and each stage has its own, even though the boss fights in this are simple and I wouldn't say they add a whole lot, it was nice to have them at least. And also the humor in this game is a lot more prominent. The game has a ton of story loaded into the first hour and the game has a more sarcastic feel than the first game. Actually the humor in this game was really the only thing I found to be enjoyable.

The endgame is similar to the first, you have to pass a quiz show then go to the final boss, only the endgame in this is worse than the first. In the first game you could collect extra jiggies to give you extra health and bonuses to assist you with the boss fight, in this game you only need 70 jiggies to reach the final boss, and collecting any more jiggies doesn't matter. Sure if you collect all 100 you unlock a bonus movie that shows pictures of all the enemies, but I honestly found that to be so disappointing. Especially considering the jiggies in this game are more of a chore to collect, it feels so pointless collecting any more since the reward isn't anything that helps you out. The final boss in this game is just a mess, its a 1st person segment where you have to dodge projectiles while aiming, only the aiming is awkward since this was an era before FPS games on console were perfected so its just extremely annoying and difficult. The ending just felt really unsatisfying compared to the first game.

So overall, Banjo-Tooie is mostly ruined by bad design and levels that are too cumbersome and big, along with bland mini games. It has way too much backtracking and despite the fact that it controls the exact same as the first game it makes it even more disappointing. I really wanted to like this, but ended up just wishing I was playing the first one.