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'Banjo-Kazooie' N64 Review

Twenty years of beautiful aging produces a masterpiece for the ages!

By Caleb ShermanPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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When I first looked myself in the mirror and said “I want to do a review series of games from 20 years ago,” my mind mostly set on a handful of old games: Spyro the dragon series (for which I own every installment), the PlayStation era Final Fantasy series (sadly, I missed the first of those games by a year) and Rare's Banjo duo were somewhere near the top of that list. So it was that I found Banjo-Kazooie in the short list of games released in June 1998, and I said, well, I know what part of the year I'm looking forward to.

Over the last two weeks, over on my YouTube channel, The Year in Gaming, I have dedicated approximately 45 minutes of every morning to adding footage of my playthrough of the classic platformer Banjo-Kazooie produced by the now defunct (as far as I'm concerned) Rare. The first game of June treated me fairly well, I was pleased with my seven and a half hours of gameplay, and I'm just as pleased to be writing this review now.

When Banjo-Kazooie came out, it was released by a company at its peak, a company that frankly, could do no wrong. The originators of Donkey Kong Country, Rare came off the Super Nintendo platform and into the Nintendo 64 platform with a big bang, the excellence of which could not be doubted. Fresh off the release of Goldeneye: 007 and Diddy Kong Racing in 1997, there could be no doubts that Banjo-Kazooie, Rare's return to the platformer genre, would be perfection. Well, as close to perfection as one might hope for from an early 3D platformer.

Banjo-Kazooie is, as mentioned before, a 3D platformer, perhaps the most iconic of its era aside from Super Mario 64. In my opinion, it is definitely the better of the two games, though it is clear that Banjo leans a bit on Mario's shoulder. The two games bear many striking similarities: a number of worlds, each visited through the use of paintings, shiny collectibles that are used both to mark progress in a world and to access new areas, power-ups scattered across stages that add extra depth to the gameplay. But Banjo does all of these better. Mario got stars spread across each stage that were used to open doors in the castle, Banjo seeks “Jiggies”, golden sentient jigsaw pieces that fill in empty spaces on level puzzles to open world entrances. Mario collects coins to restore his health and earn extra lives, coins that are seemingly infinite while Banjo collects 100 musical notes per stage that grant him one extra life and are used to open checkpoints throughout the overworld, while also keeping his health up not with notes, but with honeycomb pieces dropped by enemies. Mario gets his hands on a couple of special caps that turn him into metal, make him invisible and intangible, or even allow him to fly, while Banjo gains a series of level specific transformations from the witch doctor Mumbo Jumbo. His bird friend, Kazooie, has access to two pairs of shoes that allow him to wade through dangerous waters or run at an increased speed, and he can even fly, shoot eggs, and become invincible.

Woof, that's a lot of information, and the list goes on and on. Personally, one of my favorite features of Banjo-Kazooie compared to Super Mario is the entirely new world. Super Mario 64 takes place entirely inside Princess Peach Toadstool's castle (is her last name Toadstool? I think so…), we encounter such delightful characters as the Toads, the generic enemies from previous games, a handful of generic enemies made larger, some new monsters, and of course, Bowser. By comparison, Banjo-Kazooie drops us into Spiral Mountain for a short tutorial and then immediately we begin traversing the evil witch Gruntilda's lair. Throughout the game, we meet a cast of all-new characters (it is an all-new world after all), and each of them is imbued with their own personality, dialogue, and even odd noise based voices. This is giving Banjo a bit of undeserved credit in some ways, it's not like Super Mario 64 wasn't ingenious, nor are the characters “tired,” but Banjo introduced an extra level of freshness that Mario simply couldn't scratch.

But is the game good? Well, yes. There are some issues, especially for someone like me who struggles with repetitive challenges. Some mini-games in Banjo-Kazooie will wind up getting played five or six times in a row before the player finally nails them down. The controls aren't entirely perfect, in particular, aiming Kazooie's egg shooting beak can be quite awful, but no game features “perfect” controls. Occasionally you will have to backtrack to obtain only one or two collectibles from a previous level, but really this is to be expected. And...finally…Banjo-Kazooie pales in comparison to its successor, Banjo-Tooie, but hey, that's a story for a different day.

There's one thing that I've brought up in the past that I've complained about not being an expert on, but in this one game, I feel like it must be brought up. Banjo-Kazooie features a brand new soundtrack composed by Grant Kirkhope and it is the most beautiful orchestration of noise I have heard. This music is so ingrained in my brain that I frequently find myself listening to the two games' soundtracks while hiking, biking, and even cleaning up around the house (unless of course I'm re-listening to the Dune series).

So yes, Banjo-Kazooie is an excellent game. 5 out of 5 Jinjos (oh, Jinjos are little collectible creatures, there are five in each stage), would play again...and again….and again.

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About the Creator

Caleb Sherman

Twitch.tv streamer (Amnesia Duck), retro game enthusiast (don't ask me about Ataris though), lucky husband, and author.

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