Banjo Kazooie / Tooie / Nuts and Bolts

Man of Honour
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24 Sep 2005
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35,487
I was a massive fan of Banjo Kazooie when it came out and have played through it at least 5 times since, preferring it to Super Mario 64 actually. Never got round to playing the sequel, Tooie, so I’ve jumped at the chance to play it on my Xbox, having heard it’s better than the original.

Yeahhh, not sure about that. My love for Banjo Kazooie is very much rose tinted I’m sure but it was just such a joy to play. Tooie controls the same but the feel and gameplay is actually completely different. In fact, startlingly so.... promoting my thread. This has probably all been said before but...

BK had medium sized but rich worlds to explore, lots of content and collectibles in all areas. Each world was self-contained and (save for one instance) you could go through and 100% each world the first time you entered it. The story was cute and hub world was well designed.

BT on the other hand feels NOTHING like this. The worlds range from large to enormous... sprawling, even... at times mildly confusing. The amount of collecting has been substantially reduced, probably rightly so as it would have been infuriating to miss one item and to check every nook and cranny with levels of this size... but things feel a bit more barren and ‘padded’. The first big gripe I have is how much of the game is blocked off you as progress though it. You either don’t have the right upgrades or haven’t ‘flicked the appropriate switch’ in a later level’. This makes it difficult to know when to move on and when to keep exploring... and I don’t want to return later, I want to explore it now. The second big gripe is the amount of infuriating backtracking. They really took the biscuit with that in this game. Having to go to point A, to point B, then back to A to switch character, then to B, then to switch the character back and go back to B... (sometimes flicking back and forth to play as Mumbo Jumbo) is just really boring. There was one task I did in the dinosaur level of fetching baby dinosaurs and honestly it was just a total chore.

There are other minor gripes too. The game feels overly industrially themed. They clearly ran out of time on the very dull hub world. And the cast of supporting characters and plot just seems like it was thrown together in one meeting (king jiggywiggy.... really?).

There are some great plus points, such as the brilliant interconnecting nature of the levels and some of the puzzles between worlds being well thought through... really quite impressive even today, but it can’t save the chore based gameplay it creates I’m afraid. So yeah, I’m going against the grain on this one. The original is definitely better.

Thoughts? Anyone get around to playing number 3? I gather that is entirely different.

As a side point, Yookah Laylee (the recent BK style game made by the same developers) is sort of a hybrid between the two. Huge sprawling sparse worlds, but a bit more collecting like BK. I wasn’t fussed with that either tbh - exploring just wasn’t that fun.
 
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