Banjo-Tooie Review
Banjo-Tooie Review
See my Banjo-Kazooie review here
DISCLAIMER: I'll start this review with the same disclaimer I gave last time. I enjoy retro games, but this is not a review from the reference of the release date. Meaning that I will mostly be looking at this game as it stands today since I don't have the context from release (I never owned an N64). That said, I'm not going to bash it for being old constantly or make points about graphics and such.
Intro
I'll start by saying that this is obviously another legendary game that is a followup to the original which I enjoyed a lot. It says a lot that these titles are still pretty enjoyable after turning 23 years old. However, I want to use this review not to be harsh to this game but to highlight the obvious and hidden progress games have had since its release.
What is this?
This is a puzzle platformer collect-a-thon game with pretty good characters, expansive level design, graphics that still hold up, and some of the best music you'll ever hear. Tooie is mostly an expansion and extension of the ideas found in Banjo-Kazooie. The same characters appear and what exists in the first game is mostly left untouched here. Instead, new mechanics and moves are added to keep the game feeling fresh and I really enjoyed some and hated others (we'll get there).
What's there to love?
The most standout thing about the game is the music. The music here rivals Mario64 for how iconic and instantly recognizable most of the tracks are. They do a lot of the heavy work with theming without being too intricate or overbearing. The characters also do a good job of fleshing this game out into believable spaces.
In the first game, I felt like the entire game took place in a box. A small box. Here I don't have that problem and a few of the levels feel like the characters really belong there. Platforming is also pretty good which can't be said for a lot of stuff around this era. Every jump or move that I missed felt like my own fault for the most part. The variety of moves also adds a bit of much needed depth to the game which I really enjoyed. This game is easy to love but I don't think that it would convert anyone who didn't enjoy the first game since it is mostly a copy of that. Which leads me right into...
Lets get to the bad
How do I do this without making it sound like a rant? I can't. If you have nostalgia for this game, be patient with me here. Lets talk controls. In no uncertain terms, the controls are awful and unlike the first game, I don't think that playing on an original controller would fix much here.
To give an overview, basic platforming is normal controls and the trigger is a crouch button. The trigger is also how you activate your moves here. This is a limitation of the N64 controller and I respect the use made of it. But the amount of moves mapped to the C-stick is confusing. Normally it acts as camera control but once the crouch button is pressed, the one stick gets assigned to 4 separate moves for each character. And since the trigger is crouch, you must crouch each time to do each move. Thats a lot of trigger pressing and stick moving.
As a subset of controls, the people at Rare decided that Banjo-Kazooie was good but needed first person shooting to be great. Hopping on the trend at the time with this game hurts my brain because it controls horribly. And since the mapping is the same as shooters like GoldenEye, the controls are unusable for modern audiences. Is this fixed in the Xbox Live version? I don't know, but I hope so. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't get used on every single level, but it does.
Entire first person shooter sections in a collect-a-thon were not enjoyable to me, its not what I expect from a sequel here. Worse yet, its used heavily in the bossfight at the end which is just salt in the wound.
What about the genre?
The first game really established an entire genre and I was curious to see how it would get moved forward here. I want to be clear, I find these next few items negatives but I appreciated them because they're the first missteps in this space. So what went wrong with the game style itself?
The largest sin for me is the sin of having a game about collection without self-contained levels. What I mean by that is that game objectives spill beyond the borders of each level and bleed either into the hub world or bleed into each other. A more minor sin of this kind is the kind of sin where you need to unlock something later in the game and come back to complete a level.
Modern games still have these features but they mitigate the problems by telling you that you need to wait or they give giant hints at other levels. In this game however, you might struggle at a puzzle for an hour only to find out that theres a move later that you unlock that makes this part possible.
For a good example: There is a level with a hot and cold side of a mountain. A move is given to the player to walk into hot water on the hot side of the mountain. You can press a switch in that pool to drain it, but it suggests to you that the water is just too hot. You can also turn into a snowball on the other side of the level.
So based on that info, you might search for awhile just to see if you can connect the cold side and hot side together. Or maybe you can throw your snowball self into the water. Or maybe a character can do it for you. None of those things solve your problem. What does solve your problem is pushing an ice cube off of the next level in the sky that then falls into the pool and cools it.
And this is the last thing I'll really mention bad about this game: It makes poor use of its new moves and features and is inconsistent and that's a shame. An example from the same level: there are two characters on the cold side of the mountain that need to be warmed up. One requires you to shoot fire eggs at them. The other requires you use the bird to sit on them like an egg. No indication of that move use is given. Its only ever used for eggs elsewhere. Frustrating.
So thats the gripe here. The feature creep is very real and you have too many moves doing too little in the game and it complicates the controls. They tried to do too much with this game and it hurt what was a very solid and tight experience from the first one.
Summarize Tooie To Me
Don't let the criticisms color the game too much for you if you enjoy this kind of thing or just want to revisit it. For those who have nostalgia for it, you'll overlook the annoyances pretty easily but I'd highly recommend playing on an original controller. I'd consider it almost necessary for this experience, especially for the first person sections. If you don't have nostalgia for this, I'd tell you not to take the game too seriously. Don't 100% it like I did and just sit back and enjoy the good music and fun characters and the puzzles or collectables. If you're never going to play the game though, the soundtrack is also right there for you.
If you made it this far let me know what you think of my review, I'm always eager to hear what other people did or did not enjoy about the game and I'll be active in the comments!
Have you done Conker's Bad Fur Day? IMO this was Rare's piece de resistance, and I'm curious as to how many movie references you'll recognise this many years after its release.
I do genuinely think you would find this game easier to control on an N64 controller. Those 4 separate controls on the "C stick" are actually 4 separate C-buttons on the N64 controller.
This is one of the rare scenarios where a stick instead of 4 independent buttons makes a lot less sense to have.
I’m definitely aware that using a modern controller makes the game harder to control. With the first game, I actually didn’t have a problem with that much. Here though, there’s some real sticking points for me that I feel go beyond the modern controller limits.
The best way to put it is that the trigger button is a layer modifier. It changes most controls in the game to do something different while pressed. In the first game, this was fine because the both layers stayed the same. Here though you now have 3 different layers depending on if you have banjo, kazooie, or both. I got the hang of it but it takes time because it’s more complicated than one might think.
Permanently Deleted
I played both in my childhood, and I don’t think I’ve ever returned to Tooie after I beat it first time. It’s a good game, but doesn’t have that same lasting appeal as the first game.
You touched a bit on the why: the game is too ambitious. The levels are too massive and too intertwined. Smaller isolated levels fit the collectathon format better.
I remember having lots of fun with the multiplayer though, so that’s a bonus.
If you want to continue the collectathon journey you should try out Donkey Kong 64. It’s also a game that falls under its own ambitions, but in different ways. Still a good game, but nothing beats Kazooie.
Donkey Kong 64 is excellent, with amazing personality, great music, and great playable characters, but the minigames are sometimes a little janky and you have to love the characters, music, levels and aesthetics if you're gonna be happy with all the backtracking.
So @CleoTheWizard as a "before you play" tip for Donkey Kong 64, know that there are five playable characters and you can switch at "tag barrels" and basically every collectible, item and action in a level only works for the right character. This keeps you engaged with all characters and the different ways they move but plenty of people understandably dislike the backtracking that comes with it. Most of all remember that less than half the collectibles are required to beat the game so don't backtrack too much unless you want to, and consider playing the latest version of the "change kongs anywhere " romhack which lets you change characters with a button instead of a trip back to a tag barrel, it's a very very well done romhack now.
DK64 is sometimes accused of killing the collectathon genre. While I’m not sure if the accusations are deserved, DK64 was too ambitious with the amount of collectibles and the size of levels for its own good.
It’s still a great game. I think I prefer DK64 over Tooie overall.
imo Tooie it's vastly inferior to the first game, and feels like it has no concrete identity as to what kind of game it wants to be. Banjo-Kazooie even to this day is a tight, defined, and perfectly balanced game that genuinely holds up, but I've never been able to get through Tooie without becoming either bored, frustrated, or both.
I get that Rare were trying to push the boundaries for video games at the time, but it just didn't translate to a better experience.
All good points. I didn’t speak much about it here but both games feel very much like tech demos at times. Especially Tooie. And it’s cool that they were trying to explore, but they ended up not connecting the dots as much here. The story was even more in the background than usual. But as I also pointed out, a lot of the games mechanics aren’t consistent or explored fully. So it’s like a bunch of game designers made the game and the art was an afterthought.
It's bizarre that Banjo Tooie's world design is just the open world design that most people praise nowaday but most open world games nowadays are just as empty, maybe moreso. The only difference is detail.
This game was a goddamn masterpiece and I won't hear your slander on the controls even if I haven't played ithe original in 20 years and it didn't age well. They re-released it on Xbox about a decade or so ago, and I recall it being OK. Me n my jinjos got mad love for Banjo and / or Kazooie. Everything Rare put out in this gen was great.
Impressive breakdown, I would suggest instead of dense paragraphs using bullet points and shorter segments.
I'm curious if you've played hat in time?
What dense paragraphs? The review is well-structured in my eyes.
The paragraphs seem fine to me, they are separated in easily consumable chunks so you don't get lost (at least on computer). I also like your structure, very straight forward. If I had to point something out, it appears to me that the disclaimer and intro provide the same gist but differently worded.
I assume Toes is asking for a TL:DR or summary in bullet point format. I'm not sure if I agree that this review is long enough to warrant a TL:DR, nor would profit much from from being made more concise, but those are just my two cents.
EDIT: While I don't necessarily agree with Toes on article anatomy, most of us here should be grownups. Differences in opinions are to be expected, so let's be civil and not downvote or throw jabs without reason. How about people make a comment instead, or just upvote the comment they agree with if it's already there? I find that this results in a much more enriching experience.