Back in February, I spent a whole weekend holed up in my room, door blockaded, headphones on, only coming out to eat and pee, and all because of one thing: I was playing Banjo-Kazooie, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to beat that thing once and for all.
Banjo-Kazooie is a platformer/adventure game developed by Rare and released for the Nintendo 64 in 1998. It stars the titular Banjo, a yellow shorts wearing, blue backpack wielding honey bear, and his pal Kazooie, a so-called “Red-Crested Breegull,” though no one has figured out exactly what that is yet.
Throughout the game Banjo and Kazooie are charged with defeating various hordes of minions, all loyal to the disgusting, Wicked Witch of the West-esque Gruntilda Winkybunion, the game’s antagonist. When she learns that she is (shockingly) not the prettiest living thing in all of Spiral Mountain, but that in fact Banjo’s sister Tooty is, she swoops down on her broomstick and kidnaps Tooty in hopes of stealing her beauty. Banjo and Kazooie thus set out to rescue her.
Before we do anything else, let’s talk platformers here. The real platformer that started it all was of course Super Mario Bros. for the NES, which defined many aspects of the genre today. It set a lot of standards, so to speak.
In 1996, Super Mario 64 was released, and it too was praised for setting standard after standard. Personally I think half of that came from Mario fanboys wetting themselves at the very image of a hardly three-dimensional, severely polygonally challenged mustachioed plumber, but that’s beside the point. SM64 set standards for its time.
Looking back at BK, people were a little torn at first about things. On one hand, Rare was Nintendo’s most prized developer, but on the other you had what seemed to be just another cutesy platformer that seemed to take every page right out of the SM64 handbook, the main thing being that Mario collected stars, and Banjo collected jigsaw pieces. They’re both gold, and I’m sure if you ate the star it’d come back out looking something like a Jiggy. Regardless, the question was whether or not BK could meet those standards.
Let it suffice to say that BK far surpassed those standards to become a Rare, not to mention N64, classic. Yes, the tedious item collecting was back for BK, but somehow it wasn’t tedious, it was…fun. The worlds were huge and imaginative, the colors were brilliant, the graphics were top-notch compared to Mario. Beat Mario to death with a wonderfully animated club as a matter of fact. Granted, they were released two years apart, but BK was absolutely beautiful. Gameplay switched seamlessly between the two crazy cohorts, creating an experience that flowed. Characters were lifelike and lovable, and no matter how bad some of the jokes were, it really did manage to make players laugh. I laughed anyway. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I was seven years old at the time.
Banjo-Kazooie is a classic, bottom line. In my opinion, it set more standards than SM64. I spent moment after moment of unadulterated fun with that game, even during the more frustrating sections. I could write pages upon pages on this game, but in the interest of space, I’ll just tell you to either download it off the Xbox Live Arcade or grab a copy of the N64 version, because you won’t regret it.
