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Review: Banjo-Kazooie
n64
01.12.03 / 04:15PM / Boris
Rare makes a fun 3D platformer. Cookie cutters soon to follow.
Banjo-Kazooie came out after Mario 64, and was the only other platformer at the time for the N64. Banjo, the honey bear, made his debut in Rare's somewhat lackluster Diddy Kong Racing, and he's teamed up with a red bird (a breegull) named Kazooie, who lives in his sporty blue backpack. Banjo and Kazooie together work very nicely as a platformer mascot, and have enough novelty in their moves that they didn't seem like Mario clones (even though, yes, they are Mario clones). That, plus the general humor of the game, made Banjo-Kazooie my favorite platformer.
Despite a sequel and a handful of other Rare platformers, Banjo-Kazooie is probably their strongest outing, which is a real pity, because you would expect their later efforts to be better, not worse. Unfortunately, Rare took the wrong lessons from Banjo-Kazooie the game is short (fun, but you can complete it in an afternoon once you know what you're doing), and the moves are sufficient but not entirely varied, so they made overly bloated games with far too many useless moves in them after this point. I've not played Conker's Bad Fur Day, but their other games were far less enjoyable than Banjo-Kazooie. If you want to start with a good platformer, start here, and don't pick up Rare's later titles.
The plot: The game's opening intro explains it well enough: Gruntilda, an ugly fat witch, is doing the whole "Mirror, Mirror" thing into her cauldron. The cauldron reports that she's the fairest of them all, except for this little girl bear named Tooty. Grunty, quite peeved that her previously reported beauty has been outmatched by a new face, immediately sets out to kidnap the innocent bear. Meanwhile, Tooty is paying a visit to her big brother, Banjo, who is sleeping in bed while Gruntilda kidnaps her. Goggles the mole, who essentially serves as your new move trainer, sees the whole thing, and once Kazooie wakes Banjo up, lets you know what has transpired. Hence, you go to Gruntilda's lair, go through the different "lands," open up more of her lair until you can confront her. Should you fail (or quit the game, you get this ending either way), she transfers Tooty's beauty with her ugly, and becomes some sort of leather-clad witch hottie, and Tooty turns into a grotesque monster.
It's simple and it works. Banjo is a generally nice guy
bear, but Kazooie's a smart-ass, and she generally makes your interactions with the supporting cast a lot more fun (although not easier; she gets you into a fight early in the game). Each of the lands are, much like Mario's use of picture-worlds, opened up by completing a jigsaw puzzle of a representative scene within that world. Once you collect enough jiggies, you complete the puzzle and can enter the world. It's really the same thing you did in Mario 64, but with a little more class than just holding up a spinning star at a door. Essentially, if you liked Mario 64, you'll like this one, perhaps a little more because Banjo and Kazooie have personality that Mario otherwise lacks.
The gameplay: Banjo and Kazooie start off not knowing very many of their moves, so you go through a training "garden" learning them. Along the way, each new item you pick up explains what it does, so you really don't even need to open the manual to get the hang of the game. It's one of the best training grounds in my experience, and it's a strong point of Banjo-Kazooie. Once you've learned the basics, Goggles will let you into Grunty's lair, and he exists in most of the levels, able to teach you a new move as soon as you encounter his molehill.
Banjo and Kazooie control very nicely, and they have a serviceable set of moves. Banjo can punch, Kazooie can peck, they have a crouch-lunge, a crouch-jump, a double jump, and the ever popular butt stomp. Given this variety, I'm surprised that the two weren't included in Super Smash Brothers; they would translate very nicely to a fighting game. You eventually learn how to shoot eggs, fly, become invincible, and use different shoes, which are more or less equivalent to the different caps in Mario 64. All of the later moves require you to pick up items, which again, is the first of a downward spiral that Rare took. Here, however, the items aren't so bad, and with only three types of "ammo" type items, it's not an obnoxious pick-em-up fest.
The different lairs are fun, if not a little predictable. There's a grassland level, a desert level, a swamp level, an ice level, all standard fare in platformers, and I won't fault B-K for using them. There's also a few more novel ones, including a haunted mansion, a shipping harbor, an odd toxic waste disposal sewer and a forest which goes through all four seasons and changes over time. Each of the levels have 10 jiggies, 100 notes, and 5 jinjoes you have to collect. The jiggies are obviously the focus of the game, since you need them to unlock other lands, and so they bear some explanation.
You typically get a jiggy for learning a new move; once you learn how to do something, there's often a very simple puzzle near by that you get a jiggy for. An example is when you first learn how to do the beak-lunge while flying, there's a snowman in the stage with three, jolly, candy-like buttons on his torso. Spear the buttons with your beak, and a jiggy pops out from between his legs. Other jiggies are guarded by monsters, who you have to kill, or held by other characters in the lands, for which you have to do various tasks. In fact, that's actually sort of the fun of the game; the little tasks they have you do are often pretty fun, and not as obnoxious as they could have been. In the same stage as the snowman, as you're wandering around, you find a giant Christmas tree, with a pathway on it. At the end of the pathway is a box, which is rattling and bumping. When you approach the box, a sentient light bulb pops out, identifies itself as a Twinkly, and asks you to help them get to the tree. As it walks along the path, however, a monster sticks its head out of the obvious holes in the path and gobbles it up. You have to stomp on their heads and knock them back into their holes while 10 of the Twinklies make it safely down the path. Or, you can just hang around and watch them die, but you won't get a jiggy for that.
In addition to the task and monster related jiggies, there's also jiggies you get for stepping on Witch Switches, which open up a jiggy-containing area in the main hub world. Also, there's the jinjoes, cute little colored guys who exist, usually in remote corners of the level, and once you find all 5, they give you a jiggy. They figure rather prominently in the ending of the game, but I won't spoil it.
Lest you think you get away with just finding jiggies, you also need to find music notes. In addition to the puzzles, there are areas of Grunty's lair that are blocked by Note Doors, and you have to have a combined note total from all the levels you've visited higher than the value on the door. Sadly, the game does not memorize when you've picked up any given note, so if you die on the level or leave the stage, you get that amount as your high total for that level, and all the notes respawn. You don't need 100 on each level, but you do need the vast majority (I think you need a minimum of 80, and that would make the final boss fight with Grunty very difficult indeed) to continue the game.
On several of the levels is a shaman who lives in a skull named Mumbo-Jumbo. He's amusing, and when you give him enough skull tokens, he'll transform you into a monster specific to that stage. Most of the forms are downright insulting (in the haunted level, you get turned into a pumpkin, which has no special abilities other than being small enough to fit into holes, including a toilet!), but you need to do this in order to get at least one jiggy.
You get a good sense of Grunty's personality from her own lair, and I think it makes her a charming, if incompetant, villainess. Her spellbook, Cheato, is hiding in very remote portions of her lair, and if you can find him, he'll give you a code for holding double your supply of eggs or feathers, items which you use in some of your moves. Brentilda, Gruntilda's good sister, is also hanging around in the lair, and she'll tell you some randomly generated secrets about Grunty's embarassing personal habits. At first, these seem irrelevant, but trust me, you'll want to write them down, because Grunty's lair has a very cool surprise waiting for you once you've gotten to all of the stages: A game show about the game!
Rare completely bastardized this concept in the sequel, and it made me really sad, because Grunty's Furnace Fun was such an amusing concept in B-K. Essentially, it's a game show, emceed by everybody's favorite witch, and if you win (i.e., survive), you win Tooty back. It's a required part of the game, and it does force you to pay some attention to the scenery around you, so it's unlikely you'll do very well your first time on it. As I hinted, some of the questions are about Grunty, and the only way you'll know the answer is if you talk to Brentilda in enough locations of the lair. Once you defeat Grunty here, you need only track her down a few more rooms, and you get to fight her in a final fight very nicely done, and it requires you to use all of your skills.
Boss fights in general are uncommon in the game, and pretty simple. You fight a giant hermit crab on the beach, a pack of frogs in the swamp, a pack of bees in the forest, etc. etc. None of them are particularly threatening once you know your moves, and you sort of breeze right through them after a while. It's an element that Rare did improve upon in their later games.
The aesthetics: Graphics-wise, the N64 was hardly being pushed to its limits. There wasn't any pop up of far-off objects, but the rather poor textures looked pretty cheap on closer inspection, and a lot of objects were low polygon numbers. The items you pick up were animated sprites, so it didn't matter which direction you faced them with, they were always in full view. That said, it doesn't detract from the game very much, but the graphics were really just "sufficient." They did what they needed to do, but no level really stood out as a real stunner. Mario 64 was superior in its graphics, but Mario was the first game out for a new system; it NEEDED to be impressive looking in order to wow people. Less so for B-K.
The sound is where B-K really shone, and its the best use of midi I think I've ever heard. Each of the levels have their own sound track, as you'd expect, but they also have their own "voice" the desert world has a sort of bombastic Indiana Jones trumpet theme interlaced with a whiny voiced snake charmer flute, the haunted manor has a creepy pipe organ and xylophone riff. The richness of the instrument bank really pans out as you approach the entry point to the levels from the main world hub Grunty's theme, which plays continuously throughout her lair, has a more or less mellow sound to it, but the closer you get to a level hub, the more that level's musical "voice" takes over. The result is a hybrid of the Grunty theme and the instruments that play that level's music the pipe organ version near the haunted manor, the snake flute near the desert. It works incredibly well, and turns an otherwise forgettable tune into a catchy symphony. I still pause a little near the warp point to the game show zone to hear the cheesy game-show version of the Grunty theme.
None of the characters speak per se, but all the characters, and I mean ALL of them (including the pick-up sprites "talk" when you first pick up one of their type) have their own voice. Each character has three or four sound effects, that play randomly and in random pitches and speeds, whenever they're speaking. Banjo has sort of a "Hyuk" sound, Kazooie a muted squawk. Gruntilda's voice is sort of a scrawly "Hehhh!" sound, and it works very well to lighten up the mood of the game. The real stand out, of course, would be Loggo the Toilet, who speaks in a symphony of farts. Characters don't need to be speaking to make noise, monsters make plenty of growls and snarls when they're attacking, a few of the characters whine and sob when they're in need of some kindly bear and bird to do a task for them. The effect is comedic, and it gave the game a lot of character it would have lacked without the lavish attention to funny voices. Kudos to the design staff who figured a way to hide the limitations of sound storage on the cartridge.
The final nod to aesthetics, and again part of the charm of the lead villain, is Grunty's insults. Whenever you're in the hub world, Gruntilda's head will occasionally pop up on the bottom of the screen in a speaking bubble, and croon out (again, in her hehhh-herrrrh-hraaaa voice) a rhyming insult to Banjo or Kazooie. None of the insults are particularly offensive (at her worst, she says, "That rotten pile of feathers you've brung, useless like a heap of dung!"), and a few of them are more or less mocking herself as much as the pair of heroes ("When I become thin once more, burgers, hot dogs and chips galore!"). The inclusion of her snide remarks do keep you reminded that yes, Gruntilda is watching you and she's out to make your life miserable. It's a very clever device and it gives an otherwise unknown villain a running start on becoming memorable. When was the last time Bowser ever called up Mario just to say, "Hey, Linguini breath, you'd probably jump a whole lot higher if you laid off the rigatoni!"? Of course, Bowser doesn't need to, we know who he is. But when you're trying to carve a niche with new characters, it never hurts to make them charming.
Final thoughts: It's a charming game, and one of the strongest on the N64, even despite its simplicity. Later platformers build on what was done here, and, I'm sad to say, fail to live up to what was started. Even more disappointingly, the sequel to this game, Banjo-Twooie, is not nearly as much fun as the original (and Grunty loses all of her charm). It's a good example of the idea of "Always leave 'em wanting more," and if you pick this platformer up and none other, you will most likely be wanting more based on the strengths of this game.
01.12.03 / 04:15PM / Boris |
