Think back to a world of awesome 3D platformers that were just coming into their own. Think back to something a little more refined than the formula started by Super Mario 64, but not an overboard collect-o-fest like Donkey Kong 64.
You know what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about BANJO-FREAKING-KAZOOIE.
(Attention: Please stop everything you are doing and listen to this remix:)
I remember when we first got this game. We got this at the same time as our Nintendo 64 and Yoshi’s Story. Yoshi’s Story was what we played first, because we all knew who Yoshi was but we’d never heard of this Banjo character. It was only a matter of minutes, though, before the Banjo-Kazooie cartridge replaced the Yoshi one, and there it would stay for a long, loooong time.
Let me explain the brilliance of this game for those of you who missed out. It’s a Mario64-ish platformer, as I said. You wander around a central “hub” world and visit “themed” worlds inside. You’ve got all your obligatory ones… the water world, the snow world, and so forth… but the way that they are done is so original that you don’t even realize it’s old territory. Not to mention the last world, Click Clock Wood, is actually split up into four different versions based on the seasons of the year.
The controls are intuitive and varied and make much use of, well, you being a bear and toting around a bird in your backpack. The humor is offbeat and quirky and quintessentially British (oh Rare, gotta love ’em.) and the music is some of the most memorable you will hear, particularly the main theme, a motif which is masterfully weaved into most of the other music in the game and done in different styles and tempos depending on location.
The game objectives themselves mostly revolve conquering various challenges to collect items, which is how most platforming games in that era worked, but in my opinion Banjo-Kazooie pulled it off just about right: lots to do without going overboard. The sequel, Banjo-Tooie, would later teeter close to being overboard in my opinion (but was still fantastic and had a lot of improvements, don’t get me wrong), but B-K just did it right.
And don’t let the cute fuzzy characters fool you, this game was challenging. I don’t think I ever beat it. I never quite had enough Jiggies (the game’s lingo for “puzzle pieces”, an item you collected) to get into the last world. And yet despite that, I still managed to dump countless hours into this game and I enjoyed every minute. This was platforming at its finest. Rare and I go back a long ways. I spent many, many days with the likes of Diddy Kong Racing, Jet Force Gemini, Goldeneye 007, and all three Donkey Kong Country games. All of these games are amazing and all of them would be top contenders in my personal “Best Games Evar” list.
But if I had to pick a fave Rare game?
It just might be this one.
