Banjo Tooie

About ten years ago, I couldn’t wait for Banjo Tooie to come out. I had just played Banjo Kazooie, which I thought was awesome and I couldn’t help but be excited by all of the secret sneak peeks for the sequel that they stuck into the game… I never played it. I ended up selling my Banjo Kazooie cartridge and eventually I forgot all about Banjo Tooie, until now.

I must say that starting this game was a bizarrely intense nostalgic experience… but that won’t stop me from ripping it a new one.

The game starts out exactly where the last one left off. The evil witch Gruntilda is still trapped under a giant boulder. Her two, previously unheard of, sisters come by and rescue her. Then comes an extremely tedious cut scene with dialogue that takes forever. It’s almost as if they consolidated every cut scene in the game into one giant cut scene, because you literally don’t see any more scenes until the end of the game.

So, the weird sisters kill bottles who was the mole that taught you various moves in the previous game. Then you have to go talk to King Jingaling and you find that all of the jinjos are gone again and you need to find them. Boring… Then you talk to Master Jiggywiggy. Come on. Come on, damn it! I want to play a video game, not read a 500 page novel.

Eventually you get to go in an actual level and do something. As you play, you begin to notice that the golden jigsaw pieces that you’ve been accustomed to collecting aren’t as easy to find anymore. You used to be able to just climb something really tall and find one there or shoot eggs at everything to unlock stuff. You used to be able to just look around, find a puzzle, solve the puzzle, get a fucking jigsaw piece. Banjo Tooie however, is a lot more ambiguous about things. Some levels you could literally go in for the first time and waste an entire two hours before you figure out how to get a single jigsaw piece. It gets boring pretty fast.

Some of the pieces you can’t get without a special move from a later level. Sometimes you’ll activate something and you’ll see a little scene where a door opens or a jigsaw piece appears somewhere but you have no idea where it is. You might think you know and you’ll rack your brain over it for quite a while before finally giving up. Then, three levels later you’ll find that place. Interlacing the levels like this was an annoying idea. You gain access to levels by getting more jigsaw pieces over time. It’s really frustrating to be working on some puzzle that you can’t fully solve until several hours later in some locked place you’ve never seen before. How are you even supposed to know that you can’t solve it yet? I did one where I pushed a giant ice cube off of a cliff in one level. It fell in hot water in a different level where it melted. Then I went to that level where I hit a switch that let the water flow into yet another level where I got the puzzle piece. That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if each step of the puzzle wasn’t revealed to me in reverse order.

In each level you can find Mumbo who was the witch doctor that helped you in the previous game by transforming you into different things and also Wumba, the sexy Indian girl. In the old game, Wumba didn’t exist. Now that she’s here, she’s the one that transforms you into things while Mumbo helps you by letting you control him and use his powers at specific locations indicated by a pad on the ground with his face on it. Having the two of them seems pointless to me. Either replace Mumbo or don’t introduce Wumba. We already know that Mumbo’s capable of doing both jobs, so… yeah.

By the way, big T-rex is the best form for looking down Wumba's top.

To get any magical assistance, you have to give each one of them a globo which are these weird creatures that predictably hang out within feet of whoever’s house. What the hell is the point? If the globos are always right there next to where you need to use them, why not just make the price free?

And now it’s time to play “Old Game Versus New Game.” (never mind that they’re both old games)

In the old game when you collect five honeycombs, your life bar increases by one on the spot. In the new game when you collect the specific ever-changing amount of honeycombs, you go to the fucking store and buy a life bar upgrade.

In the old game when you collect all five jinjos in a level, you get a puzzle piece. In the new game when you collect a random-ass number of same-colored jinjos scattered across random-ass levels, you get a puzzle piece. There are also asshole fake jinjos that attack you when you get close to them.

In the old game you could shoot eggs and that was the solution to everything. In the new game you can shoot eggs, fire eggs, ice eggs, grenade eggs and remote control exploding eggs; most of which you‘ll never use. The only two that you really need/care about are grenade eggs and the remote detonation eggs.

In the old game Banjo and Kazooie stay together where they belong. In the new game you get to separate them, thereby making them both grossly inferior to the whole. The first time you get to separate them, you automatically play as banjo. You notice that your life bar is about half of what it was and suddenly you realize that you don’t have any moves other than run and jump. Then you ask yourself, why in the hell would I EVER want to separate them? What purpose does it serve? In truth it’s a great way to get you killed but eventually you do learn some character-specific moves that make it a little more bearable, (pun not intended.)

I have to say though that the worst part of the separation aspect is that life bar. I already mentioned that it’s smaller but not only that, the bar you have with a solo character and the bar you have when they’re together are independent from each other but only in a negative way. If you get the crap beaten out of you playing solo, (which is highly likely,) and then you join back together, your together bar will be proportionally lower. However, if you heal yourself back to full health while you’re together and then separate, your solo bar remains the same as it was before you healed yourself. How does that even work? You were at full health and now suddenly you’re injured again without ever even taking damage? Furthermore, if you fully heal one of the characters in solo but not the other one and then join together, it will show no change on your together bar. Then if you separate again you will find that the character you just healed is now back to the health they were before you healed them. In short, the only possible way to heal your characters in solo is to heal both of them in tandem before you join back together. The only way to heal your together bar is to be together while doing it. But if you’re goal is to injure yourself, the life bar system is suddenly highly flexible and accommodating.

Aside from that there are just a lot of little stupid things. Like everywhere you go there are various holes in the walls that you’re supposed to go in but there’s never any indication as to how you’re supposed to get in. You might need to be Kazooie or Banjo (concealed in his backpack) or transformed into some other animal or you might need to be using one of the remote control explosives. You’d think that the hole’s size would give you some kind of clue but no.

Look at that. I’m clearly small enough to get through but it still won’t let me through!
When you step on a character switch pad you have to press A to use it. But when you step on a warp pad you have to press B to use it. You will ALWAYS get it wrong.

Music notes are used as currency for getting new moves instead of getting jigsaw pieces. They also greatly reduced the number of notes per level and greatly increased their worth. You will never not have enough. They stick them all together in the same place which is lame.

Pterodactyl Land only has one family of pterodactyls. What, do they rule the land or something?
The game in general isn’t as good as the first one. Although when I started it, I had only two wishes that I wanted it to fulfill.

1.) No Snacker the Shark. I fucking hate him! Surprisingly, he was not in the game just like I wanted. But I was still extremely hesitant to enter any body of water due to PTSD.

2.) No quiz show. In the fist game you had to beat this quiz show where Grunty asked you stupid questions about things in the game. It was long and tedious and If you got too many wrong, you died and had to start over from the beginning. Well there WAS a quiz show but it wasn’t nearly as horrible.
The final battle is right after that, where unbelievably Grunty will continue to occasionally ask you quiz questions. If you get them right she goes easier on you. Come to think of it, the final battle is also easier than it was in the first game.

The ending is, well… Did you ever see Hostel II? Where the girl’s head gets cut off and the kids play soccer with it. It’s the same ending. What the hell Rare?