Banjo–Kazooie (recomp)

A light-hearted adventure with tight level design and an anarchic sense of place. Other highlights: the archenemy who regularly shit-talks you in rhyming couplets, the vocal babble sound effects, and a characterful moveset with emphatic momentum-ful moves. Its tonal range is as narrow as most any 3D platformer of its time (heavy on cartoony genre trappings, light on atmosphere), but still evokes different feelings from time to time, from the lonely silence atop “Treasure Trove Cove” to the seasonal cycle of “Click Clock Wood”. One of the most definitive examples of the (troubled) 3D collectathon genre. The highly-animated save menu and in-game cheat code puzzle-board deserve special mention—little touches like that help put this game above and beyond.



I guess I've gotta compare/contrast this with Super Mario 64. I once saw that game described as a series of “accidental perfect skate parks” (rough quote); by contrast, this game is a series of perfect adventure playgrounds where every structure is a means and an end. Super Mario 64 is about the process—pulling off a series of runs, jumps, flips, all blending into one prolonged “moment” of execution. No wonder it's so popular for speedruns! By contrast, movement in this game is more stop-and-start and more functional—it's a way to get somewhere and pause to look out on the environment for a moment and figure out where to go next. Levels in Super Mario 64 tend to be very open—bowls, cones, planes—and collect a bunch of disparate features together like a toybox, laying them out in front of you. By contrast, levels in this game feature a lotta verticality, visual obstruction, and amorphous connectedness—a different kind of density, more purposeful and coherent.

(Just to home in on the verticality part: In Super Mario 64, verticality exists less to texture the space and more to divide challenges into discrete chunks or let you lose progress by falling to a lower, earlier area. Its level design is very objective-focused and, where the levels aren't totally flat, going to those objectives almost always involves starting at the bottom and going to the top or vice versa. Once you reach the top/bottom you have no reason to look or go back from there. By contrast, this game's level design is more non-linear. Banjo and Kazooie are a kind of cursor you're using to explore the world and uncover secrets, and though there may be secrets in high places, you'll always need to come back down again (and being up high can help with navigating to other secrets by giving you a clear view of what's below). More than that, the game's moveset encourages vertical movement, since not only can you fly up (unlike Super Mario 64), you can also use the double jump to safely fall much longer distances.)

Both games encourage curiosity, exploration, and understanding, but there I'd say it's more-often turned inwards to Mario and his moment-to-moment motion and here it's turned outwards to the world around you.



Back to this game: It's definitely not without significant flaws and I can understand how some people have an almost misophonic revulsion to some of the soundscape or seriously dislike other parts of the style. (For me, the sore points are the uncharacteristic death pit in the Rusty Bucket Bay engine room and, occasionally, the floaty, twitchy double-jump. That it doesn't list which jiggies you've found and resets level state when you leave and return to a level is a bit annoying, too. And there's the cartoon racism, but what can I say about cartoon racism in 90s platformers that hasn't already been said.) Still, I think it survives in people's memories because it's one of the best examples of its genre.