Banjo-Tooie

The original Banjo-Kazooie was a classic of the platforming genre, and seemingly one of its last gasps considering how dead the non-Mario platformers have been in the last two console generations. For Banjo-Kazooie's sequel, Banjo-Tooie, Rare seemed to strive to make everything bigger, and while that's an admirable goal, in execution it didn't quite work out as well as I had hoped. Sure there's still eight levels, each with ten "jiggies" (jigsaw puzzle pieces) and a few new techniques taught to you by Jamjar, brother of Banjo-Kazooie's Bottles. The techniques all build on moves you learned in the previous game- there's no Metroid-style loss of abilities, so by the end of the game you've got tons of moves at your disposal, with most new ones involving shooting different types of eggs, or splitting Banjo and Kazooie up for solo missions. But the scope of the levels is just huge now- in some cases I had explored a level for 2 hours before I felt I had a good handle on how to get around or found a single jiggy, and my desperate need to find everything in every level meant that even with some checking a walkthrough, levels would end up taking like 4 hours total before they were cleared out. That's just too long! And unlike the first game, Banjo-Tooie is heavy on backtracking, with tons of collectibles requiring techniques from later in the game to get. This removes that OCD feeling I loved from Banjo-Kazooie, where I could start a level and after spending enough time, be 100% done with it before moving on. So, yeah, while Banjo-Tooie is still a solid game that anyone who liked the first will enjoy, I still think I liked Banjo-Kazooie much more.