I loved Rare Ware Studios as a kid because they were the gods of the video game industry creating games like wizards and warriors, battletoads, the donkey kong country franchise, conkers bad fur day, super mario 64, diddy kong racing and golden eye just to name a few. Rare Ware were known to make some of the greatest games of all time which is what made them so popular back in day. Sadly all great things come to an end and in 2002 Rare Ware Studios was purchased by Microsoft Corporation because Rare Ware no longer had Nintendo to help them out and was now in the hands of Microsoft not so great games got made like grabbed by the ghoulies and perfect dark zero and sadly Rare Ware have remained this way ever since.
I like to remember Rare Ware the way i did when i was a kid and what’s a better way to remeber them than reviewing one of the most popular and well known games they ever made Banjo Kazooie.
Story
The story to Banjo Kazooie is that the evil witch Gruntilda
Is angry because she is not the prettiest person in the land any more and has been told by her magic cauldron that Banjo’s sister Tooty is the most beautiful being in all the land. Because of this Gruntilda swoops down from her lair on her broom stick and kidnaps Tooty so she can swap her ugliness for Tooties beauty using a machiene she built. a lot of noise was made by both Gruntilda and Tooty which wakes Banjo and his pet bird Kazooie up, Banjo with Kazooie in his ruck sack rushes out to see what all the noise was about but little do they know of the adventure that lies ahead. The story may seem a little basic but trust me if you play the game you will reslise that the story is actually really clever and creative.
Game play
The way Banjo Kazooie works is that you play as both Banjo and Kazooie (they have these names because of the instruments they play). You use Banjo for basic things like punching, walking and swimming and kazooie for just about everything else. Both Banjo and Kazooie control satisfyingly for the most part, the game dosent lag at all and even though there are a lot of different moves in the game the button combinations to pull off these moves are easy to remember. One issue is the in game camera, the camera is fine when Banjo and Kazooie is on the ground but for some reason whenever I swim underwater or fly the camera just has a mind of its own and this can get annoying fast. The controls are not too bad I just wish that the camera issues when performing certain tasks were fixed before the game got released because if they were the controls would have been perfect.
Things to collect
There are a lot of things to collect in Banjo Kazooie which may seem like a bad thing but trust me it isnt because the game overly generous with these items locations.
Jiggy’s- To enter each world in Banjo Kazooie you will need fill in a picture of each world with jigsaw pieces AKA jiggies. Each world has 10 Jiggies to find and one switch you can hit which will release a jiggy in the games hub (Gruntildas Lair).
Eggs- ammunition that Kazooie can shoot from both his mouth and butt (OUCH sounds painful)
Red feather-these allow Kazooie to fly
Gold feather- these allow Banjo and Kazooie to be invincible for a limited amount of time
Notes- throughout each world the player is able to collect 100 musical notes, a certain amount of notes are needed to progress to the different parts of Gruntildas lair
Mumbo skulls- certain jiggies can only be collected if Banjo is tranformed into another animal, this can only happen if Banjo collects a certain number of mumbo skulls which he then needs to give to the voodoo master Mumbo who will turn Banjo into the needed animal form in exhange for the skulls he collected.
Jinjo- the final thing you need to collect in each world are these cute kangaroo things called Jinjo’s. There are five Jinjo’s to collect in each world and to my knowlege in order to actually defeat the final boss you need to collect all of them. The reason I believe you need to collect each Jinjo is because in everyone of my playthroughs of the game I collect all of the Jinjo’s and everytime they have helped me defeat Gruntilda.
Graphics
This game is beautiful I’m not even kidding for an N64 game every aspect of Banjo Kazooie is a piece of art, the textures really help enhance the wonderful environments in each world, the character detail is very impressive and overall the game looks better than some modern games look today which is saying a lot since Banjo Kazooie came out in 1998. There are 9 worlds to explore in the game (not including the hub world or Spiral mountain). My favourite world in the game is called Freezeezy Peak its a Christmas themed world, its my favourite world because not only is it the best looking world in my opinion but it also has the best music.
Music
This game just keeps getting better and betted because even the music is kick ass, its not often that the music in a video game suits the environments perfectly but just to add the cherry to an already perfect cake Banjo Kazooie manages to do just that. Its hard to explain why the music is so good but go and listen to the music from Freezeezy Peak, Gobi’s Valley and Mad Monter Mansion and you will see what I mean. If were not gonna get another decent Banjo Kazooie game a Banjo Kazooie soundtrack would be nice.
Final Verdict
From reading this review you can probably tell that I like this game, in my opinion its one of greatest video games of all time and highly suggest buying Banjo Kazooie because even though it has some camera issues it still is a really awesome game and because of this i rate Banjo Kazooie a 9/10.
I hope you enjoyed this raggle fraggle review
This revie is of my own opinion if you respect my opinion I will respect yours
this review was written by Dan (Padawan)
ragglefragglereviews 