Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat
1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)
16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
17. Control (PS4)
18. White Album (PS3)
19. Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA)
20. Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)
21. Breath of Fire III (PSP)
22. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2) *
23. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
24. Army of Two (Xbox 360)
25. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2)
26. Jak II (PS2)
27. Jak 3 (PS2)
28. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
29. Pokemon Sapphire (GBA)
30. Watch_Dogs (PS4)
31. Watch_Dogs: Bad Blood (PS4)
32. Legend of Hero Tonma (TG16)
33. Alan Wake: American Nightmare (PC)
I replayed the base game for Alan Wake for the first time in ages last year, and I ended up loving it a lot more than I thought I would. Strictly speaking, I’ve actually owned this game for just as long as the base game on PC, but it’s just never been something I’ve remembered to get around to until now. I know that people have talked this up as a great game, way better than the base game, for years now, so it definitely felt like it was time to finally take a crack at this follow up to a game I enjoyed so much. I didn’t use a guide, but I still tried fairly hard to find as many collectibles as I can, and it ended up taking me around 4.5 hours to beat normal difficulty of the English version of the game on PC playing with my Xbox Series controller. (Once again, I get fairly into spoiler territory in this review, so reader discretion is advised).
American Nightmare is a standalone sequel/epilogue to the base game of Alan Wake. Two years after Alan successfully tricked the Darkness into releasing his wife, he’s still a prisoner of the Dark Place, the other world where this awful, otherworldly intelligence resides. All the while, he’s been fighting frantically to survive, escape, and most importantly defeat the final great trump card of the Darkness: Mr. Scratch. Mr. Scratch is a doppelganger of Alan sent to fill in his shoes in the real world, and he’s what Alan describes as his “dark half”. Mr. Scratch may look just like Alan, but he’s every nasty tabloid rumor come to life, threatening all that Alan still holds dear in the real world. Trapped in the tiny Arizona town of Night Springs, a fictional place where reality and the Dark Place intertwine, it’s up to Alan to defeat Mr. Scratch once and for all or be trapped in this dark hell forever.
Alan Wake was a really well written game, with well realized characters and deep themes, much like Remedy are known for, and American Nightmare is no exception. It serves nicely as a coda to the themes explored in Alan Wake. Whereas the base game is more so about the creative process and how it weighs against the metaphorical darkness in one’s heart (what drives you to create vs. the forces you struggle against during that creative process), American Nightmare is about going on the offensive against one’s internal demons. Mr. Scratch isn’t just a literal manifestation of the kind of reputation and actions that Alan has tried his best to put behind him and forget about, he’s a metaphorical one too.
Trying to be a better person, to care about others and not just live life to your own selfish, hedonistic whims, isn’t an easy thing to do. It’s something that takes deliberate practice, fighting the same battles over and over and continuing to fight on even when the best laid plans turn out fruitless. You may have a good idea of the final outcome you’re looking for, but even if you’re not completely sure how you’ll get there from where you are now, what matters most is that you keep up the good fight against the monster in front of you lest you be resigned to this darkness forever. American Nightmare is a very worthy successor to Alan Wake just as you’d expect from people as in love with storytelling as the folks at Remedy. This definitely isn’t the best time loop plot I’ve seen in a game, but I think American Nightmare uses that premise quite well for both its literal plot, the themes it’s trying to communicate, as well as the actual gameplay itself.
The gameplay loop is both very familiar yet quite different from the base game of Alan Wake. It’s still a third-person shooter (though still not a cover shooter) where you manage your resources of light and bullets to respectively break the shields of and kill the dark creatures trying to get you. What’s changed is the overall construction of the gameplay loop all that takes place in. Firstly, where Alan Wake was a fairly linear game with multiple chapters, American Nightmare is going for a sort of mini-open world experience over 3 different hubs. There are clear objectives with markers on the map, but you can also explore around for manuscript pages as well as hidden weapon boxes. Manuscript pages aren’t just for flavor to the story this time around, though. They do still provide that, but collecting enough manuscript pages allows you to unlock those hidden weapon boxes to acquire new, more powerful main weapons and sidearms to use.
It’s an interesting approach, especially when put alongside the other major change, which is that the survival horror aspects of Alan Wake have been nigh entirely removed in American Nightmare. Ammo is incredibly plentiful, your flashlight recharges much faster than it used to, and the enemy variety is smaller too (though that mostly just boils down to enemies with ranged attacks being removed from this game in favor of melee attackers and grenade throwers). It gives the game a much faster arcade-y feel, and there’s even a dedicated arcade mode you can try if you just want to revel in the combat. I’m not sure I particularly like this change, but I also don’t really dislike it either. Alan Wake dabbled in horror with its resource management and environment design, but American Nightmare isn’t really a horror game at all anymore. Its gunplay is meaty and fun, but it ends up being far too easy because you’re never really encouraged to fight any way other than the most obvious one available to you. Even new guns you acquire most often boil down to your preferred way of fighting rather than a genuine upgrade in power. American Nightmare doesn’t play badly, and I imagine it’s a lot more satisfying on harder difficulties, but it’s definitely not as well polished as Remedy’s later action-focused third-person shooters.
The aesthetics of the game are really great. The visuals are frankly astonishingly better compared to Alan Wake’s. The voice acting, sound design, and licensed music choices all compliment the experience really well, but Remedy’s love of integrating live action into their games’ cutscenes is one of the best I’ve ever seen it here. Mr. Scratch’s recordings he leaves around do a good job of feeling a part of the world, and the opening cutscene in particular looks amazing. It took me two or three times of seeing it before I even realized it was live action with CG effects put on top of it rather than just a fully prerendered cutscene. American Nightmare is still a PS3-era game, but it looks so good (at least on PC) that it looks damn near next gen and still looks great today.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Alan Wake was great, and American Nightmare is great too for a lot of the same reasons. It plays really well, it looks and sounds awesome, and it’s written really well too. I don’t know if I’d say I like it better than the base game, and I could also never recommend skipping the base game to play this (if only because the story would be virtually unintelligible without knowing the background of the original Alan Wake), but this is nonetheless a really novel and cleverly assembled experience that does a great job of both adding to the world and themes of Alan Wake while also experimenting with new types of gameplay to experience it through. Any fan of Alan Wake or Remedy’s games in general will definitely get their money’s worth out of this game, that’s for sure.
American Nightmare is a standalone sequel/epilogue to the base game of Alan Wake. Two years after Alan successfully tricked the Darkness into releasing his wife, he’s still a prisoner of the Dark Place, the other world where this awful, otherworldly intelligence resides. All the while, he’s been fighting frantically to survive, escape, and most importantly defeat the final great trump card of the Darkness: Mr. Scratch. Mr. Scratch is a doppelganger of Alan sent to fill in his shoes in the real world, and he’s what Alan describes as his “dark half”. Mr. Scratch may look just like Alan, but he’s every nasty tabloid rumor come to life, threatening all that Alan still holds dear in the real world. Trapped in the tiny Arizona town of Night Springs, a fictional place where reality and the Dark Place intertwine, it’s up to Alan to defeat Mr. Scratch once and for all or be trapped in this dark hell forever.
Alan Wake was a really well written game, with well realized characters and deep themes, much like Remedy are known for, and American Nightmare is no exception. It serves nicely as a coda to the themes explored in Alan Wake. Whereas the base game is more so about the creative process and how it weighs against the metaphorical darkness in one’s heart (what drives you to create vs. the forces you struggle against during that creative process), American Nightmare is about going on the offensive against one’s internal demons. Mr. Scratch isn’t just a literal manifestation of the kind of reputation and actions that Alan has tried his best to put behind him and forget about, he’s a metaphorical one too.
Trying to be a better person, to care about others and not just live life to your own selfish, hedonistic whims, isn’t an easy thing to do. It’s something that takes deliberate practice, fighting the same battles over and over and continuing to fight on even when the best laid plans turn out fruitless. You may have a good idea of the final outcome you’re looking for, but even if you’re not completely sure how you’ll get there from where you are now, what matters most is that you keep up the good fight against the monster in front of you lest you be resigned to this darkness forever. American Nightmare is a very worthy successor to Alan Wake just as you’d expect from people as in love with storytelling as the folks at Remedy. This definitely isn’t the best time loop plot I’ve seen in a game, but I think American Nightmare uses that premise quite well for both its literal plot, the themes it’s trying to communicate, as well as the actual gameplay itself.
The gameplay loop is both very familiar yet quite different from the base game of Alan Wake. It’s still a third-person shooter (though still not a cover shooter) where you manage your resources of light and bullets to respectively break the shields of and kill the dark creatures trying to get you. What’s changed is the overall construction of the gameplay loop all that takes place in. Firstly, where Alan Wake was a fairly linear game with multiple chapters, American Nightmare is going for a sort of mini-open world experience over 3 different hubs. There are clear objectives with markers on the map, but you can also explore around for manuscript pages as well as hidden weapon boxes. Manuscript pages aren’t just for flavor to the story this time around, though. They do still provide that, but collecting enough manuscript pages allows you to unlock those hidden weapon boxes to acquire new, more powerful main weapons and sidearms to use.
It’s an interesting approach, especially when put alongside the other major change, which is that the survival horror aspects of Alan Wake have been nigh entirely removed in American Nightmare. Ammo is incredibly plentiful, your flashlight recharges much faster than it used to, and the enemy variety is smaller too (though that mostly just boils down to enemies with ranged attacks being removed from this game in favor of melee attackers and grenade throwers). It gives the game a much faster arcade-y feel, and there’s even a dedicated arcade mode you can try if you just want to revel in the combat. I’m not sure I particularly like this change, but I also don’t really dislike it either. Alan Wake dabbled in horror with its resource management and environment design, but American Nightmare isn’t really a horror game at all anymore. Its gunplay is meaty and fun, but it ends up being far too easy because you’re never really encouraged to fight any way other than the most obvious one available to you. Even new guns you acquire most often boil down to your preferred way of fighting rather than a genuine upgrade in power. American Nightmare doesn’t play badly, and I imagine it’s a lot more satisfying on harder difficulties, but it’s definitely not as well polished as Remedy’s later action-focused third-person shooters.
The aesthetics of the game are really great. The visuals are frankly astonishingly better compared to Alan Wake’s. The voice acting, sound design, and licensed music choices all compliment the experience really well, but Remedy’s love of integrating live action into their games’ cutscenes is one of the best I’ve ever seen it here. Mr. Scratch’s recordings he leaves around do a good job of feeling a part of the world, and the opening cutscene in particular looks amazing. It took me two or three times of seeing it before I even realized it was live action with CG effects put on top of it rather than just a fully prerendered cutscene. American Nightmare is still a PS3-era game, but it looks so good (at least on PC) that it looks damn near next gen and still looks great today.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Alan Wake was great, and American Nightmare is great too for a lot of the same reasons. It plays really well, it looks and sounds awesome, and it’s written really well too. I don’t know if I’d say I like it better than the base game, and I could also never recommend skipping the base game to play this (if only because the story would be virtually unintelligible without knowing the background of the original Alan Wake), but this is nonetheless a really novel and cleverly assembled experience that does a great job of both adding to the world and themes of Alan Wake while also experimenting with new types of gameplay to experience it through. Any fan of Alan Wake or Remedy’s games in general will definitely get their money’s worth out of this game, that’s for sure.
34. Banjo-Tooie (N64) *
I’ve definitely mellowed on this game over the years, but it’s still a game I’ve beaten at least three times now in the many hours I’ve put into it over the last 25+ years, and I honestly didn’t originally intend to even write a review for this. However, my other existing review for it is so lacking in detail, and I had so many thoughts arise during this playthrough that it just felt right to give it a proper, modern write up. It was also a fun opportunity to see the game’s Japanese version, so I’m double thankful that I was able to find it for so cheap locally recently. It took me about 12.5 hours to find 70 jiggies and beat the Japanese version of the game (and my stipulation for myself this time was to beat every boss and not use any Cheato cheats).
It’s been two years for Banjo and Kazooie since they saved Banjo’s sister Tootie from the evil with Gruntilda. Grunty’s still exactly where she was after they defeated her: trapped under a boulder after falling from the top of her tower, and her faithful minion Klungo has been attempting and failing to push it off of her all that time. But that ends tonight. In a monstrous digging machine, Grunty’s two sisters have arrived to free her! Now just a skeleton after being trapped in the ground for so long, Grunty is out for revenge against the people who trapped her there. She tries to blow up Banjo and all his friends at his house, but she ends up only taking out Bottles. The three witches (and Klungo) retreat to their great tower at the center of the island and prepare to steal the life force of everything on it to restore Grunty’s body back to its old self, and it’s up to Banjo, Kazooie, Mumbo, and their new friends to stop them!
It’s a fine setup for the adventure, and it’s packed with Rare’s old brand of comedy both for better and for worse. While there are some jokes that still make me laugh, there’s a lot of mean spirited jokes that punch down at “weird” people that were bad then and have aged like milk since. Lots of fat jokes, misogyny, and even some homophobic and transphobic jokes that I actually never even realized were there until this playthrough. This is nowhere near as painfully embarrassing a story as Conker’s Bad Fur Day, and I wouldn’t even come close to saying that the bad stuff is SO bad and overwhelming that it makes the rest of the game not worth engaging with in the process, but it’s definitely not as timeless as Rare’s earlier 3D platformers.
The gameplay is a 3D collectathon platformer, and it’s just as much a sequel to Banjo-Kazooie as it is yet another attempt by Rare to outdo their last big 3D platformer, DK64. Much like the first game, your goal is to go into levels and find the required collectibles to help you progress. Jiggies are still your main currency of unlocking new levels, and you’ll need 70 out of a total of 90 if you want to fight the final boss. Notes are back too, but they’ve been very significantly changed for the better. Rather than individually collecting 100 of them for a stage high score and a single death resetting all the collected ones on the stage, now you collect them in bunches of 5 or 20 and they stay permanently collected upon pickup. They also don’t gate progress anymore (as jiggies already do that just fine), and they’re instead used to gate new moves. You can find Jamjar (the new move teacher) in levels, but if you don’t have the required total number of notes, you won’t be able to learn his move. As good as this sounds, however, this does come with a pretty significant caveat.
Rare made the very bold choice to have Banjo and Kazooie keep *all* of their old moves, so all the moves they’ll learn in this game are brand new to their move set. In a similarly bold move, while every one of the game’s 8 worlds has a boss to fight, they’re an entirely optional activity. Where DK64 uses its world bosses to gate progress to the next world, all Banjo-Tooie’s bosses rewards you with is a new jiggy (and occasionally some progress towards other side quests too). In a broader sense, collecting jiggies are your “keys” for the “locks” of opening up new worlds, but they’re not the only locks you need to open. While Banjo-Kazooie had both jiggies as well as notes for its keys to unlock new worlds, Banjo-Tooie’s secondary key collectible isn’t notes but instead the new moves those notes grant you.
Being able to ignore 20 out of 90 jiggies to beat the game may sound like a quite generous amount you can ignore, but it’s actually quite the feat to get every jiggy in this game (and this is coming from someone who’s gotten all 201 golden bananas in DK64 twice! XD). Unlike Banjo-Kazooie or DK64 where each world is entirely contained within itself (and therefore able to be 100% completed upon your first visit), Banjo-Tooie brings a much more interconnected approach to its world design. Its worlds are quite large already, but just about all of them have various portals to one another that are almost always connected to some side quest for a jiggy (or even several). This means that basically every world can’t be completed entirely upon your first visit, and you’ll need to revisit it (and remember what needs doing!) at a later date. Sometimes the thing you lack is just an inciting quest event that begins in a different world, and sometimes it’s as simple as lacking the right move to get a particular jiggy.
All of this amounts to several significant problems that have bothered me more and more as I’ve gotten older and had more time to dwell on the strengths and weaknesses of Rare’s N64 3D platformers. A lot of exploration and experimentation in stages can end up being totally fruitless, even pointless from the outset, because you actually can’t have the right tools for the job until later. While I already knew that due to the dozens of hours I’ve put into this game when I was younger, a new player has no way of knowing that certain puzzles will just be impossible for them to complete at the present moment. This can have a domino effect of leading players to abandon trying to solve puzzles that *can* be solved at the current moment just because the solutions aren’t immediately obvious, and that makes getting enough jiggies to unlock new worlds and the end game that much more tedious.
This is a game I’ve 100%’d once, and I never will again because keeping track of just where everything is and what you have and haven’t gotten yet is such a massive headache. It’s impossible to take the game one world at a time because of all of the mandatory backtracking, and that’s something that bothers me a lot more than trekking back to the tag barrel over and over in DK64 (though I’d understand that not being the case for someone else). The world design isn’t *bad* as such, but worlds are very large and getting around them can be a real pain. Several worlds like Jolly Roger Bay and Grunty Industries have quite a few main/transitional areas that look very similar, so getting so lost that you don’t even realize that you’ve completely missed an area (and also possibly a very valuable new move in the process!). I have very explicit memories of playing this when I was younger, hunting around for ages for the boulder breaking move and the torpedo move because they’re just so easy to miss, and they’re far from the only ones that easy to pass by (with the latter actually being required to progress through the main game, full stop).
The overall design and gameplay of Banjo-Tooie isn’t bad, I do want to stress that, and I had quite a fun time replaying it, but its *relative* quality compared to the other (good) Rare-developed N64 3D platformers is still lacking in my eyes. It certainly increases the scale of the spectacle of a game like Banjo-Kazooie and even DK64 (which has its own large worlds to contend with), but it also ends up doubling down on a lot of annoying and frustrating aspects of those older games on the way to that spectacle. For example, DK64 already had issues with certain golden bananas feeling really thankless to get due to just how much work was involved to get them compared to others, and Banjo-Tooie makes that labor discrepancy *far* worse than DK64 ever gets. With so comparatively few jiggies skippable compared to golden bananas, 20/90 compared to 100/200, the tedious jiggies hurt Banjo-Tooie a lot more even if no jiggy is nearly as frustrating to get as a Beaver Bother golden banana in DK64.
The spectacle also extends to the aesthetics, and that’s also something that comes with both good and bad features. On the good part, this game looks and sounds really good! The music is excellent as Rare was so often known for, and the funny sounds all the characters make to talk is as fun as ever. The graphics are also really well done for the N64, and from the animations to the models themselves, the game is really impressive for the time (even if it’s not gonna fool anyone into thinking it’s a GameCube game anytime soon). The big drawback that comes from all that, however, is a REALLY inconsistent framerate. The framerate is often fine, but sometimes it’s so low that the game gets quite hard to play. Those times are thankfully infrequent, and it never gets too meaningfully difficult to play, but that may honestly only be that I’m just too used to how this game runs from having played it for so long ^^;. A high framerate also can cause issues with Banjo-Tooie, too, as some of the first-person sections while flying or swimming can get downright sickening (not to mention incredibly disorienting) with how quickly you can turn while in those modes. None of these running issues are a super huge problem so far as I’ve experienced them (and with the XBLA port still available to play, there is an eminently good framerate-having version of Banjo-Tooie out there to play for anyone interested), but it’s still an unfortunate downside to the experience that’s pretty hard to ignore.
One last thing I’ll mention is what it was like playing the Japanese version of the game. A lot of English-language games localized for Japan in the previous century are done so to a very poor standard. A lot of games even up into the PS1 era are localized only in the barest sense, not having Japanese dubs, signs are still in English, and some don’t even bother to localize text at all. Banjo-Tooie, however, is actually a very well localized game for the time (unsurprisingly for a Nintendo-published product). All the dialogue is translated into Japanese, of course, but a lot of the sign textures in game have been changed, too, so navigation is nice and intuitive even for someone who can’t read English. It’s also got a few interesting localization changes, like the three-armed piggy only have two arms now, and Grunty’s head being put into a bag when they’re playing kickball with it at the end (instead of just being the bare severed head XD).
The only real criticism I have with it (other than that the text scroll speed is fine for English but often a bit too fast for Japanese) is that our translator doesn’t seem to have understood some of the jokes as, well, jokes. A lot of the humor (both good and bad) translates quite well as is, and a few even have very clever localized wordplay too. Some, however, were clearly not understood properly by the translation team, and you just have characters saying bizarre things literally because the intended meaning flew by them. For example, the giant queen bee, Honey B, talks flirty to Banjo by calling him “big bear”. The meaning is pretty straightforward in English, but in Japanese, she just calls him, literally, a large bear /ooki na kuma/. The English equivalent would be like calling him a “sizeable ursine”, or something XD. It’s far from experience ruining, and this is still far above a lot of the other localizations done at the time, but I always like to mention this kind of thing in my reviews if only for curiosity’s sake for anyone reading~.
Verdict: Recommended. I definitely didn’t have as sour a time as I’d expected I’d have with this game on this playthrough. Banjo-Tooie is definitely not my favorite game of the 3 good Rare platformers on the N64, but I’m not gonna call it a bad game anytime soon. If you’re a fan of 3D platformers, this game has definitely aged on its original hardware in some difficult to ignore ways, and it’s nowhere as polished as Banjo-Kazooie or Mario 64, but it’s still a really quality time that’s worth playing~.
It’s been two years for Banjo and Kazooie since they saved Banjo’s sister Tootie from the evil with Gruntilda. Grunty’s still exactly where she was after they defeated her: trapped under a boulder after falling from the top of her tower, and her faithful minion Klungo has been attempting and failing to push it off of her all that time. But that ends tonight. In a monstrous digging machine, Grunty’s two sisters have arrived to free her! Now just a skeleton after being trapped in the ground for so long, Grunty is out for revenge against the people who trapped her there. She tries to blow up Banjo and all his friends at his house, but she ends up only taking out Bottles. The three witches (and Klungo) retreat to their great tower at the center of the island and prepare to steal the life force of everything on it to restore Grunty’s body back to its old self, and it’s up to Banjo, Kazooie, Mumbo, and their new friends to stop them!
It’s a fine setup for the adventure, and it’s packed with Rare’s old brand of comedy both for better and for worse. While there are some jokes that still make me laugh, there’s a lot of mean spirited jokes that punch down at “weird” people that were bad then and have aged like milk since. Lots of fat jokes, misogyny, and even some homophobic and transphobic jokes that I actually never even realized were there until this playthrough. This is nowhere near as painfully embarrassing a story as Conker’s Bad Fur Day, and I wouldn’t even come close to saying that the bad stuff is SO bad and overwhelming that it makes the rest of the game not worth engaging with in the process, but it’s definitely not as timeless as Rare’s earlier 3D platformers.
The gameplay is a 3D collectathon platformer, and it’s just as much a sequel to Banjo-Kazooie as it is yet another attempt by Rare to outdo their last big 3D platformer, DK64. Much like the first game, your goal is to go into levels and find the required collectibles to help you progress. Jiggies are still your main currency of unlocking new levels, and you’ll need 70 out of a total of 90 if you want to fight the final boss. Notes are back too, but they’ve been very significantly changed for the better. Rather than individually collecting 100 of them for a stage high score and a single death resetting all the collected ones on the stage, now you collect them in bunches of 5 or 20 and they stay permanently collected upon pickup. They also don’t gate progress anymore (as jiggies already do that just fine), and they’re instead used to gate new moves. You can find Jamjar (the new move teacher) in levels, but if you don’t have the required total number of notes, you won’t be able to learn his move. As good as this sounds, however, this does come with a pretty significant caveat.
Rare made the very bold choice to have Banjo and Kazooie keep *all* of their old moves, so all the moves they’ll learn in this game are brand new to their move set. In a similarly bold move, while every one of the game’s 8 worlds has a boss to fight, they’re an entirely optional activity. Where DK64 uses its world bosses to gate progress to the next world, all Banjo-Tooie’s bosses rewards you with is a new jiggy (and occasionally some progress towards other side quests too). In a broader sense, collecting jiggies are your “keys” for the “locks” of opening up new worlds, but they’re not the only locks you need to open. While Banjo-Kazooie had both jiggies as well as notes for its keys to unlock new worlds, Banjo-Tooie’s secondary key collectible isn’t notes but instead the new moves those notes grant you.
Being able to ignore 20 out of 90 jiggies to beat the game may sound like a quite generous amount you can ignore, but it’s actually quite the feat to get every jiggy in this game (and this is coming from someone who’s gotten all 201 golden bananas in DK64 twice! XD). Unlike Banjo-Kazooie or DK64 where each world is entirely contained within itself (and therefore able to be 100% completed upon your first visit), Banjo-Tooie brings a much more interconnected approach to its world design. Its worlds are quite large already, but just about all of them have various portals to one another that are almost always connected to some side quest for a jiggy (or even several). This means that basically every world can’t be completed entirely upon your first visit, and you’ll need to revisit it (and remember what needs doing!) at a later date. Sometimes the thing you lack is just an inciting quest event that begins in a different world, and sometimes it’s as simple as lacking the right move to get a particular jiggy.
All of this amounts to several significant problems that have bothered me more and more as I’ve gotten older and had more time to dwell on the strengths and weaknesses of Rare’s N64 3D platformers. A lot of exploration and experimentation in stages can end up being totally fruitless, even pointless from the outset, because you actually can’t have the right tools for the job until later. While I already knew that due to the dozens of hours I’ve put into this game when I was younger, a new player has no way of knowing that certain puzzles will just be impossible for them to complete at the present moment. This can have a domino effect of leading players to abandon trying to solve puzzles that *can* be solved at the current moment just because the solutions aren’t immediately obvious, and that makes getting enough jiggies to unlock new worlds and the end game that much more tedious.
This is a game I’ve 100%’d once, and I never will again because keeping track of just where everything is and what you have and haven’t gotten yet is such a massive headache. It’s impossible to take the game one world at a time because of all of the mandatory backtracking, and that’s something that bothers me a lot more than trekking back to the tag barrel over and over in DK64 (though I’d understand that not being the case for someone else). The world design isn’t *bad* as such, but worlds are very large and getting around them can be a real pain. Several worlds like Jolly Roger Bay and Grunty Industries have quite a few main/transitional areas that look very similar, so getting so lost that you don’t even realize that you’ve completely missed an area (and also possibly a very valuable new move in the process!). I have very explicit memories of playing this when I was younger, hunting around for ages for the boulder breaking move and the torpedo move because they’re just so easy to miss, and they’re far from the only ones that easy to pass by (with the latter actually being required to progress through the main game, full stop).
The overall design and gameplay of Banjo-Tooie isn’t bad, I do want to stress that, and I had quite a fun time replaying it, but its *relative* quality compared to the other (good) Rare-developed N64 3D platformers is still lacking in my eyes. It certainly increases the scale of the spectacle of a game like Banjo-Kazooie and even DK64 (which has its own large worlds to contend with), but it also ends up doubling down on a lot of annoying and frustrating aspects of those older games on the way to that spectacle. For example, DK64 already had issues with certain golden bananas feeling really thankless to get due to just how much work was involved to get them compared to others, and Banjo-Tooie makes that labor discrepancy *far* worse than DK64 ever gets. With so comparatively few jiggies skippable compared to golden bananas, 20/90 compared to 100/200, the tedious jiggies hurt Banjo-Tooie a lot more even if no jiggy is nearly as frustrating to get as a Beaver Bother golden banana in DK64.
The spectacle also extends to the aesthetics, and that’s also something that comes with both good and bad features. On the good part, this game looks and sounds really good! The music is excellent as Rare was so often known for, and the funny sounds all the characters make to talk is as fun as ever. The graphics are also really well done for the N64, and from the animations to the models themselves, the game is really impressive for the time (even if it’s not gonna fool anyone into thinking it’s a GameCube game anytime soon). The big drawback that comes from all that, however, is a REALLY inconsistent framerate. The framerate is often fine, but sometimes it’s so low that the game gets quite hard to play. Those times are thankfully infrequent, and it never gets too meaningfully difficult to play, but that may honestly only be that I’m just too used to how this game runs from having played it for so long ^^;. A high framerate also can cause issues with Banjo-Tooie, too, as some of the first-person sections while flying or swimming can get downright sickening (not to mention incredibly disorienting) with how quickly you can turn while in those modes. None of these running issues are a super huge problem so far as I’ve experienced them (and with the XBLA port still available to play, there is an eminently good framerate-having version of Banjo-Tooie out there to play for anyone interested), but it’s still an unfortunate downside to the experience that’s pretty hard to ignore.
One last thing I’ll mention is what it was like playing the Japanese version of the game. A lot of English-language games localized for Japan in the previous century are done so to a very poor standard. A lot of games even up into the PS1 era are localized only in the barest sense, not having Japanese dubs, signs are still in English, and some don’t even bother to localize text at all. Banjo-Tooie, however, is actually a very well localized game for the time (unsurprisingly for a Nintendo-published product). All the dialogue is translated into Japanese, of course, but a lot of the sign textures in game have been changed, too, so navigation is nice and intuitive even for someone who can’t read English. It’s also got a few interesting localization changes, like the three-armed piggy only have two arms now, and Grunty’s head being put into a bag when they’re playing kickball with it at the end (instead of just being the bare severed head XD).
The only real criticism I have with it (other than that the text scroll speed is fine for English but often a bit too fast for Japanese) is that our translator doesn’t seem to have understood some of the jokes as, well, jokes. A lot of the humor (both good and bad) translates quite well as is, and a few even have very clever localized wordplay too. Some, however, were clearly not understood properly by the translation team, and you just have characters saying bizarre things literally because the intended meaning flew by them. For example, the giant queen bee, Honey B, talks flirty to Banjo by calling him “big bear”. The meaning is pretty straightforward in English, but in Japanese, she just calls him, literally, a large bear /ooki na kuma/. The English equivalent would be like calling him a “sizeable ursine”, or something XD. It’s far from experience ruining, and this is still far above a lot of the other localizations done at the time, but I always like to mention this kind of thing in my reviews if only for curiosity’s sake for anyone reading~.
Verdict: Recommended. I definitely didn’t have as sour a time as I’d expected I’d have with this game on this playthrough. Banjo-Tooie is definitely not my favorite game of the 3 good Rare platformers on the N64, but I’m not gonna call it a bad game anytime soon. If you’re a fan of 3D platformers, this game has definitely aged on its original hardware in some difficult to ignore ways, and it’s nowhere as polished as Banjo-Kazooie or Mario 64, but it’s still a really quality time that’s worth playing~.
