this year, instead of confronting my backlog, I'm confronting my inability to take recommendations from my friends without breaking out in hives. speaking of hives, banjo-kazooie is alright.
nostalgia, like its constituent memories, is a deeply temperamental ingredient in any construction it's used for. someone else's rose-tinted glasses won't fit you or have the right prescription, so the best they can hope to do is guide you in tinting your own view to match theirs, but ultimately, you're still going to be the one looking through them.
all of this is to say, I don't have the nostalgia for this game that all of its fans do, and trying to borrow someone else's nostalgia goggles is just going to give me a headache. that being said, it's not an awful game, but it's also... very 1998 in some ways that would probably have rubbed me wrong at the time (or any point since).
the premise being that an evil, fat, old, ugly witch is trying to make banjo's little sister fat, old, and ugly in her place is kinda rough, but frankly, every NPC in this game just being kind of an asshole ended up bothering me more. there's basically no conversation in this game that doesn't have at least one of the participants insulting the other, because that's the tone of the writers, a trio of men who I'm sure probably enjoyed each other's company to some extent but probably couldn't write anything resembling actually charming dialogue while keeping this game rated E for everyone. which, hey, maybe their skill set works better with less kid-permissible content, and maybe they've gotten better since, but it didn't land for me in the slightest here.
the moment-to-moment of playing the game is fine, though. nothing difficult enough to dissuade me from finishing the game, apart from maybe the flying mechanics that become infinitely worse when you're forced to use them for combat, and a platforming challenge in rusty bucket bay. playing this via a new recompilation with the ability to save collected notes helped immensely, and I'd probably recommend this over emulation if someone wants to either try it for the first time or go back to it.
on an overarching note, though, it's impossible for me to think about this game without thinking about super mario 64. two years divide the flagship of the system and this attempt to hit the same market, and it feels like they didn't learn much from seeing an early version of super mario 64, except, perhaps, that they were wildly outclassed. the collectathon genre that banjo-kazooie represents the start of for many began with the level design of sm64, even if there's arguments about whether it counts as a collectathon itself... which I'm not gonna get into right now.
playing banjo-kazooie, I often found myself thinking "ah, if I was playing super mario 64, I could do this here," in a way that tripped me up pretty often. there's no triple jump, no wallkicks, no long jump... there's no sideflips, either, and the backflip is a stodgy approximation of the snappy one the plumber can pull off. the quickest way to get around is the talon trot, but this has setup time and completely converts your movement in a way that takes adaptation.
in the level design, too, I found myself wishing for a little more... je ne sais quoi. there are only 9 levels, with 100 notes and 10 jigsaw pieces each, which, even combined with the 10 extra jigsaw pieces in the hub level, produces less collectibles to be concerned with than super mario 64. the lesser breadth of variety in level choices is counterbalanced by more objectives in each level, but this mostly just lead to fatigue on my part. without any direction from the game any time I entered the level, no tony hawk pro skater style goals list, it mostly just led to going over levels with a fine-toothed comb and, when that failed me, I opened a guide instead.
and, unlike sm64, banjo needs so much more of the collectibles, proportionally. where mario could fight bowser and finish the game with 70 of 120 stars, banjo only gets to confront grunty in her quiz show finale at 765 notes out of 900!
also, sorry, that quiz show isn't even the final boss. it shows you half the credits and then you have to actually chase her down, through a door that requires 810 of the available 900 notes, which means you'd need 69 (nice) of the 100 jiggies to reach that point, and then you have to use 25 more to actually fight her! you need 90% of the notes and 94% of the jiggies to finish this game! if I wasn't vaguely aware of this, I would have been mad. anyone who was trying to bare-minimum this game just to get through it would've gotten trolled hard by that, and it's not even in a way that some of the other cheeky bits of design amused me to think about.
I think, as games have gained the capacity to be larger, they've lost sight of the need for (what I think is a reasonable responsibility, that of) designers to actually decide to either suggest or demand a playstyle between the options of any% and 100%. banjo-kazooie was incredibly well-received, but I think it also inspired a lot of gamers' 100% tendencies, because being The First Collectathon and insisting that any% = 92% of your collectibles will do that. meanwhile, super mario 64 only requires ~60% of its collectibles, and the number has dipped below that in successive 3D entries, with super mario odyssey being something like under 15%, because there are just so many to collect... but people will 100% them anyway, because they've got the completionist brainworms.
this does, of course, remind me of a couple of discussions I've seen over the years about super mario odyssey (moons) and breath of the wild/tears of the kingdom (both korok seeds and the shrines), and whether casting less-than-a-bite-sized experiences into a world that large and hoping enough of them bring sufficient fractional dopamine hits to register as a good game is an admirable design decision. this also reminds me of a line from hbomberguy's new vegas video, I believe, where he says (paraphrased), "if you just explore the whole map you'll find a lot of things that will land for you". I kinda hate this attitude, to be honest. I don't think there's anything wrong with wishing a game were smaller, or more keenly focused on things that were more involved and meaningful instead of the gaming equivalent of popcorn.
seeing the roots of this mess, as an outlier that forced you to basically 100% it, no less, is wild. all the levels have a few decent jiggies and a few forgettable ones, and all of them are too big for most of their gimmicks, so end up feeling like a loose collection of ideas in a way that only a couple of stages in peach's castle do.
I dunno! it's certainly a game that I am, on some level, grateful I sat down and played, but almost entirely out of curiosity about its reputation, and it didn't exactly live up to that reputation in particular, though it did live up to my expectations about it.