Banjo Tooie | The Completionist

hey everyone thank you for watching today's video yes i have a haircut that just took place right now but you're about to watch me in a few seconds without a haircut because i shot this in reverse anyways that doesn't matter what does matter is today's video is sponsored and brought to you by g fuel you guys know g fuel g fuel of course is the energy supplement alternative out there those are you guys trying to cut back on things like soda sugar drinks like juices and whatnot g fuel is a great alternative to that now i of course love this stuff i was one of those skeptics at first but now i really love it i love working with them and you guys actually love buying this stuff we've been working with them for so many years that we've been alluding to fists on cups for a while which is basically me being like hey let's get my logo on a cup and i'm not gonna spoil it for you but that might be happening so that is awesome and one day one day we will get a flavor a completionist flavor that 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away since i played the original banjo-kazooie all the way back in 1998. that game sparked a love in me for 3d platformers that still continues to this day it is a part of my online dna hell that clip of me freaking out to banjo being in smash went viral because i was just so happy so it might shock some of you to learn that the first time i played banjo-tooie was actually on the xbox live arcade for my show i liked it but banjo-chewie didn't exactly blow my mind the first time i completed that game but now that 2022 is shaping up to be the golden age of sequel games i thought it might be time to finally update my own thoughts about banjo-tooie hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of the completionist new game plus the show where i am re-competing the first 120 games i ever featured here on the channel you know what's hot right now sequels you know what's less hot but still comes up in conversation because i keep talking about it banjo kazooie so today is the perfect opportunity to talk about banjo-tooie the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time that i somehow skipped over when it first released when i was a kid revisiting it last year was a surprisingly good time and helped me appreciate it a lot more i think it's awesome that the banjo hype has not really died these last few decades a few decades later these characters have a huge legacy the banjo in smash announcement has had me fired up for years and made re-completing banjo-tooie a much more memorable experience so put a bird in your damn backpack and let's get to getting some jiggies [Music] and the battle continues [Applause] [Music] [Applause] maybe it's all about the twos for me in 2022 but it feels like this year there are an unprecedented amount of highly anticipated sequels and spiritual successes for lots of franchises horizon forbidden west just came out you could argue that eldon ring is the next evolution of the souls games and i'm still hoping to see god of war ragnarok and the next breath of the wild by the end of this year probably not though i'm always looking forward to seeing the next step in video games and sequels provide developers a chance to do just that but not every sequel is received as warmly as what came before take banjo-tooie one of the industry's strongest arguments that bigger doesn't always equal better as the sequel to rare genre-defining banjo-kazooie banjo-tooie had a lot to live up to i feel like i just re-completed banjo-kazooie even though it was over two years ago at this point oh my god what is time anymore to me banjo-kazooie is a nostalgic masterpiece it's filled with fun and memorable characters smart design choices that have had a clear and obvious impact on other 3d platforming games of today and pitch perfect sound design this game also includes definitely my top three video game soundtracks ever and over time i've had the privilege and the honor to develop a strong friendship with composer grant kirkhope which i'm sure a lot of you guys are really sick of hearing about at this point and the cherry on top nintendo just put banjo-kazooie on the nintendo switch online expansion pack which is crazy to think about because that game has never gotten a nintendo re-release so it really feels like a little bit of a coming home for banjo so with that said what does banjo-tooie bring to the table to expect completing banjo-tooie to be as emotional of an experience as completing banjo-kazooie would be a bit crazy for me my initial response to the game was what you might call muted i made a video about it to be released during what i dubbed at the time the month of sequels segments and it was my first time ever playing the game i didn't play the original version but instead the xbox live arcade read release which included achievements and tons of improvements there was a lot about the game right out the gate that just stuck out to me as sort of odd i thought the game had a weirdly dark tone that was sort of off-putting within seconds of starting we're seeing the death of bottles and introduced to a village utterly torn apart it's such a different tone than the first game that it impacted a lot of how i felt about the whole completion experience core gameplay was refreshingly familiar to anyone who still loves 3d platformers banjo the bear and kazooie the bird must progress through different themed worlds by finding dozens and dozens of jiggies jinjos globos do these start to sound a little bit like slurs to anyone else after seeing them over and over again over the years no just me yeah okay it's classic third person 3d mascot character platforming i jumped i flew i explored every inch of every stage gathering up collectibles and snatching up every jiggy i could my overall takeaway was that banjo-tooie was massive but ultimately not that memorable or at least not as memorable as the first game which again an impossible standard to overcome for me personally the stuff that remains good about banjo-kazooie is all good here because for the most part tui takes the old and adds a bit of new the controls are almost exactly the same and so is the completion process there's also a bunch of new stuff including some structural and mechanical changes the addition of multiplayer the connection of all the stop and swap stuff connecting together at first glance banjo-tooie looks like just a basic follow-up but playing as banjo and kazooie separately at times playing as mumbo himself and all the different transformations definitely helps make banjo-tooie stand out from the shadow of its predecessor as does the unconventional overworld structure however by the time i finished completing the whole game i found the entire experience to be a bit of an overkill the game had lots of weird backtracking and gaining choices that fundamentally made me unhappy at times the sheer volume of collectibles the addition of several multiplayer modes and a few weirdly difficult side quests have me feeling like this game might be too much of a good thing look that bird racing minigame is just the nightmare fuel that a lot of people have experienced yours included i just want balls i gotta hate that bird now it might sound like i was being a little harsh the first time around but the fact is banjo tweet was still a lot of fun to play and maybe got to feel a little too long in the tooth by the end but i still gave it my then rating of finipedit despite everyone making fun of the fact that it seemed like i did not like this game that was then and as it is so often the case re-completing this game helped me see this sequel with a new fresh pair of eyes and though it still has some stumbles i found that as i completed it once again banjo-tooie is overall a much better game than i gave it credit for [Music] now the general consensus around banjo-tooie seems to be yes the game is bigger than what came before it but even though it has some refinements it isn't necessarily a better game it's hard to argue with that sentiment sometimes too but having a few years of distance from playing this game for the very first time provided for me a little bit of perspective and honestly once i stopped directly comparing it to banjo-kazooie and appreciated the game on its own terms i had a blast alright so right away i found the visuals of banjo-tooie to be incredibly impressive banjo-tooie was released in the year 2000 and what i'd like to think was a few to the y2k panic this sequel came out only a year and a half after banjo-kazooie that's less surprising than it sounds we're used to game sequels taking years sometimes even a decade between releases and even with just a year and a half between the two games there's a sharpness to the visual fidelity that really stands out this is evident even in that dark opening cut scene where gruntilda is resurrected by her horrible sisters mangella and bla belda after her long-suffering assistant clungo fails to rescue her until the vows revenge on banjo kazooie and everyone who helped them and so they murder bottles the mole and attempt to raise spiral mountain to the ground banjo and kazooie see all of this and are fired up to take down gruntilda and her sisters once and for all it's kind of a gnarly opening that asks for a lot of investment from players interestingly banjo-tooie did not require players to make use of the nintendo 64 expansion pack despite it being a much bigger and more beautiful looking game rare managed to optimize the hell out of the rapidly aging n64 hardware though i'll admit i didn't play this game on the n64 again i completed it on the xbox live arcade gotta get those achievements baby and that delicious crossover with other rare replay titles so in my original playthrough i was very focused on the oddball tone that banjo-tooie tries to thread the needle on the writing still has that signature rare sense of humor with a lot of jokes that will fly over kids heads nowadays but still land with older players it's very dry and very very british so i gotta say the nostalgia in me really misses gruntilda's rhyming couplets but i guess it does make sense why grunty isn't written that way anymore after all she basically died and is brought back to life so she's through saying cute little rhymes to mock the player characters grunty is out for blood in banjo-tooie she wants to see the end of banjo kazooie mumbo jumbo basically anyone who with her in the first game except weirdly tooty who is almost nowhere to be found outside of a missing poster in cloud cuckoo land and even though grunty is hell bent on taking down our heroes banjo and kazooie aren't going to run away they too want some damn vengeance like a barren bird batman this story actually has stakes which is always good in a sequel but let's be honest here we're not usually playing 3d platform collect-a-thons for the plot i'm here to scour every area for collectibles and banjo-tooie delivers that the game has nine worlds packed full of 100 musical notes each ten jiggies five jinjos 18 globos honeycomb pieces 25 cheetos pages and 3 very secret game packs every collectible has its place and purpose and finding 100 of everything on a level is always satisfying collectibles and progression feel linked which is great for completionists and beyond those collectibles there are also new skills to master for the duo all the original moves from the first game are right here at the beginning take that samus but there are a ton of new abilities too and i was surprised by the amount of brand new moves there were to master instead of learning moves by finding bottles rest in peace in a level i had to seek out jam jars and pay him in musical notes which is great because now the musical notes have real currency in real time as opposed to the very end or throughout the paywall journey the new moves are pretty fun but the most interesting advanced techniques are tied to banjo-tooie's best feature the ability to split up the bear and bird duo this is one of those features that makes perfect sense for a sequel i just spent hours fully mastering banjo and kazooie's move sets in the first game so what can the sequel do differently break up the team and give them little solo missions to do now i found this to be very cool players however cannot do this on command there are special pads that players must step on to split up the pair by themselves banjo and kazooie lose a bunch of versatility but gain more unique moves as well weirdly and this is something i don't think i talked about the first time through kazooie can't really fly by herself she can only glide which sort of feels like an oversight being able to run around just as banjo or just kazooie feels unique and for being a sequel to a game that built his identity around the mascot being a duo this mechanic gives banjo-tooie a stronger identity and on top of all of that mumbo-jumbo himself has some solo sections too i noticed this time around that they don't feel super fleshed out the inner child in me thinks it's awesome to run around as this skull-headed magician i liked that mumbo had a little bit more to do in this game but who was going to help with the transformations this time around the answer would be humba wumba a native american girl who somehow fits into this crazy fantasy world it's sort of incongruous to have a human woman just exist here you know even gruntilda and her sisters don't feel like people more like monsters so it was always kind of odd to interact with humber wumba who again is a human woman but hey the transformations are awesome and who doesn't love that washing machine banjo and kazooie or this little dino baby that's my favorite one banjo-tooie makes some bold choices some of which i think works and some of which i question now i've mentioned the tonal shift of this game but extends to more than just the plot it's a small thing but the jiggies are just objects now they don't have eyeballs anymore which stuck out to me for some weird reason another change is that players now have infinite lives so they don't have to seek out golden banjo statues and try to avoid a game over screen this is a massive step towards what 3d platforming games look like nowadays and definitely a welcomed change to the first game not that i died a lot i've got some skills alright i'm pretty good at games the concept is smart i always appreciate when developers can look at something they made objectively and make changes to feature things that don't quite work anymore now one of the biggest changes is the actual layout of the map in the game banjo-tooie even though it was released so close to banjo-kazooie was way hecking bigger development of this game started pretty much immediately after the first game released and there were a ton of features and areas that didn't quite fit into banjo-kazooie that got rolled into this game the world is enormous and all interlocked you know like eldon ring or dark souls sorry i've been playing a lot of those games lately i originally found the bigness of it all to be kind of a drag i feel like i needed a map as it's pretty easy to get lost this time around i still land on the side there's a bit too much backtracking for my taste that's not to say that it's all bad by any means i understand the design philosophy and it actually ties back to something that makes perfect sense for this game now in the original n64 banjo-kazooie if you do not collect all the musical notes and jinjos and the level in one go they would reset it if you exited the level of course that changed in the xbox live versions for both kazumi and tui in tui whatever the player finds is recorded because you are much more likely to have to exit the stage to backtrack and find a new skill or something so it makes sense why there's an emphasis on backtracking in the game but that doesn't mean it's aged particularly well in rare revealed an interview with the developers that went around in 2015 the team acknowledged that the backtracking could possibly have been better implemented but counted on the relationships between the characters being timeless enough that players wouldn't mind so much and the devs were almost right i'm not the biggest fan of the backtracking in tui but i understand why it's here despite the backtracking kind of being a drag at times there are plenty of moments that make up for that particular tedium i think the bosses in this game make some really strong impressions and i had to strategize in how to defeat them some of the new moves are so intuitive that it's hard to believe they weren't in the original game like ledge grabbing or the different type of egg ammo and of course there's still a great grand kirkhope score to keep me smiling throughout it again it doesn't hit me the same way as the original banjo-kazooie soundtrack does but the love is definitely still there and the sound design is still top notch this era of n64 games has some of the best video game music ever made and grant composing for perfect dark and donkey kong 64 at the same time as banjo-tooie is crazy cool and makes me appreciate all the soundtracks all that much more one of the big things that still stands out to me however in this game is not only the backtracking but the mini games that are inside it so one of the big things about banjo-tooie that really threw me for a whirl originally was all of the fps sections that were spread throughout the title there were a lot of them and it's obvious that the passion of banjo-tooie was injected into this first-person perspective however there were so many of them that i got sick of them and i still feel that way sometimes those moments of being in first person felt really great some of them are challenging at times there's new egg ammo to make it different sometimes it's the boss sequence altogether but the true nature of it is that there's so many of them that i was burnt out and that burnt out feeling was here again and in feeling burnt out i also felt that way with some of the other levels some of these level designs are brilliant they're fun they're interesting they're engaging but the word that i want to describe and it's not necessarily a bad thing but it's something that stuck with me every single stage feels long like really really really long so much so that that's where the backtracking actually bothers me it's not that i have to backtrack it's that i had to spend so much time in the stage that the last thing i want to do is to come back to it it is really cool that all the stages are interlocked so you can kind of jump around from stage to stage but in the end i never wanted to revisit any of these stages and to cap it all off the mini games in this game just overall felt a little bland bland's not the word i want to use because they are interesting at first maybe the word i'm looking for is repetitive and exhausting i felt a lot of that sentiment in donkey kong 64 and i felt it pretty strongly but it's not nearly as bad with banjo-tooie getting back on track here it's easy to dunk on a sequel that isn't as memorable as his predecessor but honestly i had a lot more fun with banjo-tooie this time around and of course streaming on twitch always makes it more fun but seeing the passion of my community played this game with me was really exciting but i think a lot of the enjoyment comes from the fact that since this game came out i have played a lot of new 3d polished platformers even though i've completed and enjoyed the spiritual yet divisive successor that is yooka-laylee or more modern games like psychonauts 2. there is a lot to appreciate in banjo-tooie it was a bit of a shock to play this game and be surprised when something i thought was a modern convention showed up here sometimes the concept of new game plus this show where i am committed to re-completing through all these games that started my completionist journey to here makes me feel weighed down i sometimes feel like there's an expectation to deliver those same jokes and tone as my first videos or sometimes deliberately avoid them all together sometimes there were things that i legitimately missed for completion and i can use these new videos to rectify that but with re-completing banjo-tooie it felt like an opportunity to relax and enjoy something that i knew i would like even if it doesn't carry the nostalgia of the first game but what banjo to me lacks in warm fuzzy feelings for me it makes up for with secrets and even a couple of actual completion bonuses [Music] banjo atooi continues the tradition of rewarding players who make an effort to find everything and then the xbox live arcade version of this game which i did again there are plenty of bonuses to be enjoyed for completionists the end of banjo-tooie forces banjo and kazooie into a quiz battle show with gruntilda's sisters this quiz show is actually significantly easier for completionists as all the questions relate to specific trivia within the game and even though this game is pretty massive much like the trivia game in banjo-kazooie players will benefit from having absorbed this game in a short amount of time if you really immerse yourself in banjo-tooie and make it to the end in a short time period you'll probably have a much easier time with these quiz questions sadly there is nothing to unlock by playing the multiplayer side of things these modes are fun and interesting and weird but you can definitely tell they were a last minute add-on to banjo-tooie and honestly it was such an afterthought that i didn't even record footage of it because well kovid they almost feel like a test for the multiplayer and conquers bad for a day which certainly feels much more refined as far as the actual completion collectibles go the bonuses are pretty fun here earning all 90 jiggies unlocks a character parade where you can see all the character models and there's a bonus cut scene in the credits for those who found 100 of every item in the game but there are also a couple of secret exclusives to the xbox live arcade version we even got a little crossover with banjo-kazooie nuts and bolts where some unlockables in this game transferred over to the game and vice versa of course we've all heard this but in case for those of you who don't know back in the day n64 players who had copies of banjo-kazooie and banjo-tooie would be able to collect and find certain collectibles in one game like the mysterious ice key turn off their console pop in the other cartridge and that data would theoretically carry over into the new game that was just inserted this was called stop and swap but unfortunately the technology didn't quite work as intended and the feature was thought to be an unsolvable mystery however through the magic of digital assets stop and swap was revived in the xbox live arcade versions of both of these rare games so if you've got data on your xbox for the original banjo-kazooie and nuts and bolts you've got access to a few secret items i was able to unlock a new multiplayer character a jinjo as well as some homing eggs to fire at enemies the coolest reward is certainly dragon kazooie if you find the ice key in banjo-kazooie it is added to the stop and swap items in tui i can then take that ice key to unlock a vault with a mega globo taking the mega glow bow to humbewomba transforms kazooie into a dragon breegel where she can breathe fire when standing still and also has unlimited fire eggs to shoot it's fun silly overpowered and it is the perfect secret bonus for players who take their time to find the ice key in banjo-kazooie the stop and swap stuff is cool but part of that is because it didn't require me to do any of the crazy backtracking that is present in banjo-tooie it's more of a secret than a completion bonus the actual in-game bonuses the character parade an extra cutscene in the credits are fun but don't feel essential to me as much as i loved completing games in this genre banjo-tooie might not be compelling enough on its own to complete in my re-completing of banjo-tooie there were 45 jinjos saved 90 jiggies collected 25 missing pages for five cheat codes 25 extra honeycomb pieces in order to earn five extra health honeycombs 24 move upgrades from jam jar with the 25th being an extra bubble upgrade from the goldfish 18 globos including the mega globo six stop and swap eggs seven stop and swap two achievements 13 bosses defeated 12 xbox live achievements earned and a deep sadness in my stomach knowing that we'll never get banjo 3e although i believe someday we will gotta believe i think in the end banjo-tooie was a lot more fun to complete than i remember it being at the time though it's tough to avoid making direct comparisons to my favorite games of all time there is a lot to love about banjo-tooie on its own merits if you're a fan of the genre it's a very worthy successor in follow-up but this game suffers a little bit from being slightly too much of a good thing play through to the end but don't feel like you just stick around and completely get a hundred percent of everything done so with that in mind i give banjo to me my new completionist reading of finish it finish it [Music] the

Channel: The Completionist

Views: 147,922

Keywords: banjo tooie, banjo tooie review, banjo tooie gameplay, banjo kazzoie, banjo kazooie review, banjo kazooie gameplay, music, ost, banjo kazooie music, banjo tooie music, dunkey, videogamedunkey, antdude, video review, game review, game reviews, completionist, the completioinst, g4tv, g4, attack of the show, xplay, yooka laylee, rareware, rare replay, nintendo, nintendo 64, n64, smash, smash ultimate, gruntilda, gaming, smash bros ultimate, didyouknowgaming, dykg

Id: CJ-RP-EaLII

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/yarbousaj]

Yessssss. I've been waiting for this one since I discovered The Completionist, like, 150 videos ago. Back when he had the map format. Sooo excited to watch it!

[u/byniri_returns]

Genuinely shocked he hasn't done this one yet.

[u/NAteisco]

He should have played it with Alex