I'm playing Banjo Kazooie all the way through for the first time now (I've only played Treasure Trove Cove before a long time ago at a friend's house, though I remembered it very well), and while I think I may have been a bit too harsh on it in the past, I obviously have a more objective stance now, and I still stand by my belief on it being overrated.
Don't get me wrong, I found myself enjoying a fair amount of this game, and some select portions thoroughly so, but my main problem with it is that beyond Banjo's wonderfully fluent and beautifully animated mechanics, the level design is really not very good, and the level art feels rather uninspired, bar the very first hub area in the game, which I can almost compare to Kokiri Forest.
- To expand upon the level design, it rarely offers a challenge, it's mostly just walking, jumping or climbing from one spot to the next and collecting/finding stuff along the way. I don't think this would be a problem if it were one particular mission or just for one level, but it's virtually the entire game. There's no pacing or any kind of satisfaction from beating a level, you just collect everything then go back to the start and that's it. No boss fight or climax; I always feel like I'm missing something, but then I'll check the stats screen and see that I've gotten 100% on the level. Given that this is the whole game, I once again don't think this would be as bad if they would have provided you with more of a challenge than simply exploring. It's almost impossible to die or even get damaged, you can just trot around pretty much every enemy on the field, and the only reason you'd ever need to kill one is if you needed eggs, feathers or health, the first two of which are scattered about the levels in surplus anyway, and the latter being something you'd only lose by confronting an enemy in the first place, or stupidly forgetting to hover down after a long fall, and even then you have six hitpoints and you lose nothing when you die, you just respawn at the starting point of the very small levels, and you can get right back to where you were probably within thirty seconds. On top of this all, like mentioned, the worlds I find are much too small and accessible from every angle, but the platform design in general don't really accommodate your mechanics very well, they're just there, without much forethought as to what would actually make fun and intelligent level design. However, in spite of everything, I find that its saving grace are how fun and fluid the core mechanics are. With that in mind, better level design could only have made the game that much better.
- As for the level/environment art itself, some areas like the aforementioned hub at the start are downright beautiful, but other areas (unfortunately, the majority of them), feel like Super Mario 64 rip-offs, but none done as well. Since I feel a comparison is necessary, in Super Mario 64, while the textures are generally spread-out in combination with being very low-resolution, it all fits together to form a 'painting', which is basically my word for the perfect unity/synchronisation/communication between all the modelling, texturing and level design. Half the textures in Banjo Kazooie look like they all come from different cheap stock sources, and the other half look like tinted, randomly-generated noise.
To me, it sort of comes off as a generic cutesy, relatively forgettable platformer with a surprising amount of effort put into certain areas (ironically making it somewhat more memorable). Again, this is far from being a bad game, it's still on the good side as like said before I found myself enjoying it quite a bit here and there, but I don't understand why it's considered the staple of everyone's childhood. It became even more obvious how everybody almost madly adores this game for reasons I can't presently fathom when I mentioned my thoughts on the game to two acquaintances (completely unrelated to eachother), and they got really defensive over it. For me it doesn't even come anywhere close to approaching the artistic integrity of something like Rayman 2 or the challenge/fun of Super Mario 64.
Moronic fucking morons. Apparently humor (which is considered "nothing but vulgar jokes by a five-year-old" by my friend and friend's friend), story, and overall lasting impression on you have no impact on the game's quality, but just the fucking gameplay. I guess Silent Hill 2 and The Walking Dead are terrible games, then. I know that everyone has differing opinions, but at least I attempt to recognize that. Also, which I brought up with them, Conker's Bad Fur Day and GTA V have pretty similar ratings (with GTA admittedly having a *slight* edge, albeit a very slight one), so "objectively speaking," they're considered equals, with Conker's Bad Fur Day having a much more significant impact on the gaming industry.
