Wait, so the Jinjos could have done that this whole fucking time?
After many, many hours of streaming, I have finally reached the end of Banjo-Kazooie! What a delightful game this is.
Released for the Nintendo 64 in 1998, at the dawn of 3D console gaming, Banjo-Kazooie came just two years after Super Mario 64 blew everybody’s minds, and several months before Ocarina of Time set the gold standard for 3D adventure games.
This charming platformer tells the story of Banjo, a hillbilly bear who enjoys sleeping, eating honey, and playing his namesake instrument with his adorable little sister Tooty and his acerbic bird buddy Kazooie. When Tooty is abducted by local witch Gruntilda, Banjo and Kazooie (the latter stuffed inside a chic blue backpack) must undergo some impromptu combat training and then head into the witch’s stronghold to save the day.
Aiding our hero and heroine (Kazooie is — as many players overlook — a girl) in their quest is Bottles the Mole, who exists to teach Banjo how to perform certain combat moves, and to verbally spar with Kazooie.
Well, to be fair: Everyone exists to verbally spar with Kazooie. This bird is possibly the most belligerent feathered creature outside the grackles of Austin. She disses everyone she comes in contact with, even instigating some of the very combat challenges the duo must overcome. (Nipper the Crab, notably, seems perfectly reasonable until Kazooie starts talking shit about him.)
The Bitchy Witches
Gruntilda, for her part, chimes in time and again over what seems to be an intra-fortress intercom system to hurl insults at Banjo, insults at Kazooie, and, perplexingly, insults at herself.
Grunty’s plan is rather cunning, when I’m thin, guys will be running!
Gruntilda
This is a villain who suffers from extreme body-image issues, and takes it out on the rest of the world. Gruntilda has kidnapped Tooty for classic Snow White reasons: She has heard that Tooty is better-looking than she, and she find that situation unendurable. It makes things a bit iffy that Tooty is a literal child. It makes things even iffier when, during the game’s Game Over scene, Gruntilda succeeds in her plan and steals Tooty’s beauty, becoming a statuesque, voluptuous supermodel, with Tooty becoming a grotesque, misshapen caricature. So, stealing the beauty of a cute child can turn one into a slammin’ hottie. Noted.
Grunty admits she’s a hog, I really need a big hot dog!
Gruntilda
Gruntilda’s obsession with her looks and especially her weight is all over this game. She continually muses on what she will do when she gets thin, and some of her verbal self-owns are entirely related to her weight.
Grunty’s sister, Brentilda, is certainly no help; she pops up in various places to rag on her sister, and in some cases, listening to her entire rant will replenish Banjo’s health. Her insults, like her sister’s, are firmly in the realm of the elementary school playground.
The disgusting Gruntilda has spider pancakes for breakfast!
Brentilda
Then she usually has maggot pie for dinner. Yuk!
Wartbags then finishes with eyeball ice cream for dessert. How horrid!
Oh, but do actually pay attention to the seemingly juvenile things both she and Gruntilda say, as here will be a quiz later. Yes, really.
The Fortress
Gruntilda lives inside a giant fortress shaped — like so many things within it — like her own head. Within its walls, she has constructed nine worlds which Banjo and Kazooie must navigate before the reach the imprisoned Tooty. These seem to be custom-built and more than a little mocking, as many structures within them bear the likeness of either Banjo or Kazooie themselves.
Naturally, as per the Holy Law of Platformers, these levels get progressively tougher as you ascend. Your progress is blocked by the occasional door, requiring a certain number of musical notes to proceed.
Musical notes are one of the collectibles in Banjo-Kazooie. The others are eggs, and feathers both red and gold. Those later three are expendable and useful in combat, but the notes — ah, the notes.
Every world within Grunty’s fortress contains 100 notes. In one of the game’s more frustrating conceits (which I understand was actually done away with in later ports), losing a life means losing all the notes collected in that world. Your personal best note count, though, is retained for posterity. Say you collect 90 notes in the first world, and then die. You have a count of 90 notes. But if you wish to go back and up that score to 100 for that world, you’ll have to grab all 90 of the notes you previously obtained, and also the remaining ten. For some worlds, this is a piece of cake — for others, a teeth-grinding nightmare.
Your personal best note count is what opens doors, allowing you to proceed to higher levels of the fortress. Along the way, you’ll find allies such as the Warp Cauldrons, which serve (like their counterparts in Wind Waker) as shortcuts through the twists and turns of the building; and Cheato, Gruntilda’s disgruntled old spell book, who teaches you some of the game’s delightful cheat codes.
Cheatin’ ain’t easy but it’s necessary
Speaking of cheat codes, a limitation I set for myself at the beginning of the game was: I could avail myself of any “cheats” readily available on the original hardware, to any twelve-year-old with a Nintendo Power subscription, but not the conveniences of modern emulators such as state saves.
By the end of the game I had tossed that limitation out the window, and never looked back. I spent literal hours trying to beat the game’s notoriously-difficult boss fight, and if I hadn’t allowed myself to use state saves, I probably never would have.
Do I feel guilty? Of course. But I feel guilty about nearly everything, so this just goes on the pile.
As for the official cheats, there are some weird and wacky ones in this game. Cheato will teach you how to get extra eggs and feathers for ammunition, but there are so many more. These cheats are enacted by finding a certain locale (in Treasure Trove Cove; I’ll give you that much) with letters printed on the floor. The cheat codes are spelled out by slamming Kazooie’s beak down on each letter. Some can get quite long — this is a game that makes you work for your cheats. But you can be rewarded, provided you’ve found the necessary secret triggers first, with wacky effects like a giant or tiny head — or turn Banjo into a washing machine.
The Magic of Mumbo
Speaking of transformations, Banjo does not have to spend all of his time as a bear; in most of the worlds within the fortress, you can find and commune with Mumbo Jumbo, the resident… shaman. Oh dear.
OK, let’s talk a bit about Mumbo. Yes, he is indeed a cartoonish hybrid of Native American shaman and African witch doctor stereotypes. His face is hidden behind a skull mask, and in exchange for his assistance, he asks that you bring him a certain number of skull tokens. The tokens say “Eekum Bokum” when you pick them up; Mumbo says “Oobadagga” when he casts his spell.
I’d say to remember that this game comes to us from 1998, but who am I kidding? These kinds of stereotypes are not exactly scarce today. And yes, Mumbo speaks in that Tonto/Tarzan/Frankenstein manner of omitting articles of speech, but to be fair, so do most of the other characters you encounter in Grunty’s twisted worlds, stereotypes or not.
Mumbo is at least a good guy. Give him enough skull tokens, and he will transform Banjo into whatever creature the particular level requires: A termite, a crocodile, a walrus, or even a tiny, adorable Jack-o’-lantern. In these alternate forms, Banjo can reach areas previously inaccessible or speak with bigoted NPCs who don’t want to talk to a bear.
It’s hard for me to decide which of Banjo’s transformations is the cutest. You be the judge.
Getting — God help me — Jiggy with it
The world-levels themselves are mostly delightful. My personal favorites are Treasure Trove Cove, a sandy beach with a pirate theme; Mad Monster Mansion, a haunted house complete with creepy church, and Bubblegloop Swamp, a stinking mire with a turtle choir. (Ask me during my next game, Majora’s Mask, how much I love choirs of pond creatures. Go ahead, ask.) There are also some clunkers, such as Clanker’s Cavern, a literal sewer, and Rusty Bucket Bay, a docked ship that really, really tests your patience for the aforementioned note-gathering mechanic.
Within each of these worlds are ten jiggies — jigsaw puzzle pieces which serve as the other driving collectible of the game. To access each world, you must locate a jigsaw puzzle depicting that world, and fill in a number of missing pieces with the jiggies you’ve collected. The first world requires one jiggy; the last one… er, I didn’t take notes. Significantly more.
Beating the Boss
This postmortem is turning into a full-on review, which wasn’t my intention, but there you go. So I’ll close by describing the boss fight that would have me pulling my hair out if I didn’t already shave it, and nearly made me quit the fucking game in the first place.
After traversing all nine worlds, and collecting sufficient notes for entry, you are then faced with a game show.
Yes, a game show.
To save your sister, you must endure a trivia contest. With each square of Grunty’s twisted game board, you must answer a trivia question from the game. Challenges range from remembering how many pyramids are seen in the desert level, to specific details of Brentilda’s diss tracks.
Once you’ve won the game, Gruntilda escapes up a staircase, Tooty is saved, and our heroes retire to a barbecue in celebration. Until, of course, someone points out that you haven’t actually beaten the damn witch yet.
At this point, Banjo and Kazooie must head back into the fortress and up to the roof, for one of the more grueling boss battles in platformer history. There are four waves, with Grunty swooping at you with her broom (which you must dodge, then wait for the broom to stall out, then attack), then firing fireballs from a position off the roof (which you must dodge or hide from, then plop yourself on a battlement and fire off eggs at her), then an aerial dogfight, and then… then come the Jinjos.
The Jinjos are seen in all nine worlds within the fortress. They are colorful little dipshits who need Banjo’s rescuing from such perilous locales as — a small hill. Collecting all five nets you a jiggy in each of the worlds.
But here, in the endgame, the Jinjos reveal their true might. As Gruntilda protects herself from your attacks, they emerge from the stonework in statue forms, and you must free each of the four of them in succession, at which point they begin pummeling Grunty with their prismatic bodies. But wait! Where’s the fifth Jinjo? After Grunty fends off the first four’s attacks, a fifth and final Jinjo (self-dubbed “The Jinjonator”) emerges and, once you’ve managed to dodge a constant barrage of fireballs and weird Banjo-seeking energy balls long enough to hit him with enough eggs to free him from his stony shell, he comes to life and simply kicks Grunty’s ass. The witch falls off the tower, is buried under a rock, and the day is finally saved.
I’m not gonna lie: I spent two full hours on this boss fight, even after I decided to eschew my no-save-state rule, before heading for bed after six hours of streaming. I am not proud of the man I became during this time.
There are several doors surrounding the entrance to the boss fight, each of which brings something useful to the battle. You can replenish your eggs and feathers, and if you have managed to collect all but two jiggies in the game, you can also get your health meter doubled.
So back I went, on my next stream, to 100% the game and get the notes needed to open those doors. There were still two jiggies — each one a frustrating timed challenge — that I hadn’t managed to earn, but fortunately that’s the exact number you can skip and still get that health bonus.
So, armed with plenty of ammo and double the health, I headed back to the roof, where I got my ass handed to me over and over and over again. Through the magic of save states, I inched forward through the phases of the battle until finally, with exactly one point of health left, I freed the Jinjonator and watched him pummel Grunty to her downfall.
It is a poor gamer who blames his controller… and that is precisely what I am, so I will. In seriousness, though, it was probably not my $15 Logitech F310, but rather my 48-year-old reflexes, that made this boss fight such a bitch. Were I a younger man when I discovered this game, I probably would have prevailed far sooner. But then, I wouldn’t be discovering it now, on Twitch, for all the world’s amusement, now, would I?
So, as our heroes and their friends drink fruity drinks at a beach resort (waited upon by a scantily-clad waitress who is the only human being seen in the game), we bid farewell to Banjo-Kazooie, possibly the only game in history where you can turn into a pumpkin and be flushed down a toilet.
Happy landings indeed. Next up in my streaming schedule: I discover the thrills of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D! I am pretty familiar with the N64 original of this game, but have never experienced the 3DS remake. I’m told it’s the most changed of any Zelda remake, so I am looking forward to seeing what’s new. (“New” in this case being a relative term; I am a retrogamer after all.) That starts Tuesday, March 8, at 8pm CST at the usual place. See you then!
