Your Favourite Game Character

Banjo-Kazooie is one of those games I played as a kid but never owned. By the time the Nintendo 64 was released, more of my friends had started playing games, one in particular would turn into a rival of sorts. There was very little crossover in terms of the games we owned so we would often end up swapping games for a time. Banjo-Kazooie was one of those games and from the first time I played it I fell in love with the world it depicted.

Even after playing the game and loving it, I still never owned it, I'm not sure why that was as I went on to expand my collection of N64 games and from time to time I would still borrow Banjo-Kazooie from my friend, who didn't miss the game all that much from what I can tell. The game gave birth to a fascination with collectathon games that would follow me across multiple generations of consoles.

The game itself is another platformer, 3D this time, set in a world dominated by a witch named Gruntilda. Grunty's desire for youth leads her to kidnap Tooty, which in turn leads her older brother Banjo and his sidekick Kazooie to set out to free her. The Bear and Bird combined have an interesting moveset that would be vastly expanded upon in the sequel, Banjo-Tooie.

Kazooie had her uses in the original game but she really came into her own in the sequel, thanks primarily to the split-up pads which were introduced that allowed the two characters to move around independently having previously only ever been chained together. Kazooie has a charm that shines through her charisma, she's also a bit of a bitch, in the vein of Roger from American Dad or Stewie Griffin from Family Guy, she had as much sass as a game rated E for Everyone could get away with at the time.

Banjo-Kazooie was developed by Rare which at the time was still an independent game studio, they went on to develop other games that would skew more to a mature audience; the studio was eventually bought by Microsoft and the fabled Banjo-Threeie third instalment of the franchise ended up taking the form of a racing game with modular vehicles that most fans of the series hated called Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. I never played that instalment in the series, I watched a playthrough and saw enough to know it wasn't for me.

It wasn't the fact that it was a racing game that deters me from the title, a few honourable mentions of games that didn't make the cut in this 30 Day Challenge are Midtown Madness 3, Simpsons Hit and Run, Simpsons Road Rage, and Crash Team Racing - all of which are racing games or involve driving at part of their core gameplay mechanics; what disqualifies Nuts & Bolts however is the fact it's such a major departure from the first two games, at least when Crash Bandicoot ventured into that arena the developers did so as a side-series that wasn't part of the core storyline of the franchise, Nuts & Bolts however tried to pass itself off as a direct sequel to Banjo-Tooie and it's too divergent for that to pass.