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Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge

With THQ publishing Microsoft’s titles on the GBA, a number of Rare’s games previously lost to limbo have since come back to light. The first of those titles to be released, Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge, is the one we’ve known about the longest, and the one that appears to have changed the least.

The game tells a kind of alternate story to Banjo-Tooie, where Gruntilda (last seen crushed under a rock at the end of Banjo-Kazooie) never got rescued by her sisters. After her henchman Klungo manages to get Grunty’s spirit into a robotic body, the newly-dubbed Mecha-Grunty wastes no time getting revenge on the heroic duo. Deciding the best course of action would be to seperate the two, Mecha-Grunty hatches a hare-brained plot involving time travel and… Well, it’s a platformer. Of course the story is a bit goofy.

The game itself plays in a 3/4 overhead perspective that actually does a very good job of replicating the gameplay of the N64 games on a 2D platform. On occasion, this does cause problems, making it hard to judge exactly how high or how far away something is, but mostly it works pretty well.

Graphically, the game looks very good, mixing prerendered graphics with characters designs that look very similar to their N64 counterparts, and are so well animated it almost appears that they, themselves are being rendered in 3D. Unfortunately, the environments themselves are too often bland and uninteresting. It’s an oddly unbalanced mix that has the game looking very impressive one minute and boring the next.

Aurally, the game captures the N64 titles perfectly, using the same sounds, same voices, and often even the same music. For those unfamilliar with the series, this means a lot of banjos in the music, and voices consisting of unintelligible garbled syllables strung together in each character’s dialect (For example, Kazooie’s is “Gabbo gabbo wo wo gabbo…” and Grunty’s is “RAAAH rah raaah rah RAAH…”). Whether or not this works is entirely a matter of opinion, but personally I think it adds a kind of charm to the series and I think Rare deserves a lot of credit for keeping the GBA game’s presentation so similar to the N64 titles.

And like so much of the presentation, the game itself plays much like the N64 games. The game is mostly a very good platformer, with the usual Rare charm shining through. Like so many 3D platformers, the game has a structure similar to Super Mario 64, with notes instead of coins and puzzle peices instead of stars.

Unfortunately, the illusion of nonlinearity in Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge is only skin deep, moreso than any of the previous games. While many have complained that Rare’s games have too strong a focus on collecting things, but Grunty’s Revenge takes yet another step to bind the player to linearity in the method that players learn abilities. Essentially, every section of the game has spots where you can learn new moves for Banjo and Kazooie. While the previous games in the series did this as well, neither of them took this idea to the extremes Grunty’s Revenge do, and now more often than not these moves are necessary for the following area, if not the current area you are in.

This means that if you miss something in a given level, you have little choice but to go back and get it, which completely eliminates the purpose of having a nonlinear world. Why have players traverse back and forth to get from area to area if there’s no reason to go back? Why let players go to a new area when they haven’t yet found the ability they need to explore it? Do not confuse this with the Super Metroid school of game design, where extra goodies are spread throughout a locale that will only be accessible later- the game’s design seems more focused on punishing those that trek too far ahead too early. And it only adds insult to injury when the ability you need to learn is something stupidly simple like “Climbing ladders”.

All in all, Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge is still a very good platformer, those who have tired of “the usual Rare collecting BS” will probably dislike Grunty’s Revenge just as much as they disliked the console games, if not more. As for the rest of us, the game is certainly still enjoyable, but there are times when “the usual Rare collecting BS” can aggravate even the more forgiving Rare fans.

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Tags: Banjo Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge

Posted by Jake McNeill on Oct 21st, 2003 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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