Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge — An Unnecessarily Long Review
As someone who grew up with Banjo-Kazooie, it’s kinda weird how I played Nuts & Bolts on launch day, but never got around to Grunty’s Revenge until just recently.
I was aware of its mixed reputation among other fans and had heard a couple of songs from the soundtrack beforehand. I knew that it was once planned to be a 2D platformer for the Game Boy Colour with more levels and a slightly different plot before it shifted over to the Game Boy Advance. My feelings towards the first game on Nintendo 64 are complicated: it was a prominent staple of my pop-cultural palette and contributed heavily to my growing interest in art and game design even at a fairly young age. At the same time, the games genuine faults are not only very plain to see but also continue growing in volume the more I revisit it.
The prospect of playing something like that again on a smaller screen with fewer buttons and a more limited perspective didn’t appeal to me at first, but then I played some more modern (and arguably better) 3D platforming throwbacks on Nintendo Switch and none of them seemed to scratch the itch in that same way. I was certain that it couldn’t just be nostalgia talking. I’ve read many essays, participated in numerous conversations with people who also grew up with these games and watched countless videos dissecting the design minutiae of the Banjo series. I’ve heavily scrutinised the possibilities surrounding a potential new game (in spite of my immense reservations) and how it can possibly hope to resonate with modern gamers and notoriously picky fans alike, to the point that I even shared a series of opinion polls to try and understand what anyone, let alone me should even expect from this series now.
I know exactly what worked for me, what didn’t work for me and what aspects likely only ever released chemicals into my brain specifically. If any game was going to take me back (however briefly) to the past, it was this one.
Speaking of which, the plot for Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge begins six months where the first game left off: with the wicked and selfish witch Gruntilda defeated and stuck under a rock, her ghoulish assistant Klungo struggling to free her from underneath. With vital help many more months away and Grunty’s body decaying fast, he decides there’s only one logical thing to do: build a giant robot for Grunty’s soul to inhabit and control. As you do. This done, she splits the titular duo apart just as they’re about to set up a barbecue, declaring her intention (in ceaseless rhyming couplets) to travel back in time to stop Banjo and Kazooie from ever meeting with eachother, which a friend of Banjo’s seems prepared for. Mumbo Jumbo the witch doctor sends Banjo himself back in time to intercept Gruntilda, save his friend and stop the witch all over again.
This kind of story is typical for a Banjo game: frontload all the set-up towards the beginning as an excuse to work in a bunch of disconnected set pieces before the final confrontation brings it all home again. Logical questions such as “why is the past so materially similar to the present day” or, “why doesn’t Grunty move the boulder herself once she’s in the robot suit” or, “do we ever actually get to see how Banjo and Kazooie first met eachother” are very knowingly thrown aside in favour of exploring zany locations, injecting them with irreverent, mildly cynical humour and having a bunch of sassy characters butt heads with eachother. Some lines of dialogue between Kazooie and tutorial meister Bozzeye for example actually got a genuine chuckle out of me in spite of the grating mumble sounds that accompany the dialogue.
It was particularly irksome coming from someone who never found it annoying in the original Nintendo 64 console games, considering that most of the very tinny voice samples in Grunty’s Revenge are reused between non-playable characters with the pitch shifted slightly and the pauses between each sound bite are distractingly prominent.
The music on the other hand is no slouch. It’s the first game in the series not to be composed by series regular Grant Kirkhope, but Jamie Hughes does an impressive job of translating the cheesy, cheeky and jovial spirit of the console games over into crunchy handheld stereo. While most of the songs are just okay, a handful of his tunes did manage to worm their way into my head and stand alongside some of the series best tunes, so needless to say, Jamie did a solid job.
I was also surprised to see some extra conveniences added in by this totally different development team. One of the major mainstays of the Banjo series has been the character transformations provided by Mumbo Jumbo from his shaman hut. These transformations would allow the player to do things that Banjo and Kazooie could never be capable of in their normal bear and bird forms, though they seemed to rely a lot on the “fit through a special character-shaped gap” function. Typically it was limited to one new dedicated form per-location and when the player left and strayed too far from where they came from, they would be warned ahead of time that the “magic” would wear off and force the pair to revert back to normal.
Grunty’s Revenge adds a seemingly novel wrinkle to that concept wherein any transformation can be chosen in any world once they’re unlocked by beating a level boss. In practice, there were quite a few limitations put in place. For one, the limited range at which the magic wears off is now much more constrained, to the point that a player can’t even explore the entrance of a level while still transformed as they could in previous games. As for usuable transformations that weren’t found in the current level, they’re even more limited. In both cases though, the player will not be given an initial warning when they stray too far from Mumbo’s hut. All it will take is for the player to stumble into the “wrong” place without realising until they’re abruptly teleported back to the entrance of Mumbo’s hut as a jarring punishment for experimenting and exploring. In practice then, you’ll find that most of the areas immediately surrounding Mumbo’s hut will be the ones where a transformation will actually be required and sometimes, not even that.
It’s not all bad news however: the player can save their current in-game progress wherever and whenever they please, just like the original N64 games, but crucially in Grunty’s Revenge, you are not booted to the title screen every time you do so. You are even free to save to any of the three save slots available, not just the one that has currently been loaded. What’s more, instead of beginning at the entrance of the games main hub world when you reload a save, you start right in front of the entrance to whatever area you just exited from.
It also eschews the lives system of the first game, so you can retry a challenge however many times you wish without fear of losing progress or being thrown back to the entrance of a world. At the same time though, it seems like the developers felt the need to balance out the convenience brought about by these quality of life improvements by making the challenges themselves more difficult while also increasing the amount of back and forth trips required. On the one hand, as someone who grew up with the first game on N64, this feels somewhat refreshing. It actually manages to put me back into that same headspace I was in when I played Banjo-Kazooie on the N64 for the first time as a child. If I ever got lost or if a task was proving too much for me, I could leave it alone and explore other possibilities elsewhere until I had the guts to take it on again.
On the other hand though, some of the challenges can prove to be too demanding, even for someone like me who knows the original game like the back of his hand. Many of the timed challenges in Banjo-Kazooie on N64 could be ridiculously strict, with some late-game tasks leaving very little room for error to make the cut with barely two or three seconds left on the timer and Grunty’s Revenge amps that up to eleven with late game enemies and hazards capable of stripping you of multiple health points if you haven’t stocked up on as many energy bar extensions as possible.
There are three things unique to this game that don’t help matters, the first being the controls. In general, they do the job fine: trimming the fat to fit with the limited input methods provided by the Game Boy Advance. Even if there are still some moves that are used way less often than they should be, there are still some things that it probably does even better than the N64 version. For example, the Talon Trot ability which has Banjo flip onto his back so that Kazooie can walk around for him to move faster, jump further and walk up steep hills. In both Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo Tooie on N64, the player had to crouch, press the right C button and then keep the crouch button held down at all times if they wanted to keep Kazooie’s feet on the ground.
On the game boy advance, you crouch with the L button and then switch to Kazooie with the R button, but you don’t have to keep the crouch button held. You can waddle and jump to your hearts content and simply tap the crouch button again whenever you want Banjo to be in control again.
Another control improvement I enjoyed was the way it handles the eggs. In Kazooie and Tooie, the player could collect eggs and fire them out of Kazooie’s mouth like ammunition (don’t ask me how that works please) The player however could not move and shoot at the same time. The player had to either crouch, move into a first person aiming perspective or enter a designated area that allowed them to move and shoot at once.
Grunty’s Revenge meanwhile simply asks the player to crouch and press the B button to pull Kazooie out like a rifle. They can walk, hop, turn and shoot all at once without ever switching perspectives. These changes make for something that feels very freeing and a genuine step up over their console counterparts. So if that’s the case, why do I say that they have problems?
It’s because a good majority of unlockable abilities require the player to crouch first, and crouching forces a delay before the other inputs. So if you want to perform a flap flip jump to reach higher ground, you have to wait for the half-second long crouch animation to play out before the game will allow you to press A to perform the jump. Half a second relatively speaking doesn’t sound long, but when you take into account that inputting other commands following a crouch in the N64 games resulted in near-instantaneous feedback, half a second starts to get in the way, especially if you want to get away really fast or attack an enemy before they can attack you.
The second major issue that takes this standard navigation and fills it with paranoia and uncertainty is enemy respawning. Once you defeat an enemy, leave the place where they once were and then return, they get right back up again. This was also seen in the first Banjo-Kazooie game and is also a standard fixture of video gaming as a whole at this point, but it’s rendered even more obnoxious here than it was when Banjo-Tooie doubled down on it. At least in that game, the respawning enemies were telegraphed with some sparkle effects and magic noises.
In Grunty’s Revenge, enemies can reappear as soon as you walk away from where they were felled. To be clear, I don’t mean exiting an area through the door you came in from and then re-entering through that same door. I mean that as soon as the screen scrolls away from the part of the screen where they used to be, even if it’s just a few feet, that fallen enemy will immediately return again as though they never left at all. This becomes a recurring problem when I’m backtracking to a previous area or trying to clear a path to prepare for a platforming challenge only to see that path become crowded with hazards again.
This is where I run into my final (and biggest) problem: the platforming itself.
It does do the job enough of the time to avoid being completely unplayable, but at all other times when it really matters, the flat orthographic isometric perspective employed by the game makes navigation very confusing and tricky. It does manage to do the job of successfully evoking the visual direction of the first two games, but it becomes a problem when judging distance and height relation between two adjacent surfaces and it’s not clearly communicated as to whether Banjo will land squarely on the next platform over or if he’s going to fall right in front of it, behind it, over it or even under it.
There is a guiding shadow cast directly underneath him to try and aid with this just like the N64 games, but when the sense of perspective is so thoroughly skewed to the point that Banjo can’t even jump over waist-high fences without grinding his face against arbitrary invisible boundaries, even this genre-standard affordance can’t help much at that point. I lost count of how many times I would be flailing to escape from harmful bodies of liquid only to find that most of the seemingly nearby ledges that surrounded me were actually elevated too high or too far away for me to jump onto. It got so bad that at one point, I mistook a wide opening for a completely solid surface and almost missed out on a vital late game ability. Other times, it seems as though the level designers are in on the joke as they hide collectibles essential for 100% completion in the final two levels directly behind cliffs and objects that you cannot look behind thanks to the forced perspective.
EDIT: Oh yeah, the level design? It’s fine. It suffers a tad from not being able to use central weenies to orient oneself around due to those inherent isometric perspective limitations, so instead it tries to differentiate areas based on relative location i.e. how far towards the furthest end of the screen the player happens to be. This invariably means that memorisation of key locations comes down more to assessing verticality, and in levels where colours and textures don’t repeat too often as to render areas indistinguishable from eachother, it mostly succeeds.
So the game pulls off the look and feel of a Banjo-Kazooie game, but…wait.
Actually, there is no “but”.
This IS a Banjo-Kazooie game.
I could go over the other increasingly miniscule gameplay and design differences between this Banjo game and the others in the series like the lack of variety in bosses and mini-games, the Jinjos now apparently answering to a hint-granting oracle statue, how the wonderwing invincibility power is limited to a contextual pad in addition to a finite supply of collectibles or how the 100% completion ending can’t help but be an anti-climax, but that would be missing the point.
That point being: all of my grievances directed towards Grunty’s Revenge are not all unique to Grunty’s Revenge. I sought a game that would transport me back in time along with the main characters and in spite of my expectations, that’s exactly what I got, warts and all. Finally playing this game for the first time was an odd but valuable experience. On balance, it’s probably become my second favourite in the series just behind the original game, something the developers can feel free to be proud of, and I can absolutely see why others bounced off of it the way some did for other games in the series.
Regardless of how much simpler the package is overall and how much has been superficially changed to suit the handheld format, it’s exactly how I remember these games as a child.
But that’s not exactly a compliment anymore.
This game helped me revisit and reassess that place in my childhood that I thought was long behind me, reminded me why I enjoyed these games in the first place and also highlighted the parts that I want the series to move as far away from as possible.
But then, this series tried to move on once before and in spite of its best efforts, Nuts & Bolts’ attempts to endear itself to the wider public failed spectacularly because in its desire to innovate, it shed too much of what people expected from the series and what they enjoyed about it. Now those same fans seem to become fearful and resentful at the prospect of any changes at all, even if it means at the “bear” minimum, bringing across familiar sensations in a different way with less friction. It makes me sad, because despite the failure of Nuts & Bolts, I never wanted it to stop trying.
Since a new Banjo game is all but inevitable according to the powers that be at Microsoft, I find that I’m more excited and enthused by new and alternative takes on the old framework such as original soundfont mixes and appealingly strange mods.
Nowadays, I’ve fixated increasingly on the bold and new ideas of what a new Banjo-Kazooie game should be and what I know for a fact it won’t be: the new directions it will not take, the ways in which it will never build and evolve on came before and instead, likely regurgitate the old wholesale with a boilerplate facelift redux while fans say “MORE warts and all, please”.
I genuinely fail to see how that kind of approach could possibly be sustained in the long term aside from fans repurposing that creative dead end as their personal comfort zone. I’m sorry that this got so pessimistic again, but I can’t help how my brain works. I have my own ideas for what I want a new Banjo game to look like as well, but I know that if they ever did happen, it wouldn’t be used for a Banjo game.
I enjoyed my time with Grunty’s Revenge, but I also want to move on from it. If this sense of overly safe familiarity is even the slightest hint of what the future looks like for Banjo-Kazooie, I’m not going to feel very strongly about it either way.
Merry Easter.
I made some video games and a 3D tribute to Faith The Unholy Trinity: https://thebonsaitreehouse.itch.io
I edited a goofy music mashup last Christmas: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Pz02L2OmIFJlmBcY2gJaw
I’m trying to wean myself off of Twitter: https://bsky.app/profile/bonsaitreehouse.bsky.social
I have other things coming soon that I’m choosing not to share at the moment because of reasons.