Headscratchers / Banjo-Tooie

• So, why did Grunty turn into a skeleton?
  • She's been buried underground for two years. Don't ask why she's still alive.
    • Why is she still alive? (Sorry. Couldn't resist.)
    • A Wizard Did It. (Well, she is a witch, what did you expect?)
    • Her sisters stole life force from the land and gave it to her. They couldn't resurrect her completely, though, so she ended up as a skeleton. That was the main plot of the game, remember?
    • Nope, she never died, her body just became skeletal while buried, the plot was to have her regain her flesh. And she never got to use B.O.B. in herself anyway.
    • Well, that's an easy way to lose weight.
    • The fact that we see Grunty's rock being knocked around during the title sequence and the intro scene makes it pretty obvious that Grunty was alive the entire time.
    • She's a witch. Apparently witches in this verse are immortal. At the end, she got blown to pieces and was still conscious; if that didn't kill her, lack of food, water, and oxygen wouldn't.
    • And why do her ribs show through her clothes?
    • I think her cloak's just open, exposing them. Either that or it's to freak people out.
    • Part of her clothes rotted while she was buried underground alive for two years (her hat has also visibly deteriorated).
    • She was kept alive by that last spell she cast before falling off the tower.
    • No, that spell was supposed to turn Banjo into a frog, but missed.
• Why can't Banjo use his claw swipe attack when he's by himself? Most of the other moves make sense in terms of whether you need to have both characters together or just a specific one in order to perform them, but the fact that Banjo can do nothing to defend himself before learning to use his backpack to hit people is ridiculous, considering that they left all the duo's other moves from Banjo-Kazooie intact. While I'm at it, why does he suddenly need Kazooie to roll in the sequel when he was perfectly capable of doing it without her help in the original?
  • They changed the claw swipe for a ground version of Kazooie's peck attack in Tooie, specifically so Banjo couldn't use the move and thus need to learn the backpack attack. It was a lame attack anyway.
  • He wishes he could keep those moves, but he cannot. He is bound by a pack.
• If you try to leave a world as Mumbo, he'll refuse to leave because he's afraid of his skull getting looted. But Banjo and Kazooie are still in there. They're more than capable of protecting the place.
  • He's obviously afraid of Banjo and Kazooie looting it.
    • Fridge Logic kicks in when you realize that in the first game, Banjo and Kazooie actually *did* loot Mumbo's skull. Notably, the multiple times they took mumbo tokens *in* his skull and used them to pay for spells.
    • Obviously Mumbo needed some help with spring cleaning.
  • It's also possible there was stuff he had in his house that he didn't want Banjo and Kazooie to mess with.
  • Well, if that's the case, it leaves the question as to why he would leave them in there alone in the first place.
• Why didn't Gruntilda zombify Master Jiggywiggy instead of King Jingaling? She knew from the previous game how important jiggies were for Banjo and Kazooie to succeed, and indeed they did receive much needed insight and help from Jiggywiggy. It could've slowed down the duo's progress quite a bit for the hag's benefit.
  • During the cutscene when Gruntilda decides that King Jingaling will be her first target, she says that "that traitor Jingaling just gave them [meaning Banjo and Kazooie] a jiggy." The nature of the relationship between Jingaling and Gruntilda is another headscratcher—why does she call him a traitor? Were they once on the same side?—but it seems that he's her target because she's angry at him in that particular moment, so he receives the brunt of her wrath. Plus, Gruntilda's the arrogant type—she might have thought that she didn't need to bother draining Jiggywiggy, because she believed that Banjo and Kazooie wouldn't be able to collect the jiggies they needed to enter his temple.
  • It could also be that Jiggywiggy is immune to the B.O.B.. Or that the Crystal Jiggy, with its mere presence, is powerful enough to protect the temple and all its inhabitants against the B.O.B.'s life-drain.
• A development Question, Why was "Bottles Revenge" completely dummied out from the second game? Hackers have been able to reconstruct it on emulators so it must have been really close to completion.
  • Rare ran out of time to completely debug it according to the wiki, thus they had to cut it.
• Banjo and Kazooie blast the life energy that B.O.B. sucked from King Jingaling back into him and bring him back from the dead. Okay, that's cool and all. But then, they proceed to do the same thing to Bottles, even though B.O.B. had no energy in it other than what it took from Jingaling. Whuh?
  • I always figured that in order for the machine to even work in the first place, it would have to had energy of its own and Banjo and Kazooie pretty much used up the energy that make the machine work in the first place to restore Bottles rendering it completely useless if Grunty considers using the machine again. Banjo even tells Kazooie to crank it up to full power which likely would have exhausted any energy reserves the machine might have had afterwards.
• Somehow, while the Mega-Glowbo has enough energy to transform Kazooie into a dragon, all it takes is the energy of just one single, measly Glowbo to transform Banjo into a tyrannosaurus.
  • There are two reasons why this is the case: 1). The dragon transformation, unlike the rest of them, is permanent and able to pass through any world. 2). The tyrannosaurus transformation isn't the work of only a single Glowbo, as it not only requires Humba's transformation pool, but also Mumbo's Glowbo-powered growing spell.