YMMV / Banjo-Kazooie

This page lists the YMMV tropes of the original game. Please put those of the other games in their corresponding YMMV tabs.

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• Base-Breaking Character: Brentilda. Is she a pleasant Fairy Godmother who helps to contrast Gruntilda's wickedness, or is she dull and judgmental, only serving to give a villain as charming as Grunty Informed Flaws? Rare seemed to side with the latter camp, citing her being forgettable as the reason why she was phased out of Tooie.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The pirate-themed Treasure Trove Cove is well-loved, and players might often find themselves there because it has the cheat-code sandcastle.
  • Freezeezy Peak is beloved for it’s cozy Christmas aesthetic, fun puzzles involving dive bombing the large snowmen and the giant snowman’s buttons, and appropriately festive musical track.
  • Click Clock Wood has become a fan-favorite, with its time mechanics and bumblebee transformation.
  • Mad Monster Mansion is a great level, being both densely packed and wide open enough that, despite being comparatively smaller than the levels before it, it feels much bigger.
• Breather Boss: As exasperating as Rusty Bucket Bay can be, Boss Boom Box is an incredibly easy boss who can be taken down in seconds by just spamming the Wonder Wing on him.
• Breather Level: The Jiggies in Click Clock Wood are generally much easier to obtain than those in Rusty Bucket Bay, though it can still be a challenge to obtain all 100 Notes due to the precarious platforming.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Banjo's Signature Laugh is often thought to be spelled out as "guh-huh". However, this is disproven by Tooie, where the rim of his Split Up Pad is plastered with the word "gu-huh" (note the lack of an H in the first half). Not even Rare is exempt from making this mistake; if you play the banjo in Sea of Thieves, one of the quick chat options selectable by the player is "Guh-hu".
  • It's commonly believed that Rare has always fully owned the series, hence them taking it with them after being bought by Microsoft. However, in truth, the IP was originally fully owned by Nintendo, and only transferred full ownership of the series over to Rare after the buyout in exchange for full ownership over Rare-created assets and ideas from series like Donkey Kong and Star Fox.
• Designated Monkey: Many fans believe Gobi doesn't deserve to be a Butt-Monkey, since it always results in him feeling miserable as a result. What doesn't help is that Banjo and Kazooie abuse him for his water always after they free him from imprisonment, making it seem as though they're yanking the camel's chain, and what's worse is that during the second go around, he's been imprisoned for two years, only to have the cycle repeat once more. Now granted, the first time, he actively refused to give a palm tree he was laying in front of water, but the other times...
• Designated Villain: Conga. Whereas other foes in the series either try and kill the pair over a Jiggy, one of Kazooie's usual insults, or for not handing over a pizza they don't actually have, he just chucks oranges at 'em for trespassing in his home. And unlike most bosses, three Jiggies involve causing his misfortune instead of one: there's one for making him attack the orange tiles, another one for stealing an orange and giving it to Chimpy nearby, who helps them out by raising a stump, getting them to where they can attack him with eggs for the third Jiggy. Rare seems to have agreed as he's an ally in Banjo-Tooie.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The eighth world, Rusty Bucket Bay, is this due to water that makes you drown on the surface. There are also difficult-to-get Jiggies like the one behind the ship's propellers (those propellers will kill you immediately if you touch them when they are active), the one inside the engine room, and the one guarded by the boss. It's also one of two areas in Banjo-Kazooie, the other being the Final Boss fight, with a bottomless pit (it's inside the engine room).
  • Mr. Vile in Bubblegloop Swamp is, for many first-time players, the first time the game provides a spike in the challenge; prior to this, most Jiggies are pretty straightforward or out in the open, and then you run into this guy who forces you through not one, not two, but three challenges with increasing difficulty for a single Jiggy.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Some of the things Brentilda says about Grunty aren't even nauseating, and in fact make her sound incredibly cool, despite Brentilda saying they make her horrid.
  • "The old hag's favorite color is ghastly grey!"
  • "My sister sings in her own band, Grunty and the Monster Mob. They're awful!"
  • "My lazy sister often sleeps on a pile of treasure, the dirty hag!"
  • "The only thing she's ever won was the biggest butt competition at witch school!"
  • "She often boasts of appearing on the cover of Fat Hag Monthly, polishing her crystal ball!"
  • "My fat old sister's favorite sport is broomstick racing!"
  • "Although she's dim, she attended Cauldron College!"
  • "You won't believe that Gruntilda's party trick is performing a scary striptease!"
  • "When relaxing, she usually reads Big Butts and Guts magazine!"
  • "She also has an eyeball flower growing in a pot beside her bed! Filthy old bag!"
  • "Did you know Wartbags keeps a dragon's foot in her pocket for luck?"
  • "I've also seen my sister cuddling a scary teddy bear in bed at night!"
  • "Gruesome Gruntilda's favorite pastime is collecting dragon teeth!"
  • "This poor guy called Undead Ed was her first and only boyfriend!"
  • "When she was younger, Grunty used to have a baby dragon as a pet."
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Hot Grunty from the first game's game-over screen, Mumbo Jumbo agrees.
  • Mumbo Jumbo himself. In the first game, he started out as a weird shaman with an unexplained romantic history with Gruntilda who turned up in a handful of levels. In the second game, he became a playable character.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Rusty Fuck-It Bay" for Rusty Bucket Bay, mostly due to its infamous engine room.
  • In the Japanese fandom, Banjo and Kazooie's names are often shortened to Ban and Kazoo.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content:
  • There were a lot of scrapped things in the beta version of the game that fans wished could have stayed, such as extra worlds (e.g. Fungus Forest and Mt. Fire Eyes), additional music tracks, an alternate victory dance upon receiving a Jiggy, and a different-looking Mumbo's Mountain, to name a few.
  • There was a scrapped mission of Tooty guiding Banjo to Mumbo Jumbo after Gruntilda turned him into a frog^note This came right after her defeat in the final battle as her way of having the last laugh. The spell makes a direct miss in the final game. Had the mission come to pass, it not only would have made more use of Tooty, but she would have been helping her brother the way he helped her.
• First Installment Wins: Despite a heavy contigent of fans considering Tooie an Even Better Sequel, many other consider the first game better. Primarily due to them opining that its simplicity makes for a more enjoyable game compared to the chore-like nature of Tooie. Additionally, they also argue that the Darker and Edgier nature of Tooie's humor also sucks out much of the original game's charm. Interestingly, the developers at Rare have similarly expressed a preference for the first game by virtue of the former point. The sentiment grows even further when discussing the GBA games and especially Nuts & Bolts.
• Franchise Original Sin: The first game had only one instance of backtracking (using the Turbo Trainers in a sled race). Tooie and especially Donkey Kong 64 would include much more backtracking.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Ape Escape, the Sony Playstation's notable Collect-a-thon.
  • Also with Castle of Illusion, since both of these games have pretty much the same exact plot.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Most of the enemies in the original game are reasonably easy to defeat, but the giant snowmen known as Sir Slush are incredibly annoying in that they can only be killed while you're in the air (and require a special maneuver that's easy to bungle) but still present a danger while you're on the ground. Their snowball attacks are shockingly accurate especially since they often aim at where you are going.
  • Those ghosts in Mad Monster Mansion. No golden feathers? You're screwed.
  • The mummies and skeletons which can be briefly disabled with ordinary attacks but not permanently defeated without the Wonderwing.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Fall damage normally kicks in if you fall for about a full second. However, it's possible to preemptively avoid this by using the Beak Buster near a ledge, then steering Banjo and Kazooie over the ledge during the move's recovery animation where the duo leaps up to put Banjo back on his feet; this animation makes them immune to it.
  • The Freezeezy Peak mission to clear a path for the Twinklies can be vastly simplified if you simply attack the first Twinkly Muncher to incapacitate it, then move to a position where the path is off-camera - none of the enemies will respawn as long as their spawn points aren't in view, allowing you to stand there as the Twinklies safely march to the end.
  • There exists a glitch in the game which makes the infamous propeller room Jiggy from Rusty Bucket Bay, widely regarded as the most difficult in the entire game, much easier to obtain.
  • The "Reverse Bee Adventure" glitch, which allows you to take your bee transformation in Click Clock Wood outside of the level's bounds. It breaks the game wide open. The only catch is that the glitch is extremely hard to pull off, and it can only be done once per save file.
  • During Grunty's Furnace Fun quiz, normally if you get the question wrong on a skull space, Banjo and Kazooie are chucked into the lava below the board, costing you a life and making you redo the quiz from the start. However, if you crouch while moving (to perform a sliding crouch) on a space adjacent to the skull tile and mash C-left, it's possible to enter Talon Trot while on the quiz board. If you receive a quiz question (as opposed to a timed challenge) from the skull space and get it wrong while in Talon Trot, Banjo and Kazooie take damage but remain in place, and the invisible walls preventing you from skipping spaces without answering their questions, or just leaping around the board, are all removed. This lets you skip the rest of Furnace Fun and the cutscenes that come after its completion, and instead head straight to the final battle with Grunty.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Beautiful Grunty retroactively resembles Mila Kunis, who would play the Wicked Witch of the West in Oz the Great and Powerful.
  • The story of Castle of Illusion is also about an evil witch who is jealous of another girl’s beauty. Grant Kirkhope would provide the music for the game’s remake.
• Hype Backlash: The game has held Sacred Cow status for most of its lifetime, considered one of the best N64 games and often revered by gaming YouTubers who played it in their youth. Newer gamers don’t always see eye-to-eye, with some claiming that the artstyle is its whole gimmick while the gameplay is slow and uninteresting. Possible case of Once Original, Now Common as many games similar to BK came out in the ensuing years, something even Rare themselves poked fun at.
• Love to Hate: Gruntilda is a Wicked Witch with a massive ego who is willing to kidnap a child and murder the titular duo, their friends, and even her own sisters to achieve her plans. Nevertheless, she's so undeniably hilarious, hammy, and oddly charismatic that it's impossible not to enjoy her presence.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • GUH-HUH^ExplanationBanjo's Signature Laugh.
  • WAHEY ^ExplanationBoggy shouts this a lot during the races with him in Freezeezy Peak. Within the speedrun community, several emotes are dedicated to this vocalization, with their main usage being spamming them during said races. If you don't have the money to sub, simply shouting WAHEY will suffice.
  • Kazooie is always pregnant. ^ExplanationA rather bizarre tweet from Playtonic Games that is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, posted with no context whatsoever, likely as an "explanation" for Kazooie's egg-firing abilities.
  • Eekum Bokum^ExplanationThe voice clip that plays whenever Banjo picks up a Mumbo Token in the first game. It gained a small boost in popularity after Korone Inugami of hololive did a stream of the game, which only further exploded when YouTube user 2Snacks did a short animation about it. Korone wouldn't be the first to refer to 'Eekum Bokum', though. Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos also had the Troll Witch Doctor unit refer to the quote when being clicked too many times, but that didn't catch on until Korone did it. And of course, you can combine the two.
  • Whenever people talk about this game online, expect a few to make Grunty-esque rhymes.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The choir accompanying the appearance of a Jiggy.
  • From both Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, "Jinjo!" whenever a Jinjo is rescued.
• My Real Daddy: No matter how long Banjo-Kazooie will be owned by Microsoft, you'll be hard-pressed to find a fan who doesn't think of them as a Nintendo property at heart thanks to the first two games, which were among the most popular games on the Nintendo 64. Doesn't really help that the guys in charge dropped the series like a hot rock after Nuts & Bolts, consigning the two to cameos and minor guest appearances for over a decade. A common refrain heard after Banjo and Kazooie were announced as DLC fighters for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and then later announced to be coming to Nintendo Switch Online, is that the two are finally back where they belong.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • A lot of things Brentilda says about Grunty, such as:
    • "Grunty brushes her rotten teeth with mouldy cheese flavored toothpaste!"
    • "She also washes her hair with rancid milk. Yuk!"
    • "And she gets her clothes from the trashcan!"
    • "You'd be sick if you ever saw the sight of her STREAKY BROWN UNDIES!"
  • Every time Loggo the Toilet shows up, for obvious enough reasons. In Mad Monster Mansion in the first game, you have to get flushed down him while transformed into a pumpkin to collect a Jiggy in his septic tank, something so filthy even Grunty chides you for how disgusting it is. In Grunty's Industries in Tooie, you at one point need to unclog him using Kazooie's beak.
  • Captain Blubber's dialogue noises consist entirely of belching sounds, and in Loggo's case, fart sounds.
  • The music for insides of Clanker, Loggo, and the giant fish; with frequent burp and fart sounds.
• Polished Port: The XBLA ports of the first two games have massively less slowdown, crisply upscaled HD resolution support, and bring back Stop 'n' Swop (as well as a Stop 'n' Swop 2 that may befall the same fate as its predecessor). The only downsides are that the camera controls are permanently inverted and the option to skip dialogue has been completely removed, making the ports less ideal for speedrunning, and there's noticeable music sync issues with the game's cutscenes, especially in regards to Tooie's opening, which gets a whopping 30 seconds out of sync^note This is due to the music specifically being composed with the lower framerate and slower loading times of the N64 versions in mind, which were significantly bumped up in the ports, and to date, there have been no patches released to rectify these.
• Presumed Flop: It's often assumed by many Western fans that this game (and its overall series) were not popular in Japan, because despite being a first-party Nintendo game, it was developed in Britain, and Japan is often stereotyped as strongly preferring domestic media to those produced overseas. This belief was exacerbated when Dragon Quest's Hero was announced for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate the same day as Banjo and Hero got a tepid reaction from Western fans, leaving many of them to assume that Japan felt the same way about Banjo as the West did about Hero. However, that's not the case—the series is beloved in Japan as well, and Banjo's inclusion in Smash Bros. was accepted warmly there too.
• Rooting for the Empire: Several fans have admitted to preferring the original game's bad ending to the good one, thanks to a combination of fanservice, Mumbo potentially getting a girlfriend (never mind that said girlfriend is Grunty...), and Tootie's status as a Flat Character.
• Sacred Cow: Given that they're both considered some of the best games on the Nintendo 64 and as such formed a huge part of many fans' childhoods, criticizing the first two games in a harsh manner online is not a good idea.
• The Scrappy: Cries of "wahey!" aside, Boggy isn't well-liked among fans. Not only is he a neglectful father, preferring to go sledding, the sequel also reveals that he's gotten lazy and gave into his vices, much to his wife's chargin.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Banjo's neutral attack, the Claw Swipe. It's pathetically weak and has lousy hit detection, meaning you're always better off just using the superior Forward Roll or Rat-a-tat Rap for combat. Tooie outright replaced it with a move similar to the Rat-a-tat Rap.
  • The Beak Bomb, mainly in the first game. In theory, it's a cool idea to give Kazooie a flying attack, but in practice it's very hard to aim it right, and the game's wonky flying controls and the small targets you aim for (such as the hats of the Sir Slush enemies in Freezeezy Peak and Click Clock Wood) do not help with this. In Tooie, the Beak Bomb's direction during use can be influenced more easily, which combined with more spacious levels makes it a bit more viable for faster travel when flying.
  • Collecting Notes and Jinjos in the original release of the first game. If you restart the level by dying or leaving, Notes and Jinjos reset with it, forcing you to collect them all over again unless you've already gotten them all in a previous run. For Jinjos, this just means losing out on one of a level's ten Jiggies. For Notes, this means having your progress through the hub dungeon walled off. It's telling that Notes not only had their collection method, but their function completely reworked in the sequel.
• Self-Fanservice: Kazooie, a normal, albeit huge bird, often gets turned into an attractive Funny Animal in artwork, a practice that had increased in prominence after the duo's appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Banjo isn't safe, either, as some people just really lean in on the "bear" thing or make him into a big, bulky hunk.^note Not entirely unreasonably in Banjo's case. Despite being cartoony, he does have the generic muscle form, and Tooie shows his back to be fairly muscular when he takes off his backpack. It's just, as such artists are known to do, they blow it out of proportion.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Playing the games while jumping as few times as possible. YouTuber DPadGamer managed to beat Kazooie with 90 jumps, and Tooie with just 6!
  • Clearing the games with only the five honeycombs you start with.
• Squick: Everything Brentilda tells you about Grunty. The hag's pretty much built on Squick.
• Stuck in Their Shadow: Banjo-Kazooie is a little weird about this. Ask anyone who the star is, and they'll say it's Banjo, even though the titles of three out of five games also include his partner Kazooie. The second game, Banjo-Tooie, opts for a silly title pun instead of recognizing the second lead's name (it's even lampshaded by Kazooie herself at the end of the first game), and Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge mentions her name even though she isn't available at the start. This is all especially odd because she does the great majority of the actual work (to the point Banjo can be considered The Load) despite living in his backpack: Most players use Talon Trot exclusively to move because Banjo is so much slower, and all of the good attack moves utilize Kazooie (though in Banjo's defence, it's implied that his bear strength is what makes Kazooie's attack moves so effective). She also flies him around, and he even swims slower than she does.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The beginning of the Gruntilda's Lair theme sounds a lot like "The Teddy Bears' Picnic".
  • Rusty Bucket Bay's theme sounds like a sped-up, more industrialized version of "Stray Cat Strut" by the Stray Cats.
  • The Click Clock Wood theme resembles the song "Oh, You Beautiful Doll".
  • The intro to the main theme from the original game sounds an awful lot like the theme to The Addams Family. The blue egg jingle in the beta footage blatantly sounds like the opening notes of said theme song.
• That One Level:
  • Fans like Clanker just fine, but Clanker's Cavern is a tiny, three-room level with hardly any content that required a lot of swimming around. And getting to it involved two mildly difficult jumps in a row. At least it avoids most common sewer level pitfalls in the process.
  • Rusty Bucket Bay, mainly due to the engine room, which has annoying to avoid propellers and gears. It's also all above a Bottomless Pit, and thanks to the musical notes being record-based (changed in the XBLA port), you will lose all your notes if you don't anticipate how annoying this room will be. There's also a switch Jiggy, where you need to race across all the treachery and make it to the boat's motors under a strict time limit. General consensus is that it's best to get this room over with first and then tackle the rest of the level. There's also a lot of irritating spots where the camera suddenly shifts to a fixed view that make swimming even more difficult than it already is with the faster oxygen usage. This is especially troublesome when collecting the Purple Jinjo, which requires you to swim through a narrow hole and back.
  • Click Clock Wood can be this to amateur players. It's the longest level in the entire first game, so if you slip up or miss any notes and come back later, you'll have to waste a lot of time getting them all back. Not helping is that the lion's share of the level is set very high up in the air and commands precision platforming, so one wrong step will send you flying all the way down to the bottom. And it's also home to one of the most elusive and easy to miss Jiggies in the game. The Xbox Live port mitigates the note collecting part, thankfully.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Mr. Vile challenge in Bubblegloop Swamp, due to his Rubber-Band A.I. making his eating competition much harder than it needs to be. It wouldn't be so bad, except that you need to beat him three times, not to mention the rules become more difficult during the second and third rounds. Each time you lose, he'll take one of your honeycombs. You can avoid getting hurt by leaving the room before he bites you and then return, but this forces you to start the three-game cycle all over again. If you've been to Gobi's Valley and learned how to use the Turbo Trainers, you can use the pair at the top of Mr. Vile's room to give yourself an advantage, but first-time players are unlikely to know this is an option.
  • The Tiptup music challenge can also be a royal pain if you aren't very good at Simon Says-style mini-games. Not surprisingly, many fans had to resort to using a pen and paper to get past this part.
  • Freezeezy Peak is a fairly easy level for the most part, but it has three annoying side challenges: killing all of the snowmen by using the Beak Bomb (a move with rather wonky controls) to hit the small targets on their hats, and the two races with Boggy. While Boggy is nowhere as brutal as Mr. Vile, he still abuses Rubber-Band A.I. and can be rather annoying if you don't know what you're doing.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Stop 'n' Swop. Technically not their fault, as changes to the N64's hardware in later models made what Rare was originally planning to do with it impossible (they had planned to have the players shut off the console and switch cartridges, as the N64 originally held memory within its RAM for 30 seconds after being turned off; however, newer models drastically reduced that time, to the point where it would have been impossible to use the mechanic on a newer console). Nonetheless, after all the endless speculating the (admittedly cool) sequel hooks at the end of Banjo-Kazooie prompted, the cop-out Banjo-Tooie had to use felt distinctly forced and was definitely a let-down.
• Ugly Cute: If you get a Game Over, Tooty's beauty-stolen form is surprisingly cute, seeing as how her cuteness was swapped by Grunty's hideousness.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Kazooie can be very confusing, given her brash character and utter lack of feminine traits. Rareware apparently got sick of it, though, since the Revival gave her a few Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
• The Woobie:
  • Gobi, a camel who just wants to find some water and a quiet place to rest, is constantly suffering abuse from our eponymous heroes and Gruntilda's mooks for some reason or another. By the time you see him locked up and put on display in a freak attraction at an amusement park in Banjo-Tooie, you can't help but want to cry for his constant misfortune despite the fact that it's necessary in order to progress.
  • Clanker is a pitiful blend of Gentle Giant and Body Horror. He's obviously a very intelligent creature and probably used to be a regular whale before being gutted and encased in machinery. And in spite of his solitary confinement in his cavern, which would drive pretty much anyone completely insane, upon seeing Banjo swim in he simply offers a friendly welcome and asks if Banjo could please raise him to surface level. He's spent this whole time alone and imprisoned in a derelict cyborg body, unable to so much as breathe comfortably. It's even worse in Nuts & Bolts, where he has been disassembled and his parts used in the construction of Banjoland, but remains conscious and cognizant, albeit unable to actually move or communicate at all. It's arguably a fate worse than death.

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