YMMV / Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the Lord of Games really the creator of all video games as he claims? Or is he simply a Great Gazoo or Mad God who, while immensely powerful, labors under the delusion that he created all games? The poor quality and obvious artificiality of his game worlds (Nutty Acres, Terrarium of Terror, etc.) seem to hint that his personal achievements may not be as enormous as he claims.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: A big reason why the game tanked in sales is its Genre Shift. Many old time fans were either furious or simply turned off by the fact that they were getting a new Banjo-Kazooie game after years of waiting, only for the art style and platforming of the original games to be completely thrown out for a borderline In Name Only vehicle based follow-up (the game throwing various Take Thats towards the previous games and fans of collect-a-thons did not help). And the game's nostalgic factor and unorthodox gameplay had no appeal to a newer audience, especially since the audience in question was now part of the largely adult aimed Xbox 360 crowd instead of the more family-oriented Nintendo crowd the original games aimed for, thus ensuring the game would flop.
• Best Level Ever: Banjoland, which is widely considered the best world in the game owing to the sheer number of Continuity Nods and Easter Eggs present, its music being an awesome medley of songs from across the first two games, and its wide-open design allowing for a lot of vehicle options.
• Broken Base: The vehicle based gameplay is extremely divisive. Many people hate it, finding the game incredibly boring due to the repetitive mission-based structure and overly large and empty worlds. Other people find the game to be incredibly fun due to the heavily customizable vehicle mechanics and variety of ways they can interact with the environment and complete missions.
• Critical Dissonance: While critics gave mixed to positive reviews to Nuts & Bolts, fans of the series bashed the game for not being the advertised big comeback for Banjo-Kazooie they had in mind.
• Fanon Discontinuity: This has cooled down quite a bit overtime, but for various reasons, many fans still like to pretend that Nuts & Bolts never happened.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • There's an exploit that allows for decent Sequence Breaking in Showdown Town when used properly. Basically, put an item in the trolley (preferably something square), stand on the item, and use the wrench on the trolley. It allows the ability to fly past various obstacles that require trolley upgrades to pass normally, allowing access to many crates before the first world. Just make sure to move forward every so often to continue flight, and enter the vehicle when (crash) landing to avoid damage.
  • Another glitch to get past the laser walls in Showdown Town, crates have a bit of a weird proximity sensor when it comes to the trolley. If you use the wrench to bring a crate behind a laser wall as close to the trolley as possible, and then lay the trolley on its side so the bed is right up against the laser wall, the next time Showdown Town loads (whether from exiting a level or even just loading and exiting Mumbo's Garage) the trolley will reappear with the laser wall crate either in the bed or nearby it, allowing you to get some of the best items in the game way before you're supposed to!
  • Yet another glitch involves the wooden sail parts. Mumbo outright tells you that they provide thrust no matter which way they're pointing so you don't have to worry about wind direction. What he doesn't tell you is that one of those directions is straight up, making it possible to build an ultralight "glider" that can fly forever under its own power. Even better, one of the more annoying fixed-vehicle challenges in the Terrarium of Terror involves driving an impossibly slow car with sails built-in up a mountain. You can convert the car into a glider in the field (which conveniently pauses the timer until you're done) and just fly to the goal at the top in about one tenth of the time it would take if you did it the "fair" way.
  • An early glitch was found in the original Nuts & Bolts demo, which limited how much of Showdown Town players were allowed to access. By sliding down the rocky ledge next to the main ramp up to L.O.G.'s factory while pushing against the wall, Banjo can potentially clip through the geometry and land in a layer of water below. Swimming through this water would allow Banjo to move beyond the barriers blocking the way, and summoning the trolley once he was well outside the barrier would send him back to dry land, allowing demo players to explore beyond the barrier (and even play a level of Hero Klungo Sssavesss Teh World) well before the game was released.
• Harsher in Hindsight: There are multiple lines of dialogue predicting the game would do poorly. It did, to the extent that the characters haven't starred in another video game since and it's seen as the main reason why Rare spent the following six years only making Kinect games.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: At the end of the game, Kazooie asks L.O.G. to give her and Banjo's old abilities back, claiming they may need them for another game. L.O.G. does so, though he warns that they might never get another game. While that part has held true, Banjo and Kazooie would ultimately get a chance to put their old moves to new use in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Mis-blamed: The game's alienating direction was often blamed on Microsoft, as this was the first (and last) home console Banjo game to be released after Rare was bought out by them. However, all accounts of the developers state that the gameplay change was completely done of their own accord with no interference from Microsoft.
• The Scrappy: The Lord of Games is hated by fans of the series for shamelessly dissing one of the greatest features in the past two games (via his "Collect-a-thon"), and radically changing the formula of the game himself. Essentially, in universe, he's singlehandedly responsible for absolutely everything BK fans hate about the game. In-universe, he's also responsible for all of those one sidequests in the other games, including Canary Mary above which he personally scoffs at the player for.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Hero Klungo Sssavesss Teh World, despite (or perhaps because of) being Stylistically Sucky, is a rather addicting 2D platformer in spite of its simplicity, as well as showing the fruits of Klungo's efforts following his Heel–Face Turn in Tooie, which has led many players to spend a lot of time with it, sometimes admitting to using it as a distraction from the incredibly divisive base gameplay.
• So Okay, It's Average: Once you take the They Changed It, Now It Sucks! criticisms out of the equation, the general consensus ultimately boils down to this. It's not a bad game and Rare's usual wit and charm is still present throughout the adventure, but beyond having little to do with the previous Banjo-Kazooie games, the vehicle-based gameplay, even when judged on its own merits, is regarded to be mechanically solid, but boring and repetitive in execution.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The intro videos for the five worlds all parody the opening credits of American TV series from the 1960s to the 1980s (each of which used Video Credits for the regular cast), complete with lawyer-friendly takes on their theme music.
    • "Welcome to Nutty Acres" is a brass, strings, and "wacka-chicka" guitar theme that evokes Jerrold Immel's theme for Dallas as the "credits" mimic that series' mixture of landscape panoramas and cast credits scrolling horizontally across the screen.
    • The heroic, trumpet-driven "LOGBOX 720: Access Granted" sounds uncannily like Stu Phillips' intro theme for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, complete with Banjo spinning over a background of circles before the cast credits.
    • The lush "Banjoland Visitors This Way" is highly similar to an instrumental version of Charles Fox' theme for The Love Boat, with Jiggies instead of hearts in the opening porthole and Kazooie, wings spread, taking over from the anchor for transitions between cast credits.
    • The lofty "Let the Jiggosseum Games Begin" sounds remarkably like a re-scored version of Bill Conti's theme for Dynasty, set against a homage to the splash effects used to divide the screen for that series' cast credits.
    • "The Terrarium Awaits" is a dizzying theme that calls to mind "Johnny" Williams' theme to Lost in Space, accompanying a tribute to that series' presentation of cast credits under circular portraits with colourful transition effects.
  • The theme of "Terrarium of Terror" sounds a lot like the main theme of Mars Attacks!.
• That One Achievement: Obtaining the trophy in the "Saucer Of Peril Returns" challenge in act 2 of Terrarium of Terror requires a large amount of precision on the player's part, but the shift in gameplay can be downright annoying and the speed of the bullets shot is often not fast enough to hit most of the targets, in addition to the pointer being slightly faster than needed at times. In this challenge, 430 points are required to obtain the trophy, but most players are likely to get the Jiggy on most of their tries.
• That One Level:
  • Terrarium Of Terror can qualify as this, as much of the level is maze-like in its design and there are a lot of pathways through the level that are small, leaving less space for vehicles to move through. Much of the challenges in that world also tend to involve pre-set vehicles and trips through one dome to another dome, often through an unconventional pathway.
  • For individual stages in Nuts & Bolts, L.O.G.’s challenge “Six of the best” has a lot of Fake Difficulty for tasking you with something the game never expects of you beforehand, namely a vehicle that can do practically anything (namely carrying things, sumo, flying though hoops, and staying in a ring for an amount of time). Sure, you can roll back the clock by answering questions, but they are often about very small details and they don’t roll it back as much as you think.
  • Same applies to "Bear in a Ball". Think driving in this game is hard? How about doing it while the controls are reversed?
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Replacing most of Banjo's moves with vehicles pretty swiftly divided the fanbase. The final game has been received positively, but wasn't too successful in terms of sales. Some detractors point out there's nothing wrong with the game mechanics themselves, in fact they're rather fun, it's the fact previous Banjo-Kazooie titles have nothing in common with them. This overlaps with They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, as many feel the concept of two rivals building all manners of custom vehicles and competing against each other in huge levels sounds like a great game, just not suitable for a proper Banjo-Kazooie game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Even defenders of Nuts & Bolts have admitted that the game might have gone better had the gameplay ideas been used for a new IP rather than for a Banjo-Kazooie game.
• Uncertain Audience: Not only did the game's premise scare off both established fans and potential new players, the game's execution of such did so as well. As mentioned, the core gameplay was seen as In Name Only for the series, making established fans feel like the series had abandoned its identity. However, the game frequently made reference to older games in the franchise, most notably opening on Gruntilda's skull escaping her burial to pursue her revenge and Banjoland, a world consisting of call-backs to the first two games; these left potential newer fans disinterested or confused by the continuity with the original games. L.O.G. himself embodies the confused appeal when he calls the original collect-a-thon gameplay "painful to watch" while also saying gamers today "just want to shoot things." While the game was somewhat well-received by critics and the gameplay itself was eventually Vindicated by History, even the game's defenders agree that the third main Banjo-Kazooie game and the released mission-based vehicle building game should have been separate entities.

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