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 Bottles is feckin' expired |  Wumba's Wigwam |  Mayahem Temple |
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 Bullion Bill's place |  Drill Sgt. Jamjars |  Witchyworld |
Late one night, 2 years after the events of Banjo-Kazooie, Bottles, Mumbo, Banjo, and Kazooie are playing an innocent game of poker, while Gruntilda von Winkybunion's evil sisters, Mingella and Blobelda, arrive in Spiral Mountain to revive their dead sibling. It only kinda works, leaving Grunty as a questionably-rotund skeleton, but it's adequate to allow her to carry out her vengeance against Banjo and Kazooie. In the ensuing onslaught, Bottles is killed and Banjo's house is destroyed. Now, it's up to the bear and bird to travel to the Isle O' Hags and storm Cauldron Keep. On the way, Bottles's brother, Drill Sergeant Jamjars, puts the 3-armed monster through its paces, leaving absolutely no button combo on the entire N64 controller unused.
I count Banjo-Tooie one of my favourite N64 games, and for good reason. This game had some huge shoes to fill, being the sequel to one of the greatest N64 games of all time; and fortunately, Rare were able to follow up a great game with a stellar one! Taking advantage of a recent drop in the price of memory, B-T was able to fit in LOADS more stuff than its predecessor, and it didn't even need the Expansion Pak! The only thing they couldn't make work was Stop'n'Swap. For those unfamiliar with the Nintendo 64 zeitgeist, Stop'n'Swap was supposed to be Rareware's overarching... I dunno, thing that would connect all their N64 games. Or some of them. Or, like, 3 of them. Whatever. The point is that Stop'n'Swap, which was implemented on at least 3 games (that we know of), was supposed to use Banjo-Kazooie as its linchpin. You would collect secret and incredibly difficult-to-obtain items after hundred-percenting the game; then, you would power the console off and, within 3 seconds, swap out the cartridge for another SnS-enabled game. Hence "Stop'n'Swap": stop playing B-K and swap out the cartridge. But the thing was, players needed to do this in less time than it took for the N64 console to clear its RAM. While a launch-day model Nintendo 64 takes about 6 seconds to do this, the hardware revisions from late 1998 onwards had different RAM that took less time to clear. Fully-optimised, the RAM took a half-second to clear—certainly not enough time for a player of any dexterity to A, turn off the system; B, swap out the cartridge; and C, turn the system back on. So much for Rareware's answer to SEGA Lock-On.
B-T is not hurt by the loss of SnS, still managing to have almost as many cheat options as GoldenEye 007, accessed by collecting Cheato's pages, which Gruntilda tore out of her unfortunate sentient spellbook in retribution for helping Banjo and Kazooie in the previous game. The planned bonuses for SnS were able to be implemented in spite of it by putting duplicates of the bonus items in missable locations within B-T, with the most conspicuous one leading to a bitchin' new upgrade for your feathered friend. The Freezeezy Peak Ice Key, obtainable in Jinjo Village, unlocks the Giant Glowbo's vault in Hailfire Peaks, which Humba Wumba will use to transform Kazooie into a dragon.
I tend to play B-T every year. I never usually finish it, mostly because my interest wanders; this is not because of the game so much as my particular flavour of autism. I tend to wait a year or, in the case of 2018, 3 years, so that I can get as fresh of an experience as I can. If ever it were possible to un-play videogames, I would un-play this, Paper Mario, The Sims Classic, and either GoldenEye 007 or Doom, so that I could re-experience the wonder of finding something new around every corner. Even so, having played B-T every year since 2013, I'm still awestruck by the sheer enormity and intricate connectedness of the locations in this game. Rareware seemed acutely aware of players' desire to find hidden things, and made it possible to do so in unexpected places. Unlike Doom, where the game judges your performance based on how many of the secrets you found, or your average Super Mario game, where there's probably a secret behind that waterfall or within that pipe, Banjo-Tooie rewards both skill and tenacity with connections between levels, secret Jinjos, and even new moves from Sgt. Jamjars. Finding secrets feels more genuinely like a reward than a requirement.
10/10, would recommend. But, I would also recommend playing Banjo-Kazooie first. If you're the type who likes to throw money at huge multinational corporations, both B-K and B-T are available on Switch Online + Expansion Pack and Xbox Game Pass.
