Size over Substance: How Larger Levels Make Banjo-Tooie an Inferior Sequel
Upon first glance, Banjo-Tooie appears to be an ideal sequel. It’s bigger, has greater stakes, and offers a wider variety of gameplay opportunities. However, Tooie falters in its quest to be as impactful as its predecessor because of scale creep - something that makes completing objectives feel more like work than fun. // Image: Rare, Nintendo, Microsoft
Returning to any piece of media that you grew up with is a special experience. This year, I’ve had the privilege of getting opportunities to return to some of the games that inspired me to become the video game enthusiast I am today. As someone that grew up in the late ‘90s and 2000s, I quickly developed a love for video games that had a focus on rewarding players for completing objectives. Whether it was Super Mario 64 offering Power Stars for completing mission objectives in its levels or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time giving the player a Heart Container for defeating a boss at the end of a dungeon, I became enamored with games that rewarded me for overcoming challenging odds.
A genre that does this perhaps better than any other is the collect-a-thon 3D platformer - a genre that exploded in popularity in the late ‘90s and early 2000s largely thanks to a single developer: Rare. Makers of games like Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct during the SNES era, Rare came into their own during the N64 era as they produced just as many hits on the platform as Nintendo themselves. While Super Mario 64 wrote the book for the formula of what a successful 3D platformer should be, many would argue that Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie is a game that mastered that formula.
Banjo-Kazooie deeply understands the unique capabilities of the 3D platformer despite the genre only being a few years old at the time of the game’s 1998 release. Unlike the 2D platformers that dominated previous console generations, 3D platformers offered a degree of freedom that allowed for player-driven exploration. The linear obstacle courses from the likes of Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country were a thing of the past as 3D platformers aimed to provide more open-ended level design that tasked players to complete various challenges within that open space.
Banjo-Kazooie’s aim is not to create levels that the player goes through in a linear fashion to beat the level. Rather, the game creates various challenges throughout each level and reward the player with a Jiggy upon completing each challenge - the primary collectible that allows the player to progress through the game. Some challenges are simple navigational challenges that test the player’s knowledge of Banjo and Kazooie’s movement capabilities. Some challenges involve playing minigames that break away from the typical platforming action. And some challenges are more involved sequences that require some puzzle-solving and exploration. In conjunction with the Jinjos and Notes to collect in each level, Banjo-Kazooie’s level design is constructed in a way that consistently engages the player. There isn’t much downtime between getting to collect something - which, in turn, makes the player feel like they are consistently accomplishing something.
This past month, I got to replay Banjo-Kazooie for the first time in over 15 years thanks to the game’s availability on the Nintendo Switch Online service. Throughout my 11-hour playthrough, I was consistently reminded of what made me love the game so much during my youth - the game does a phenomenal job at incentivizing and rewarding players for their curiosity and willingness to explore the areas that levels provide while consistently creating engaging activities to do in each level. The worlds of Banjo-Kazooie are paced in such a way that you never have to wait too long to hear the dopamine-inducing jingle of collecting a Jiggy, which only reinforces the player’s drive to complete whatever task comes next.
That said, there are some aspects of Banjo-Kazooie’s design that are still flawed. Notes, another collectable that determines the player’s ability to progress through the game’s hub world that connects each level, are a bit of a sour spot in the Nintendo 64 version of the game. If the player leaves a world or dies while in a level, all Notes reset, forcing the player to collect Notes all over again, with only the maximum number of Notes a player has acquired in a single run through the level counting for overall progression. This makes death unnecessarily punishing by forcing players that die before collecting every Note to engage in the tedious busywork of grabbing Notes around levels again. Additionally, while the game mostly has strong pacing and sees players get through levels on a casual playthrough - anywhere between 20 and 60 minutes -, the game’s final two levels are significantly longer. Rusty Bucket Bay and Click Clock Wood offer some of the game’s greatest challenges, at the cost of taking far longer to complete. Click Clock Wood, specifically, features some Jiggies that require a lot of steps to acquire, making for a world that takes a long time to complete.
Overall, though, Banjo-Kazooie crafts a great platforming experience that holds up quite well over a quarter-century after its release. After I completed my playthrough of Kazooie, I jumped right into the game’s sequel, Banjo-Tooie, another game current available on the Nintendo Switch Online service that I grew up playing a lot of. Released in 2000, Banjo-Tooie is everything that marketing professionals would convince you makes for a perfect sequel. It’s bigger, has a longer playtime, features more gameplay variety, has greater and more pressing stakes, features a darker tone, and has a far more ambitious scope by introducing interconnected levels that make the game’s world feel more cohesive. Banjo-Tooie is also arguably one of the most visually ambitious games on the Nintendo 64. Despite its increase in size, though, Tooie has less Jiggies and Notes to collect throughout its levels. While it has a longer runtime, there’s more downtime in between grabbing major collectables.
While I enjoyed my time with Tooie, my relationship with challenges and being rewarded for overcoming those challenges was different while playing this title. What makes Kazooie such a fantastic experience is that it features levels that are constructed to consistently give the player incentives to accomplish without ever overwhelming the player with things to do. Banjo-Tooie, on the other hand, suffers from scope creep: a phenomenon where the game has become far larger than its predecessor for the sake of it - not because it improves upon the original game’s foundation. The result is a game that, while still fun in its own right, lacks the brevity and pacing that makes acquiring collectables feel as rewarding as its predecessor. Tooie’s commitment to its ambition and the size of its levels come at the cost of consistent fun and satisfaction for its players.
As someone that’s recently played both games back-to-back, the difference in my experience gathering every collectable in each game was quite different. To fully understand the impact of level design has on the quality discrepancy between Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel, let’s look at the differences of their levels and how Banjo-Tooie’s larger and emptier levels make for an overall inferior experience.
Mumbo’s Mountain is a textbook example of a great first level in a video game. This level introduces the game’s mechanics while putting players is a relatively safe environment with Jiggies offering tasks to complete that are relatively close together. The result is a level that most players complete and move on from in under half an hour. // Image: Rare, Nintendo, Microsoft
For the most part, Banjo-Kazooie is a decidedly small game. From Spiral Mountain to Mumbo’s Mountain to Freezeezy Peak, players won’t spend an egregious amount of time in each level, and a large part of this is due to how close every collectable is in relation to one another. Players will rarely have to travel far without coming across a Jiggy, a molehill that allows them to learn a new ability, a Note, a Mumbo Token, a Jinjo, and Empty Honeycomb Pieces that expand Banjo and Kazooie’s pool of hit points. There’s a lot of crap to collect, but that only means that there’s a consistent amount of content to engage with in each level.
Mumbo’s Mountain is a perfect example of how to craft a level that aims to test players’ understanding of their character’s movement capabilities before moving them onto more challenging levels. As a first level, Mumbo’s Mountain is particularly short and rather breezy for players to get through. Despite its small scale, Mumbo’s Mountain features a healthy variety of objectives for the player to clear, including making use of Kazooie’s ability to fire eggs, making use of the various different types of jumps to reach different Jiggies, and utilizing Mumbo’s transformation that turns Banjo into an ant that lets the player access an area that’s otherwise inaccessible. There’s a healthy variety contained within a small space that gets the player up to speed with the various types of abilities they need to use throughout the game along with the types of challenges that they’ll typically see in each level. It sets the player’s expectations without ever overwhelming them.
Moreover, all of the collectables throughout Mumbo’s Mountain are fairly close together. The level is constructed around two hills, and the bottom and top of a mountain. Upon attempting to collect everything, most players will complete Mumbo’s Mountain in under half an hour - a perfect length that ensures that the intro level doesn’t overstay its welcome while also offering frequent opportunities for the player to be rewarded for demonstrating their understanding of the game’s mechanics and movement options. Beyond anything, Mumbo’s Mountain does a great job at setting player expectations for what the rest of the adventure will be like. While levels get progressively longer and more challenging as the player proceeds through the game, every level save for the last two manage to still take well under an hour to fully complete.
Every level in Banjo-Kazooie features ten Jiggies to collect, one of which necessitates finding five Jinjos hidden throughout the level. This rule that the game quickly sets gives context that informs how levels are designed. Every level needs to have nine objectives to complete along with five locations to put Jinjos that test the player’s ability to smartly navigate and explore levels. Each of these objectives that reward a Jiggy are located close enough together to ensure that the player never goes beyond a minute without collecting anything.
Banjo-Kazooie is at its worst when it forces the player to go through long sections that require the player to complete multiple objectives to obtain a single Jiggy. The game’s final level, Click Clock Wood, is often considered the worst level because of its repetitive nature. While the level itself isn’t necessarily larger than most other levels of the game, the level features a four-season gimmick that sees the level change to reflect each season of the year, with certain Jiggies, Notes, and Jinjos only being obtainable in certain seasons. Moreover, the player needs to raise a bird and grow a flower throughout multiple seasons - meaning that the player needs to complete multiple objectives in different seasons in order to obtain a single Jiggy. Click Clock Wood is essentially four levels in one, which inherently elongates the time in between getting Jiggies. This level being perceived as the worst level in the game precisely highlights what makes a strong 3D platformer level: creating a comfortable distance between player triumphs without making those triumphs too common that they lose their rewarding nature and not too rare that players begin to lose interest during longer objectives to acquire their respective rewards.
In a documentary for Halo 2 released in the mid-2000s, Jaime Griesemer coins a phrase that I find particularly valuable when discussing how to make quality, dense levels that incentivizes completing challenges for consistent, but not too consistent rewards. “In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game." While this quote discusses the idea of “30 seconds of fun” in the context of a first person shooter that can rotate the concept of fun thanks to a variety in environments, enemies, weapons, and vehicles, I think this idea is incredibly applicable to the idea of making meaningfully crafted levels in platformers. Whenever anyone plays a video game, they want their actions to have meaning. When you’re clearing a raid boss in Final Fantasy XIV and spamming attacks as a Damage-per-Second class, every attack you deal has meaning because it is inflicting damage on a common enemy and sets your team up to move closer towards later phases of the fight and an eventual victory. If, say, you needed to perform a certain number of attacks to begin dealing damage, suddenly those attacks carry a lot less meaning for the player.
To be a game that consistently brings joy and meaning to players, games need to provide consistent and prompt feedback to enforce that their in-game actions are making a difference. Banjo-Kazooie achieves the “30 seconds of fun” cycle because of the high density of collectibles that ensures that the player is constantly seeing the number of Jiggies, Notes, and Jinjos in their inventory go up. Even the sound effects and short jingles that play when the player collects something important go a long way at giving positive feedback to players that successfully navigate the game’s challenges and objectives. Banjo-Kazooie is at its best when its levels make for feedback loops that feel consistently satisfying to the player. The game’s smaller scale works to its benefit because it can produce environments that host this cycle of feedback at a consistently snappy rate.
Mayahem Temple is a stark contrast to Mumbo’s Mountain. While its another first level, Mayahem Temple is emblematic of a lot of Banjo-Tooie’s pacing issues, including long instances where the player doesn’t collect much, and certain Jiggies requiring backtracking when the player acquires abilities found in later levels. // Image: Rare, Nintendo, Microsoft
This is where the framing behind Banjo-Tooie’s increase in scale and level size begins to shift. Suddenly, that “30 seconds of fun” begins to be stretched to “five or more minutes of fun”, which doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way. In all seriousness, Tooie’s commitment to creating larger levels without pumping them full of even more collectables to grab makes for longer stretches of time where the player doesn’t receive any feedback for completing objectives.
Mayahem Temple, the game’s first level, is similar to Mumbo’s Mountain in that it sets the player’s expectations for what most of the game’s levels will be like moving forward. In some ways, Mayahem Temple is even more impressive as a first level than Mumbo’s Mountain because it introduces much of the gameplay variety that makes Tooie stand out from its predecessor. Players will be introduced to the game’s first-person-shooter segments, they’ll get to play a kickball minigame, and they’ll even get to briefly visit another level to complete an objective for a Jiggy. However, players will inevitably notice the increased period of time between each Jiggy collected. Nearly half of the level is initially blocked off until the player uses Mumbo to summon a golden giant that kicks two doors open. This inevitably leads to some in-level backtracking where the player needs to trek back to Mumbo’s hut to switch back to playing as Banjo and Kazooie. It becomes apparent while playing through Mayahem Temple that completing objectives that reward Jiggies are just going to take longer.
Like its predecessor, Tooie features various abilities to learn throughout each level, and many of the abilities learned in Mayahem Temple allow the player to engage with the activities that they need to do to acquire Jiggies in that level - something that Kazooie also consistently did. However, there are two Jiggies in Mayahem Temple that feature rocks that cannot be destroyed by any of the abilities the player currently has access to. Acquiring these Jiggies requires the use of the Drill Bill - an ability that the player learns in the game’s second level, Glitter Gulch Mine. However, to even be able to reach Glitter Gulch Mine, the player needs to collect a certain number of Jiggies - the amount of which requires the player to at least acquire some Jiggies in Mayahem Temple. Glitter Gulch Mine itself contains Jiggies that can’t be acquired without the Split Up ability that allows the player to control Banjo and Kazooie independently. This chain of levels featuring Jiggies that can only be obtained with abilities learned in later levels goes throughout the whole game. This means that players are going to have to consistently backtrack to previous levels after learning abilities so that they can grab Jiggies previously inaccessible to them. Additionally, some parts of levels can only be reached when navigating through exits that connect levels to each other, such as one Jinjo in Glitter Gulch Mine only being accessible through exiting a sewer in Jolly Roger Lagoon - going from the game’s fourth level to its second level. This inter-level backtracking further elongates the collection process, making it take even longer for players to achieve the satisfaction of having collected everything in a level.
On one hand, the decision to design the game’s levels this way justifies Rare’s decision to create interconnected levels that the player can navigate between. Moreover, it creates a lock-and-key style of game design that can make players have “a-ha” moments when they realize that certain abilities learned in later levels can help them reach places they couldn’t reach in previous levels. On the other hand, though, making backtracking such a pivotal aspect of Banjo-Tooie’s design creates long instances where the player doesn’t accomplish much - something that feels antithetically to what a collect-a-thon 3D platformer should be all about.
Lock-and-key style game design works in a lot of instances - Super Metroid is a fantastic example of how this type of game design can elevate players’ sense of satisfaction towards making progress. Super Metroid features a world with a labyrinth-like design, featuring certain linear segments that force the player to take notice of areas that they currently don’t have the means of accessing on a first run through. For example, when navigating Zebes when Samus first lands on the planet, the player is going to inevitably run past crevasses that Samus cannot fit into. After navigating further through the game’s first area, the player acquires the Morph Ball, which quickly demonstrates how the player can use this ability to get through smaller crevasses. Without saying anything, this activates the player’s memory on instances where they think this new ability will be applicable while also triggering their imagination on what other ways and instances they can use the Morph Ball in. Moreover, the Morph Ball simply allows the player to explore more of the game’s map. This process repeats throughout the entirety of Super Metroid. The implementation of this style of game design creates a constant progression system where the player gradually unlocks methods through which to explore the game’s giant, inter-connected labyrinth. This allows the player to comfortably unlock more sections of the game’s world without ever being overwhelmed by navigation options available to them. In a sense, the lock-and-key design guides the player to navigate the world in a semi-linear fashion without the player feeling like they’re being forced through a specific path.
All this is to say that backtracking isn’t an inherent design flaw - it can be used to elevate various aspects of a game’s design. The issue in relation to backtracking being so prevalent in Banjo-Tooie is that it introduces more downtime between Jiggies and delays the player gratification of seeing that they’ve collected everything in a level. While backtracking to previous levels and grabbing Jiggies previously gatekept from the player offers some satisfaction in its own right, this comes at the cost of gameplay pacing - making for an overall experience that feels remarkably slower than its predecessor.
Of course, Banjo-Tooie doesn’t introduce backtracking to the series. Kazooie features a singular instance of backtracking, where the abilities learned in Gobi’s Valley and Freezeezy Peak are required to grab one Jiggy in each other’s levels. Gobi’s Valley gives the player access to the Running Shoes which is needed for a Jiggy in Freezeezy Peak, while Freezeezy Peak affords the Beak Bomb, which is needed for a Jiggy in Gobi’s Valley. It’s a small inconsistency that can thankfully be played around by going to one level to learn the level’s ability, then leaving and completing the other level - but it nevertheless interrupts Banjo-Kazooie’s otherwise consistent focus on giving players the ability to entirely complete levels before moving on to the next one. Such a thing simply isn’t possible in Tooie until the player reaches Cloud Cuckooland, the game’s final level that holds the game’s last ability.
Collecting all that Banjo-Tooie has to offer players is a significantly more time-consuming process that holds off on giving players the elation that completing levels provides for as long as possible. This doesn’t elevate the collect-a-thon 3D platformer experience, but rather, makes it more grueling and filled with “busywork” periods where the player needs to figure out what they can and cannot complete in a level on a first run through. What exacerbates this issue further is the fact that some levels require more than just backtracking between levels. Oftentimes, Banjo-Tooie requires players to backtrack within its levels, many of which dwarf Click Clock Wood, the previous game’s largest level.
Grunty Industries is an enormous level often seen as the worst level in Banjo-Tooie, bringing the game’s pacing to a crawl. With an exterior area, over six floors to explore, and various subareas within each floor, this single level can take over three hours to complete thanks to its bloated size and repetitive aesthetic that makes it easy for players to get lost. // Image: Rare, Microsoft, Nintendo
Variety and brevity are often the two factors that help make platformers reach their greatest potential. Without variety, levels and/or objectives to complete within levels can either feel too same-y that they lose their identity and essentially ask players to go through the motions. Likewise, levels that lack brevity make players sense that the game doesn’t respect their time. Banjo-Tooie doesn’t struggle with variety - as stated before, it vastly improves upon Banjo-Kazooie in terms of the types of tasks that the player needs to complete. There are boss fights in every level, plenty of minigames to play that reward Jiggies, more transformations than in Kazooie, and each level feels remarkably different from the last in terms of theming and structure. Where Tooie falters, though, is brevity. I mentioned earlier that most of Banjo-Kazooie’s levels, save for its final two levels, take about 20-40 minutes to complete when trying to collect everything in a level. Even in the game’s most bloated levels, Kazooie is mostly constructed in a way that keeps player-assigned tasks relatively close together. Tooie throws out this idea without a second thought. Mayahem Temple, the game’s first and shortest level, will likely take a player over an hour to complete everything. This process only gets longer as the player goes through each level.
The previously mentioned inter-level backtracking plays a large part in this, but the sheer size of Banjo-Tooie’s levels are equally to blame, if not more so. Tooie is undoubtedly a bigger game when you take into consideration how long it takes to get from one side of a level to the other. There’s a reason why Rare introduced Warp Pads that let players teleport to different points in levels - if they hadn’t done so, navigating most of Tooie’s levels would be far more of a pain than they already are. Put simply, most of Banjo-Tooie’s levels are too large for their own good. Not only does it take a long time to get Banjo and Kazooie to far-apart sections of levels, but many levels make the process of navigating levels difficult just through the lack of visual indicators. Glitter Gulch Mine and Cloud Cuckooland are particular standouts, as both of these levels feature various sub-areas that split off from a central hub. So many of the entrances to these sub-areas look so similar to each other to the point that it will be difficult for players to remember which exits connect to which sub-areas. This introduces instances where players have to return to the main area of a level when they realize that they haven’t navigated to the area that thought they were headed towards. It’s a seemingly small issue that only results in a couple seconds of exiting sub-areas and looking for the correct exit that the player was initially looking for, but this significantly adds up time over the course of the game.
In addition to their sheer size and amount of time that it takes to get around levels, levels in Banjo-Tooie are far more involved than Kazooie’s, for better and for worse. While this leads to more Jiggies feeling like impactful rewards for conquering boss battles or meeting a score requirement in a minigame, some Jiggies take various steps that lead to a lot of work being required just to get one Jiggy, causing there to be an imbalance among the game’s collectables. Put simply, the amount of time needed to grab a Jiggy or even a Jinjo is wildly inconsistent. In some instances, it can take a few minutes, and other times, it can take upwards of half an hour for a single Jiggy.
The dinosaur family in Terrydactyland is a perfect example of this problem. In order to get one Jiggy in this level, the player needs to help a mother dinosaur with different issues affecting her three children. One child is missing, one child is sick, and one child is turned small. In order to complete these objectives, the player needs to switch to Mumbo and walk back to the cave housing the family to cast a spell to enlarge the small dinosaur, save the missing dinosaur from a section in Witchyworld and transport them via the train that goes between levels, then take the sick dinosaur to the train, take it the Cliff Top section, then use Mumbo in that area to cast a spell to heal the dinosaur, then take the train back to Terrydactyland. All this is required to do for a single Jiggy. Keep in mind that using the train and Mumbo spells also bring about unskippable cutscenes showing these actions take place. Needless to say, this is a lot to do for a single task. While this particular instance is certainly an extreme, it’s indicative of the overall increase in time it takes to acquire Jiggies.
And then there’s Grunty Industries.
This massive level is the microcosm of every issue with Banjo-Tooie’s level design. It’s massive in size, requires using alternate exits to access multiple parts of the level (including needing to use the train to even access the main section of the level), features tasks that take a very long time to complete, contains an abundance of sub-areas that are easy to confuse with one another, is easy to get lost in, and can’t even be completed on the player’s first run through the level as some Jiggies require the use of abilities learned in the game’s following two levels. On my 17-hour playthrough of Banjo-Tooie where I 100% completed the game, Grunty Industries took up over three and a half hours to complete. Over 20% of my total in-game time was dedicated to completing this one level, and it’s not like this level particularly has more to collect than other levels. The player is still collecting ten Jiggies in this level, there are still collecting a similar number of Jinjos and Empty Honeycomb Pieces as are in other levels - the process for collecting everything in this level just takes substantially longer than any other level seemingly for the sake of it.
Featuring levels that take over three times as long to complete as levels in the original game may sound like an enticing feature for a product in an industry that has increasingly favored offering a higher hour-per-dollar-spent value over time, but in Tooie’s case, that clearly comes at the cost of creating a well-paced experience.
After I finished my recent playthrough of Banjo-Kazooie, I walked away satisfied, greatly enjoying the level variety and charm of the game. Despite some imperfections with the game’s Note system and the occasional inconsistency in the game’s structure, Banjo-Kazooie’s level design has aged quite gracefully thanks to its compact focus on keeping tasks simple and close in proximity to one another. After I finished my recent playthrough of Banjo-Tooie, I was struck with an overwhelming feeling of relief. While I commend Rare for being as ambitious as they were and placing a greater focus on gameplay variety for this sequel, Banjo-Tooie is an exhausting game to play. While the “quicker” Jiggies that are earned from beating bosses or completing minigames are precisely the right kinds of challenges to be included in a sequel, the bulk of the game’s objectives require a lot more of the player, with an overall smaller number of rewards to give them.
With the perspective of where the industry has gone in the 24 years since Banjo-Tooie’s release, I don’t necessarily blame Rare for prioritizing making a bigger, more ambitious game. As the rise in popularity of open-world games over the last two decades has illustrated, people evidently want bigger games. But making larger games maintain a great level quality is a tantalizingly difficult task. For every Xenoblade Chronicles X or Ghost of Tsushima - games that excellently use their space to create densely populated and meaningful activities - there are also games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla - games that create a massive world featuring menial tasks that the player will inevitably get burnt out from.
There’s beauty and value in creating a smaller, more focused game. As we’ve seen with excellent games like Astro Bot and Super Mario Galaxy, having a smaller, sometimes more linear levels means that developers can create a more focused and therefore creative challenge for players. These challenges can be more densely populated with meaningful things to do, while also giving players a more succinct “30 seconds of fun” that continually fuels their wonder for the worlds they explore. Banjo-Kazooie hosts smaller levels and, yes, has a shorter playtime - but that’s okay. What matters is that the player experience is consistently strong thanks to tight gameplay pacing facilitated by more compact level design. Banjo-Tooie offers a far wider variety to its gameplay and genuinely features some exciting new ideas for players to engage with, but its levels stretch the game too thinly, resulting in uneven pacing and a completion process that feels more exhausting and rewarding.
There are certainly lessons to be learned from Banjo-Tooie’s level design and I think we’ve seen those lessons be gradually learned in the 3D platforming space over the last 24 years. Wanting to create sequels to games that are bigger and try new, sometimes experimental ideas is something that any developer strives for, but sometimes in this quest for larger size, it’s easy to lose sight of what made people enjoy the original game in the first place. Above all else, Banjo-Tooie is a cautionary tale about what happens when you try so hard to create something revolutionary and new that you partially forget what made the original experience so magical for a lot of people. Tooie is by no means a bad video game, but it certainly lacks the tight design and pacing of its predecessor, and a massive part of that is due to the fact that Tooie wants to be so much of an evolution of Kazooie that it ends up betraying some of its DNA, making for a less enjoyable game overall.
Whether you’re a game creator or appreciator, it’s important to be aware of these cautionary tales that video games and their legacies leave and how to learn from them. While Rare became less of a powerhouse in the platforming space following their Microsoft acquisition in 2002, other platformer developers have doubtlessly learned about the dangers of level scale bloat. It’s no coincidence that some of Nintendo’s more open 3D platformers like Super Mario Odyssey still have an overall conciseness to their level design. By remembering the DNA of level design that makes players enjoy their time exploring game worlds, we can evolve the ideas seen in such level design without abandoning it altogether in favor of something bigger and seemingly bringing more marketability and mass appeal.
If there’s any lesson to be learned from Banjo-Tooie, it’s to sometimes ignore the lines that marketing tries to convince us to be true. Sometimes, bigger isn’t better. Sometimes, making the best out of small spaces is exactly what results in the best overall gameplay experience. And if you make the best use of those smaller spaces, then there will still be players that get to enjoying exploring those spaces over a quarter century after the fact.
Thank you very much for reading! How do you feel about the scope of level design and how it can impact your overall enjoyment with a game? As always, join the conversation and let me know what you think in the comments or on Bluesky @DerekExMachina.
