Picture this, okay. It’s 1999, and you are 5 years old. It’s summer vacation. And for whatever reason, your mom has a lot of appointments and so, you being five, end up being babysat, woo hoo for you! Luckily your mom has a cousin who is so gracious as to watch you during all these meetings and, even better, said cousin has kids your age! And, they have your favorite/only console, the N64! You spend at least two days a month over there, playing board games and Pokemon and having a great time until, one day, you notice your cousins’ small stable of games and your mind is blown! There are at least four, no, FIVE, games you’ve never seen before (granted, the only games you’ve seen before are Pokemon Stadium and Hey You Pikachu, but still). And, on a whim, you ask your cousins to pick their favorite and we’ll play that. They pull a game off the shelf, pop it into their console and you spend the rest of the time until your mom picks you up playing this game.
Granted, you’re not very good, you never even get out of the opening area, but you’re having a blast, this is a new experience and you’re very excited over it. You go home, excited, ready to ask your parents for the game and… you don’t remember the title. You never got it, it never came up in conversation, it was just, you know, gone. And it’s the beginning of the schoolyear now. That was the last time those cousins would watch you and, in fact, would be the last time you saw them for over a decade. Only one thing sticks with you though. You vaguely remember that character in the game… was a bear.
Now picture this. It’s 2008, now you’re 15. Due to several moves in a short period of time and your own autism-related issues in a classroom setting, you are now homeschooled. You are mostly left to your own devices, your parents both work and trust you to do the work, which you do, and your school day usually lasts about 2 hours, leaving an obscene amount of free time. And as you are home, alone, with a computer in the other room, you basically have unfettered access to the internet. And what’s the first thing you do? …Okay, what’s the second thing you do as a little gamer boy? Look up stuff about video games, of course. Quickly you’re directed to the early gaming scene on YouTube, back when Let’s Play meant a different thing, the AVGN was not uploading on YouTube and was still releasing nonstop bangers, and there was widespread, what we would eventually call “discourse” but back then we called “flame wars”, on what were the “greatest games of all time”.
All the bangers like Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VII, Sonic Adventure 2, and more games I will probably get to if I continue this series I’m thinking of doing. And I was all in on all of them. I was prime for this kind of discussion, an interest in video games as a concept, no real access to play these games, no real thoughts and opinions of my own that random people could mold into just parroting their own opinions as if they were mine. I was super prepped for the retro gaming space in 2008 (and the alt right pipeline but I thankfully dodged that one). And in many of these discussions, one name also came up: Banjo-Kazooie.
You are, of course, floored. You have, somehow, through the power of the internet, been reunited with this game from your childhood, this vague memory you’d never thought you would see again in your life. And, as you would, you are scrambling to find ways to play it. Unfortunately, finding N64 games was really hard in 2008, not that you had money to buy them anyways. However, a friend decides to let you in on a little trade secret: if you type in “Banjo-Kazooie ROM” on your web browser (shoutouts to Internet Explorer), you can access not just this game, but the entire history of N64 games, on your PC! And it’s all totally legal! The new opportunities you have at your disposal excite you… until you try actually playing these games.
You are not a PC gamer, never have been, probably never truly will be. Keyboard controls feel funky to you, wrong. And what’s more, you don’t have a controller you could hook up to your PC to rectify this issue, not that you’d have known how to operate the process of making it work on your PC in general. And, in truth, even if you did, your parents Windows XP computer, obtained several years back at this point, has a lot of trouble running the N64 games you’re excited to play anyways (not that it was entirely its fault, lord knows N64 emulation is a nightmare). You have, once again, been defeated, Banjo destined to become yet another distant memory to you. But you hold out hope, one day, hopefully soon, you will find a way to play Banjo-Kazooie.
Picture this. It’s 2023, you are now 29 years old. At the start of the pandemic, you were laid off from your job of around ten years and due to the failing health of your parents, you continued to stay out of the job market for an extended length to take care of them as they recovered from various medical emergencies and surgeries. Without an income to speak of, you have turned to your backlog, which is sizable, slowly chipping away at it to fulfill your limited free time. And, to add just a little bit of spice to your backlogging experience, you use tools to randomize the games you play. This practice has been very fruitful, summoning forth incredibly obscure but fascinating games, old classics you’ve just never finished, big indie titles that do something interesting with the medium, it’s been a blast. You’ve found new favorites, finished loose ends, it’s greatly improved your gaming experience. And one day, one fateful day, the randomization tools you use land you on one game: Banjo-Kazooie.
This is it, at long last there is time, there is initiative and, most importantly, thanks to Microsoft’s, at the time, buddy buddy nature with Nintendo, there is availability. And… you’re not really all that excited. Despite this game being one of THE major loose threads throughout your life, this opportunity to put it to be it is faced not with excitement but with this kind of mix of cautious optimism and indifference. This is people’s favorite game of all time, arguably one of the greatest platformers ever made, and yet you, a person who in our last little vignette was so into this era of gaming that it was basically your entire personality, is just like “guess that’s cool”.
See, you’ve changed. You’ve changed a lot, actually. The once retro game obsessed child, someone who believed that older games were better as a rule than modern games, has given way instead to an adult with far more complicated opinions on the past. Your philosophy in what video games should be is no longer a repetition of the old talking point of “if it’s not fun, then what’s the point”, rather, you crave weirder, more interesting, more unique games.
You’ve fallen out of love with a lot of games, a lot of genres, that were once life-defining. JRPGs, once your favorite genre, are now nothing short of intimidating for you and, frankly, you find yourself potentially too cynical to enjoy their storytelling anymore. Games that you used to adore, your Mario Galaxies, your Twilight Princesses, your Sonics, just in general, your love for them proves a distant memory. They are not what you want, what you crave from gaming, they feel incorrect to you. And, indeed, the mascot platformer has fallen out of favor for you. You still get down with Mario, don’t get me wrong, Mario Odyssey has been one of your favorite games of the entire generation and compelled you to even learn a speedrun because of how fun it is. But by and large, you don’t look at the genre with the same excitement. You see a mascot platformer and face it with vague indifference.
Not only that, but this is not exactly a road untraveled for you. As you have been facing this war on your backlog, you have played many beloved games, games people would call their favorites, call the greatest games of all time. And… well… you haven’t been seeing it. Maybe it is overhype, maybe you just aren’t in the right place or the right time, but you have tackled games like Sonic Adventure 2, Super Paper Mario, to a lesser extent Yoshi’s Island, and it’s not that you think these games are bad, you actually did rather like Yoshi’s Island, it made your top 30 that year, you also haven’t seen masterpieces. You’ve honestly started to feel something is broken in you, you are facing the most beloved games of all time and can mostly only manifest a vague shrug for any of them. You even jokingly post about it on social media, how you played “Ecco the Dolphin”, a game pretty universally considered at best mediocre and at worst awful, and fell in love with it immediately, in juxtaposition of all of the games other people would call the greatest of all time.
But, even in the midst of all these reservations you have regarding Banjo, there is still a part of you who is excited to finally face the bear and bird. After all, this is possibly the biggest loose end of your life, a game that has been following you, just out of grasp, since you were a small child. And who knows, maybe it’ll actually click for you, maybe this game will defy the pattern. After all, on paper this game has a lot to offer you specifically. You like more unique, interesting games, and Banjo is known for its specific sense of humor and its incredibly unique level design, worlds brimming with character and personality. And while the gameplay isn’t some really fast paced platformer with a lot of interesting movement tech like its big brother, Mario 64, there’s still a lot of cool stuff to learn with in Banjo. So, with many reservations, but also many hopes, you take the plunge, you finally play Banjo-Kazooie. And…
...i don’t like Banjo-Kazooie.
The Humour
Banjo-Kazooie's sense of humor is arguably its most famous trait. The iconic sense of humor is either the first or one of the first things that you're likely to hear about Banjo-Kazooie. Its audience loves this cast of characters and their uniquely Rare dialog, emphasizing a variety of gags and jokes. I imagine this must've been pretty groundbreaking at the time, honestly, at least for the console-specific audience. There had been "funny" games before this on console but most games trying to be explicitly comedic at this time would've done so through slapstick or pop culture references. Or, if they were more deliberately written to be comedic, they were likely niche PC adventure games. Banjo-Kazooie would've been one of the first mainstream video games where the comedy was written, genuine jokes, gags, puns. They abound in this game. It's also the part I want to tackle first because I think me not liking the humor in this game is the easiest pill to swallow.
Now, bear in mind that when I approached Banjo-Kazooie, I was already an adult with a fully crafted sense of humor all my own. Banjo-Kazooie is a game for children, I know people are going to be mad at me saying that but it's a game with a colorful bear and bird where they fight a witch while encountering a lot of toilet jokes. It's a game for children. And I think that reflects very strongly in how most of the people who laud this game's humor first got initiated into it. They too were children, they were able to have their sense of humor shaped by Banjo-Kazooie rather than coming into it like I did, sense of humor already formed. You can tell when someone's sense of humor was heavily influenced by the N64 Rare platformers, trust me. So I am not going to sit here and tell you that, because I don't find the jokes funny, that's a problem I actually have with the game. That's me coming into this and not being the target demo or the target sense of humor.
My problem is instead with how repetitive the humor in Banjo-Kazooie tends to be. It feels as though the same jokes are being told over and over again. The same exact setups and punchlines for grossout humor, puns, gags, what have you. A toilet joke always feel like the same toilet joke, a slapstick gag always feels like the same slapstick gag, it feels like Rare's writing staff thought of a few things that kids would find funny and just kept repeating them. Brentilda in particular wore me down, as she is an NPC you will keep encountering across your journey and her only role is to tell the same joke about Gruntilda over and over again. She'll start by mentioning a fact about Gruntilda and then the punchline is always either "Gruntilda is gross", "Gruntilda is fat" or "Gruntilda is ugly". None of these are jokes I find particularly funny, and having to hear them over and over made me very annoyed. It was like being trapped in an elevator with a second grader who just found out what farts were. The worst part about it though is that Brentilda, who is representative of this huge problem I have with the game, is not only not optional, paying close attention to her jokes is necessary for the final level.
Grunty's Furnace Fun
I have more generalized thoughts about the levels that I want to get into later on in the review, but I just want to say that this level might be one of my least favorite levels in gaming history. Can I just vent for a second? It's my blog, whatever, this level was miserable for me. So, I want to be clear, by this point I had already more or less figured out I really didn't like Banjo-Kazooie. I had fun for the first few levels, up until Freezeazy Peak I was kind of into this game actually. After that point, the good will started draining rapidly, culminating in Rusty Bucket Bay and Click Clock Woods, two irresponsibly large and complicated levels that each took me hours to complete WITH using Save States. I was so ready to be done with this game by this point, if I hadn't committed so hard to finishing it, I probably would've DNF'ed it.
So, I want you to imagine that you have gotten to the end of this game you didn't like, you even went the extra mile and 100%-ed it, got every Jiggy and every note, and you get to the final door, ready to face the final boss. And what you are greeted by is a long, boring quiz about the game you just played all the way through and, moreover, did not like. You are asked questions about locations you hardly remember because you've already pushed them out of your brain and characters whose names you never cared to learn and every single Brentilda line. If I had not already effectively 100%-ed the game, I would've stopped. I would've rejected this. I don't know if I can find it but I distinctly remember texting some friends of mine and going "the sheer arrogance of this game". Like "you probably loved our game so much that we're going to give you a quiz just to remember how much you loved it". I genuinely tried to learn the speedrunning trick where you do a frame perfect transition into a move as Grunty "kills" you so you can just walk across because I wasn't about to walk all the way back through Grunty's Lair to find all the Brentilda quotes and write them all down. And guides don't super help on this quiz because the Brentilda quotes are semi-randomized.
But even if I had been more amiable to the game, the thing that awaited on the other side would've still soured me on it. See, I was 100%-ing the game, despite my own reservations about 100%-ing video games and also my lack of love for Banjo because I felt like that was correct. To really understand the Rare style of platformer, you have to 100% the game. This is both a positive and a negative depending on who you ask, fans of Rare love how much there is to find in these games while critics tend to bemoan how much it seems like they were just unnecessarily bloating the game. So to get a full perspective I felt like I needed to do a 100% run. Good thing I did, because as it turns out, in order to beat Banjo-Kazooie regularly, you basically have to 100% the game already.
Collectathon
I'm going to do something that I don't really like doing in these blog posts. I hesitate to compare a game to another game, not that I won't do it, a key feature of my Earthbound posts are me just comparing the other games in the trilogy to Earthbound. But I tend to think that one of the key issues in the modern media landscape is that too many people are only judging things through the lens of the things they remind one of. People calling Astro Bot "essentially Mario Galaxy 3" or attributing Clair Obscur to Japan even though it's such a distinctly French piece of art just because it reminds them of Persona, that sort of thing. I want to view things as their own works of art and so I tend to hesitate to compare them to other works unless it is relevant to their history. But to really explain why I take issue with Banjo's approach to the collectathon I do have to compare it to another game.
So, in 1996, Super Mario 64 hit the market. Quite possibly the most influential video game of all time, Super Mario 64 was the first game really properly establish a language for 3D movement in games. There were other 3D games before this but they didn't have the same full range of 3D movement and the same understanding of what level design could be. This is not to say they never could, but Mario 64 really accelerated the medium years past where it was. But more relevant is that Mario 64 more or less established the language of the collectathon platformer. The lack of space present on the N64 cartridge caused Nintendo to have to innovate, instead of their initial plan of having more traditional Mario levels but in 3D, they opted instead for larger environments with loads of objectives in it. It is not only one of the franchise's first, but it remains one of its best, an infinitely replayable, completely accessible platformer that feels fresh each time you play it.
But an underrated game design ideal that I think Mario 64 really nails is how it handles the amount of objectives needed to be cleared to get to the end vs. the total number of objectives present in the game. Mario 64 requires the player to obtain 70 out of the possible 120 stars in order to face the final boss, with other walls being placed at 8, 30, and 40 stars. Only around 60% of the game's total. What's more is that there is only 1 actually required star in the game, with another world requiring you to get at least one star in order to progress. I think that this is genius, I think that this is the perfect way to do it. You're not forcing your player to do any individual objective really, they have full freedom of where they want to go and what they want to collect, but they still have to engage with the game properly. It is enough content to where the player can get a full sense of the game's scope, but their progress is also not stalled by being forced to complete an objective they can't or truly do not want to do multiple times. The Bowser's sub mission is a low point and I can understand people balking off that one, but on the whole the player is free to engage with the game on their own pace. Obviously this metric is fluid, Mario Odyssey would be a nightmare if you had to collect 60% of the moons in that game to beat it, but for collectathons of this style, 60% is a fantastic amount.
Banjo-Kazooie requires the player to collect 94 of the game's 100 Jiggies to finish the game. I understand that one of the things people like about Banjo is that it has this sense of adventure, the player is incentivized to delve in deep and explore the various levels in it. And I'm also well aware that the kind of player who really adores Banjo-Kazooie is also the kind of player who is likely to 100% a video game, even if the process of doing so can and often does ruin their enjoyment of said game. But I feel like we can all agree that this expectation on the player is ludicrous, right? Forcing the player to collect 94 of the games' Jiggies means that, should they get to this final roadblock, they will very likely have to go back through and get a lot of things they probably thought they were okay to miss. They now have to do a bunch of minigames they didn't want to do, or the more annoying/frustrating objectives that they passed on. They probably have to now go through Rusty Bucket Bay and Click Clock Woods, two incredibly tedious and irresponsibly large levels that often have incredibly complicated orders of operation to accomplish a single objective. Again, I knew this going into it and I was still appalled at how much the game asked of me to simply beat it, I cannot imagine what it would be like if I had played it blind.
This is not even mentioning the notes, the other collectible this game is built around. The notes are one of the most controversial aspects to this game even to people who love it. It's such a problem that it's one of the very few fixes that they made to this game when it was originally rereleased on Xbox 360. A way to think about the notes in Banjo-Kazooie is that they are the equivalent to the coins in other platformers. There are 100 of them scattered in each area and you use them as a currency, buying your way past obstacles at various points in the game. It's very similar to the way Spyro the Dragon handles its gems, as both currency and collectible. However, Banjo makes the interesting decision to make it so that these notes are not permanently collected. The game keeps track of your score, when you go into a level you will leave with however many notes you collected or, if you are going through it a second time for cleanup, you will leave with any additional notes you've collected. However, unless you have already collected every note in the level in question, each time you return to the level you will reset from 0 and have to start collecting everything all over again. Meaning that, should you die in the level, you will have to restart from 0 and work your way back up as well.
This becomes an increasingly laborious task as the game goes on. Banjo-Kazooie levels only progress in complexity and so do their ability to hide things. Many levels in the late game have upwards of a dozen sub areas where collectibles are hidden. Even if I felt the sense of adventure that so many people feel when playing Banjo-Kazooie, this idea that these worlds are tiny little windows into their own stories that Banjo is just entering, it would've worn me down by the end of it. Having to collect things in levels stops feeling like an adventure and starts feeling like a chore, as you comb every possible inch of a level and interact with literally everything trying to find every note so you don't have to come back later to do note cleanup and do it anyways. In levels as simple and accessible as Mumbo's Mountain or Treasure Trove Cove, or even mid game levels like Freezeazy Peak and Gobi Desert, this isn't that big a deal even if I don't particularly enjoy playing the latter two levels. But in a level like Click Clock Woods, a massive, hard to navigate forest setting you have to not only scour every inch of but scour every inch of four times over? It's miserable.
It's also completely and totally unavoidable. You have to collect 810 notes in order to beat the game, there are 900 total in the game. Just like with the Jiggies, you are expected to collect an absurd amount of them, even before the final doors to the final battle, you need 765 to get into Furnace Fun in the first place. But unlike the Jiggies, you cannot just operate how the game clearly wants you to operate with the notes. With the Jiggies, it's clear the game wants you to grab a few, explore some more of Grunty's lair, fill in some more areas, hit a wall, return to previous areas and find any remaining Jiggies and Notes. The final Jiggy door is meant to be a moment where you go "okay, need to do some cleanup in the rest of the game" and trek back through, re-experiencing this game as you get the remainder of the Jiggies. But the notes discourage this gameplay ideal because it incentivizes you to get everything in one go. You are actively punished for playing the game like Rare seems to think you should and actively rewarded for turning the game into a chore. In my opinion, Banjo-Kazooie feels like it's at war with itself, a game with two core philosophies fighting each other for control. It wants the player to be constantly going back and forth across Grunty's Lair, completing objectives at their own pace; while simultaneously being a game that encourages the player to obsessively check off every objective before they can move on because, in the end, you need to do all this work anyways.
The Heart of Banjo-Kazooie
Ultimately, though, the main reason I dislike Banjo is because of me. Banjo-Kazooie's core design ideal is something of a lost art in game design today, mostly because we've kind of evolved past it. I've called Banjo-Kazooie "a game for children" throughout this post and to a lot of people that likely seems like a derogatory term. People get irrationally upset when you state that something that is unambiguously for children is, in fact, for children because they think that reduces it to some sort of level where it doesn't have to be taken seriously. But to me, understanding Banjo-Kazooie as a game intended for children is crucial to understanding it's design and why it didn't resonate with me, a not-child.
See, back in the day, games were different. Nowadays the majority of games are made with the idea that, first of all, the people buying them are probably the people with direct disposable income and not the people who need to rely on those who do have disposable income. As such, there has kind of been a shift in game design, an idea that even games that are otherwise meant for children, like Mario, are experiences people are intended to have for a little while and then put down. These are meant to be finite experiences, pieces that the player engages with for a while and then likely puts down for the next big game because that's just where we are in gaming. Too many games, not enough time. There's too much competition to realistically expect a player to even beat a game anymore, if you look at achievements on basically every game, you'll see massive dropoffs only a few hours in as players shift to something else or simply bounce off the game.
This wasn't true back before the turn of the millennium. The understanding then was that, even as the industry tailored to mature gamers more and more, that the vast majority of their audience would be children. Children do not have disposable income and their parents are less likely to regularly be buying games for them, especially as they were more likely to see them as toys than a true entertainment medium. Kids weren't buying a new game every couple weeks, their parents were buying them a few times a year, they were birthday presents, Christmas gifts, rewards for good report cards. Games mattered more to their audience, it wasn't just a piece of art you were experiencing, it was potentially your only new game for the next several months, if not the entire year. I know that, for me, games didn't start becoming commonplace until I was in high school and my mom would let me pick out a game at least once a month. I had like three total games on my N64 growing up, and that was my only console until I was 10!
Banjo-Kazooie is, seemingly, designed with the idea that the people who are playing it would always be playing it. That its large, sprawling levels with loads of secrets to find and characters to meet would not feel tedious to the target audience because they wouldn't be sitting down to play it with the idea that this was a game to be beaten. It was just, you know, a game. And I can't replicate that feeling. I can't go back to when I was a child and experience games the way I would back then. Nor do I particularly want to. Games are such an interesting medium of art with so many works to experience. The year I played Banjo-Kazooie was the year I played Gris, a beautiful, heart-wrenching, tragic game about learning to overcome the feeling of loss that threatens to consume you after you lose someone important to you. The year I played Doki Doki Literature Club, a masterful piece of horror that pushes the boundaries of the relationship between player and game. Ecco the Dolphin, a bizarre, surreal prog rock masterpiece that leaves the player in a unique atmosphere and doesn't let up. And numerous others, games I adore. Games I wouldn't get to play if I played everything like I did when I was a kid. I not only do not like Banjo-Kazooie, I couldn't like Banjo-Kazooie. Because no matter what I did, it was asking me to develop a relationship with it that I was unwilling to form.
There's kind of a tragedy to that, though, isn't there? Like, it can't help but be a little heartbreaking, realizing that the way you consumed media as a child is dead. It's a place you can no longer reach, an old friend you cannot see again. There are moments throughout life that are like this, moments where you realize that your connection to your childhood is slipping. It's a difficult thing to confront for everyone, the realization that so many things are falling through your fingers, as if grains of sand. It's tempting to cling onto it, to try and let that magic continue. To never let go of your childhood, to instead embrace it indefinitely. And for many years, that's what I did.
I used to be someone who buried himself in nostalgia, who cared about the things that he grew up with more than anything, who cherished these works that brought me so much joy. I was a Harry Potter kid and regularly bought Ravenclaw merch before Joanne went mask off, I was the kid who never stopped playing Pokemon even when others abandoned it, while all my friends were moving to Call of Duty and Halo, I was the sole friend who held tight to Mario. I lived through my own nostalgia and the nostalgia of other people for so much of my life. As friends were grinding out CoD lobbies, I was memorizing Mega Man robot master orders even though I had only played one Mega Man game. Losing the part of me that felt this magical, deeper connection to video games was not a small feat by any means.
But at the same time, losing these parts of myself, it's kind of freeing. I was letting my nostalgia and the nostalgia of others consume me. I hadn't given myself the space to develop my own taste really, to find the games I love as opposed to the games I have loved and other people have loved. My relationship with art was just unhealthy, I was clinging to games I either had not thought too terribly deep about or hadn't played at all. My world was influenced by a handful of content creators and an inability to move past the games I had already played and so it was difficult for me to truly engage with art in any meaningful way. As these parts of me drifted away, as my addiction to the past subsided I really found my love for games, discovered what my connection to them actually means in the grand scheme of things.
Games mean more to me than just what I got out of them as a kid, maybe not always on an emotional level, but on an intellectual one. I'm more engaged by the material in question. It's not always an easy or pleasant road, I've had to go through a lot of growing up to get here, to develop a healthy relationship with the art I consume. I've had to reject so many ideas I used to hold dear, grow past entire genres I once cherished. And, in the midst of it all, it's made me feel distant from people I once called friends, and/or content creators I used to watch. I used to really enjoy watching reactions to showcases with people because it felt like an earnest sense of community; and the reason why I stopped, other than a general frustration with the digital showcase era, is that it's become clear how many people I used to like watching along with and/or would like to hear their opinions about gaming news have gotten more and more insular. They only crave the things they already know and will not give new games the time of day.
I don't want to be like that. I don't want to spend my entire life trying to get the same thing out of games I did as a child, I don't want to have my tastes defined by who I was when I was little. There are so many games out there, so many new ideas to explore, and it feels limiting to only look to the things I already know. I don't only want to become the kind of person who ignores the entire medium outside of one or two games that come out every year in niches I already occupy and then complains that either video games are going downhill or that the medium isn't representing the wants of "true gamers". And I want this for others too, to expand their horizons and not just tap into the same well.
I don't like Banjo-Kazooie. And you know what, that's good. I've grown as a person, the part of me that would've loved this game is firmly where he belongs, in the past. He would've loved Banjo if he had gotten it working on the old Windows XP computer and that would've been good too. I don't mean to make it sound like enjoying Banjo-Kazooie is inherently a sign of having a poor relationship with art, because of course it isn't. Loads of people love Banjo and have great relationships with art and loads of people dislike it and have horrible relationships with art. While it is very common for people who like Banjo-Kazooie to be pretty caught up in their own nostalgia, that's true of most video games from the past, especially on a Nintendo console. It's just, to me at this specific timeline and juncture in my life, not liking Banjo is representative of something important, something meaningful. That I am not the same person I used to be. That I am someone who is, undeniably and unequivocally, me.