I don’t know if it was the bear playing the banjo, the chicken playing the kazoo, or the dinosaur with a xylophone solo, but from the moment I booted up Banjo Kazooie, I knew I was in for a silly time. Banjo Kazooie is an open world 3d platformer centered around collecting puzzle pieces called Jiggies. You get jiggies from beating enemies, doing favors for friends, or just exploring the nine world. Each world has a wildly different climate and new cast of characters. There are minor enemies scattered, but most are easily taken down by Banjo’s roll attack or Kazooie’s egg gun. At the end of the day, the gameplay revolves around exploring the world rather than fighting the bad guys.
However, this gameplay is at a sharp contrast with the overarching story. Banjo Kazooie stars a standard damsel in distress plot line, shockingly similar to Shrek. Banjo’s little sister is captured by an evil witch, who seeks to steal her beauty, and the only way to stop her is unlocking the lair with puzzle pieces.
Banjo Kazooie seeks to disrupt the damsel in distress narrative. But rather than disrupting the sexist nature, or exploring why we save the Princess, Banjo Kazooie disrupts how we treat saving the princess.
Tooie is only in this situation because Banjo refuses to take the conflict seriously. Literally, the princess was being stolen right outside his window while he overslept. And even when Banjo woke up, he could not help but give his goofy smile and head out for a fun day of saving the princess.
During his journey, Banjo rolls, sings, and flies with a smile on his face. And when he finally reaches Gruntilda, he keeps the same attitude. There’s no sense of rush in the final battle, you continue the standard 3D platforming cycle, shoot some eggs at Gruntilda, and then everything works out fine. At no point in this game did I feel the same stress as Street Fighter 2, Super Mario Bros, or any other game of the era.
Banjo and Kazooie subverts the expectation of a “thriller”; Banjo is one of the first games not designed to make you feel powerful, or fight against an unstoppable force. Your first goal of this game is to explore. Banjo is rather tight with its requirements compared to other games: you must collect almost every jiggy to beat Banjo. It encourages you to explore the incredible world they created. You watch banjo do the cutest swimming animation of the 90s, listen to a mole fight with a chicken, and hear an evil witch talk in rhymes. Banjo and Kazooie truly teaches the journey over the destination.
Like Problem Attic’s criticism of Braid, I think it is fair to say Banjo’s philosophy is one from a place of privilege. Not every bear gets to gallop through a ski resort, sometimes there are direct consequences to putting off our problems. I think the approaching everything with a carefree attitude negates a lot of the worlds problems. It is not healthy to be at constant war with your problems, but I can not say completely ignoring them is much better. Banjo is incredibly lucky for the plot armor he wears, for he was risking his sister’s life the entire game.
However, I think it’s important to subdue the general state of anxiety within early video games. Early developers pushed almost every game as a life or death scenario. When you look at games like Golden-Eye or even Super Mario Bros, they all have this way of feeding panic. There’s high stakes, precision required, and major consequences for failure. Panic is the last thing you feel when playing Banjo Kazooie. It is one of the first games that pushed exploration as a goal over defeating enemies. While it is still cluttered with monsters, they are secondary to the happy noise Banjo makes when he finds his Jiggies.
Overall, Banjo is an incredible silly game. I really enjoyed its foil to the panic we face in other retro games. It was wonderful to sit back and just explore a 3D universe, with no feelings of rush. And at the end of the day, nothing beats watching a bear play the banjo.
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