Banjo-Kazooie/YMMV

• Author's Saving Throw: With Stop 'n' Swop rendered impractical, but hints about it already dropped, Rare couldn't just ignore it. The solution was to add Banjo-Kazooie Cartridge enemies into Banjo-Tooie that drop the promised items when defeated.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: A big reason why Nuts & Bolts tanked in sales. 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. 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.
• Breather Boss:
  • As exasperating as Rusty Bucket Bay can be, Boss Boom Box is an incredibly easy boss who can be taken down in seconds by just spamming the Wonder Wing on him. The Zubbas works much the same way as well.
  • Old King Coal roams around the arena with brief pauses to heat up the room to make 90% of the arena hazardous while the fumes drain your oxygen, but you're safe in the higher platforms set across the arena and he is very susceptible to being sniped by eggs (especially Ice Eggs or Grenade Eggs). The heat mechanic will hardly be a threat most of the time because not only will he stop heating the room once your oxygen meter gets low enough, but you can double said meter before the fight by saving Banjo's fish with the Bill Drill. Given that Old King Coal guards Chuffy, a train that is necessary to get inside Grunty Industries without exploiting bugs, the easiness of his fight is likely intentional.
• Breather Level:
  • Click Clock Wood in the first game is a refreshing change of pace from the madness of Rusty Bucket Bay.
  • Mingy Jongo and Canary Mary notwithstanding, Cloud Cuckoo Land is nowhere near as difficult or confusing as the previous two levels.
• Contested Sequel:
  • Nuts & Bolts, for radically diverging from the formula of the series. Even those that enjoy the title tend to see it as In Name Only to the other games.
  • While you're hard pressed to find anyone who would outright say Banjo-Tooie is a bad game, a lot of fans agree that despite its massive suite of improvements over the first game, it has a lot of its own differences that can be seen as flaws. The biggest two are the significantly slower pacing (thanks to more emphasis on puzzle solving and exploration over pure platforming) and the constant backtracking. In addition, the complexity of obtaining each Jiggy is drastically ramped up from the first game, which is either a plus or a minus. All of these differences come together to make Banjo-Tooie either an incredibly satisfying, detailed and engaging game to complete, or a bit of a mess and not as enjoyable as the first game.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The final battle against Grunty in Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie.
• Designated Hero: Parodied somewhat with Kazooie, especially in Banjo-Tooie. Before the game even starts, she's shamelessly cheating at cards with Mumbo and Bottles, then spends the game constantly snarking and demanding jiggies from characters in trouble before letting Banjo rescue them. One of Banjo's recurring lines is a shocked "Kazooie!!!" in response to these moments.
• Designated Villain: Conga, in the first game. Whereas other foes in the series either try and kill the pair over a Jiggy, one of Kazooie's usual insults, or for not handing over a pizza they don't actually have, he just chucks oranges at 'em for trespassing in his home. And unlike most bosses, three Jiggies involve causing his misfortune instead of one: there's one for making him attack the orange tiles, another one for stealing an orange and giving it to Chimpy nearby, who helps them out by raising a stump, getting them to where they can attack him with eggs for the third Jiggy.
• Disappointing Last Level: Cauldron Keep, the final world of Banjo-Tooie, is a very small level with no jiggies, and it only serves to host the climactic quiz show and final boss. Concept art shows that Cauldron Keep was once planned to be a full world, but Rare simply ran out of time and was forced to scrap the majority of the level.
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Hot Grunty from the first game's game-over screen; Mumbo Jumbo agrees.
  • Mumbo Jumbo from the first game. Started out as a weird shaman with an unexplained romantic history with Gruntilda who turned up in a handful of levels. In the second game, he became a playable character, And the Fandom Rejoiced.
  • Jolly Roger, making him (along with Mr. Fit) one of the few minor characters to return for Nuts & Bolts with an expanded role.
• Even Better Sequel: For many, Banjo-Tooie was a significant improvement over the original, expanding on the formula by dramatically increasing the world size, adding more bosses, and making Jiggies harder to find, removing the limited lives and changing the system for collecting Notes (along with what they do), making the game more challenging while simultaneously removing the more unfair difficulty aspects. The development team said in an interview that they prefer the original game in the long run for its simplicity though.
• Evil Is Sexy: Grunty becomes really beautiful when she absorbs Tooty's youth in the first game-over sequence.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Ape Escape, the Sony Playstation's notable Collect-a-thon.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Fallproof and Honeyback Cheato Codes in Banjo-Tooie. Once you unlock them by giving Cheato enough pages, the game and any remaining boss fights become a breeze, as Banjo and Kazooie will take no damage from falls (aside from falling into a bottomless pit) with the former code, and the latter code makes it so that Banjo is constantly regenerating his health, making him nigh unkillable.
  • The Clockwork Kazooie egg, from Banjo-Tooie, is one the five egg types and easily the most useful among them. Once fired, it spawns a tiny mechanized Kazooie that can be detonated for a powerful explosion and, more importantly, can pick up items. That includes Jiggies and Jinjos, meaning that by simply firing a Clockwork Kazooie at a hard to reach place, you can skip doing either a tough platforming section or a tricky puzzle. True, it's not going to solve every problem (minigames among them), but it deals with more than enough of them. Speedruns use the item heavily, and even in casual playthroughs knowledge of its power is enough to break through multiple challenges.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Most of the enemies in the original game are reasonably easy to defeat, but the giant snowmen that appear in a few levels are incredibly annoying in that they can only be killed while you're in the air (and require a special maneuver that's easy to bungle) but still present a danger while you're on the ground.
  • And those ghosts in Mad Monster Mansion; no golden feathers? You're screwed.
  • The Hotheads in Banjo-Tooie like to swoop in on their flying carpets at inopportune moments, often knocking unfortunate players off ledges, and their airborne nature makes them difficult to hit. Their annoying laugh just adds insult to injury.
  • Also from Banjo-Tooie, the Minjos. While it's fairly easy to tell when a Jinjo is actually a Minjo (if a Jinjo is in a spot that's way too convenient for you, it's probably a Minjo) they're still very fast and aggressive and, unlike most enemies in the game, tend to require more than one hit to defeat.
• Good Bad Bugs: In Banjo-Tooie, Banjo can double-jump when he's going solo by swinging his backpack in mid-air and then jumping again. This move allows for minor Sequence Breaking by reaching otherwise inaccessible platforms without outside help.
• Jerkass Woobie: Klungo is an unrepentant villain who makes it clear that he doesn't regret anything he did while working for Grunty, but the sheer amount of abuse she put him through makes you feel more than a little sorry for the big guy. Sure enough, it finally catches up with Klungo and he outright quits working for her. The next time we see him in Nuts & Bolts, he's much happier.
  • Kazooie herself. She has a habit of insulting others, but if you read the dialogue closely, you'll also notice that each of the character have insulted Kazooie herself in some way.
• Memetic Mutation: No one expected Jinjo.
  • fuckin' bitchass minjo
• Moral Event Horizon: Gruntilda crosses it when she puts her two sister's lives at risks and them kills them for loses the Tower of Tragedy Quiz Game Show.
• Most Annoying Sound:
  • The Hotheads' laugh in Banjo-Tooie.
  • Players who use the Talon Trot often may get annoyed with the noises Kazooie makes every step.
  • Washing Machine Banjo's wheels squeak like crazy every time he moves. Every. Time.
  • The cackling laugh that ghosts make in Mad Monster Mansion from Banjo-Kazooie quickly gets annoying.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The choir accompanying the appearance of a Jiggy.
  • From both Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, "Jinjo!" whenever a Jinjo is rescued.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo's claw swipes were a very weak attack everyone used and disliked because it was easy to use even by accident. For Banjo-Tooie, the devs took a good, hard look at the controls, cut the claws altogether and gave its move spot to the rat-a-tat rap instead (replaced by the fire breath attack when Kazooie is turned into a dragon), and there was much rejoicing.
• The Scrappy: Canary Mary and, to a lesser degree, Bottles.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Beak Bomb, mainly in the first game. In theory, it's a cool idea to give Kazooie a flying attack, but in practice it's very hard to aim it right, and the game's wonky flying controls and the small targets you aim for (such as the hats of the Sir Slush enemies in Freezeezy Peak and Click Clock Wood) do not help with this. In Banjo-Tooie, the Beak Bomb's direction during use can be influenced more easily, which combined with more spacious levels makes it a bit more viable for faster travel when flying.
  • Collecting Notes and Jinjos in the original release of the first game. If you restart the level by dying or leaving, Notes and Jinjos reset with it, forcing you to collect them all over again unless you've already gotten them all in a previous run.
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: A weird instance of this trope. The original Banjo-Kazooie was widely felt to have caused this trope to apply to Super Mario 64 -- at the time considered the benchmark for 3D platformers -- which many reviewers in 1998 claimed looked outdated and inadequate compared to Banjo-Kazooie. Fast-forward to the modern day, however, and the situation is reversed. Super Mario 64 is still very fondly remembered by most, whereas Banjo-Kazooie suffers from being lumped in with Rare's subsequent collectathon platformers.
• Signature Scene: Grunty's Furnace Fun in Banjo-Kazooie.
• So Okay It's Average: The basic response to the GBA game.
• Squick:
  • Everything Brentilda tells you about Grunty in the first game. The hag's pretty much built on Squick. Though the Scary Striptease doesn't seem so bad if you think of Gruntilda as she appears in the Game Over screen doing it.
  • Receiving both prizes from Canary Mary. The Jiggy was stuck under her wing for days, and the Cheato page was wedged in... somewhere. Kazooie is rightfully disgusted when Mary tells them where they've been.
• Stuck in Their Shadow: Banjo-Kazooie is a little weird about this. Ask anyone who the star is, and they'll say it's Banjo, even though the titles of three out of five games also include his partner Kazooie. The second game Banjo-Tooie opts for a silly title pun instead of recognizing the second lead's name (it's even lampshaded by Kazooie herself at the end of the first game), and Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge mentions her name although she isn't available at the start. This is all especially odd because she does the great majority of the actual work (to the point Banjo can be considered The Load) despite living in his backpack: most players use talon trot exclusively to move because Banjo is so much slower, and all of the good attack moves utilize Kazooie. She also flies him around, and he even swims slower than she does.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The beginning of the Gruntilda's Lair theme sounds a lot like "The Teddy Bear's Picnic".
  • The theme of Nuts & Bolts' world "Terrarium of Terror" sounds a lot like the main theme of Mars Attacks!.
• That One Boss: Grunty in both Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie; Weldar and Mingy Jongo in Banjo-Tooie.
• That One Level:
  • Rusty Bucket Bay, mainly due to the engine room.
  • Grunty Industries in Banjo-Tooie. It's by far the most complex level in the entire game, even though it's only the sixth out of eight. Terrydactyland too, though mostly because of how huge it is.
• That One Sidequest: Canary Mary's Cloudcuckooland race in Banjo-Tooie. Also a Guide Dang It.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Replacing most of Banjo's moves with vehicles in Nuts & Bolts 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 they 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 Character:
  • Mingella and Blobbelda's roles can be summed as rescuing Gruntilda at the very beginning of the game and then participating in the Tower of Tragedy Quiz at the very end (where they get crushed to death no less).
  • Some think playable Mumbo is underutilized in Banjo-Tooie. He is mostly used to open paths for Banjo and Kazooie to get through, and he has no Jiggies to collect besides a single one from the first world.
• Ugly Cute: If you get a Game Over, Tooty's beauty-stolen form is surprisingly cute, seeing as how her cuteness was swapped by Grunty's hideousness.
• Unwinnable by Insanity: As Washing Machine Banjo, it's possible to trap yourself in Grunty Industries (specifically at the bottom of the Air Conditioning Plant).
• Values Dissonance: Some North Americans might take offense to Rare (a British company) designing Humba Wumba as an extremely stereotypical Native American. It's worth noting that in Nuts & Bolts, made under the supervision of American Microsoft, Rare drastically changed her design to be much less stereotypical. That said it's unlikely only North Americans would think of her as stereotypical.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Kazooie can be very confusing, given her brash character and utter lack of feminine traits. Rareware apparently got sick of it though, since the Revival gave her a few Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
  • Many players have mistaken Terry from Banjo-Tooie as a female, since he gets mad because he thinks you've stolen his eggs, and no gender is immediately given, you'd think that he laid the eggs and is the female. But according to the game's instruction manual, as well as some random dialogue from Zombie Jingaling, Terry's wife has left him, and therefore he is very protective of the eggs.
• The Woobie:
  • Gobi, a camel who just wants to find some water and a quiet place to rest, is constantly suffering abuse from our eponymous heroes and Gruntilda's mooks for some reason or another. By the time you see him locked up and put on display in a freak attraction at an amusement park in Banjo-Tooie and see that he's grown a very large gray beard, you can't help but want to cry for his constant misfortune despite the fact that it's necessary in order to progress.
  • King Jingaling also counts. The poor guy loses all of his subjects thanks to a giant tank that runs over part of his kingdom (one entire family of his subjects is killed in this way) and his reward for pointing Banjo and Kazooie in the right direction and giving them a Jiggy is to be zombified.
  • Klungo is an unrepentant villain who makes it clear that he doesn't regret anything he did while working for Grunty, but the sheer amount of abuse she put him through makes you feel more than a little sorry for the big guy.