In today’s discussion, we’ll be deep diving into Spiral Mountain, collecting music notes and getting Jiggy with it, as we head into the world of Banjo-Kazooie on the Game Boy Advance with Banjo-Kazooie Grunty’s Revenge. This is the fantastic GBA game that did a sterling job in bringing N64 style 3D platforming to Nintendo’s 32-bit handheld, but is somewhat lost to time, having never been rereleased or got the kudus I think it deserves.
So, welcome to Rare Treats episode 1! I’m ready to talk some Mumbo Jumbo as we head into the Game Boy Advance and Banjo-Kazooie Grunty’s Revenge!
In the early days of 3D video games, there was perhaps no bigger and more important genre than the 3D platformer. Super Mario 64 was the killer app for the Nintendo 64, and all the competition had to try to play catch up with that game. Sony PlayStation got Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, and the Sega Saturn got Nights Into Dreams and Sonic Xtreme…or at least they tried really hard to get Sonic Xtreme, but failed to get a true 3D Sonic game off the ground until Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. The point is that it was seen as vitally important to have a winning 3D platformer to rival Nintendo’s masterpiece in Super Mario 64.
As it turned out, for all the attempts that the likes of Gex and Croc, and Bubsy 3D trying to be up there with Mario, the best Mario alternative also came from camp Nintendo in the form of Rareware’s Banjo-Kazooie.
When it released in 1998, I was convinced it was a Super Mario 64 beater, and for me, it was exactly the 3D platformer that I expected from the guys who had made the Donkey Kong Country series. Huge amounts of humour and personality, googly eyed characters and fantastic creative gameplay that was a joy to play.
Famously, Banjo-Kazooie teased its sequel, Banjo-Tooie, within its ending, and fans were desperate for more. Technically, Banjo-Kazooie has two direct sequels. The first of course, is Banjo-Tooie, which release on Nintendo 64 in late 2000 in the US and we didn’t get it here in the UK until I think March 2001 as one of the final N64 games released for the platform.
The other game of course, was this. Banjo-Kazooie Grunty’s Revenge is set between Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, and so is actually more of a direct sequel to the first game that leads into Banjo-Tooie. This along with Banjo Pilot were two Banjo games released for the Game Boy Advance, but whilst both were announced before Rare were sold to Microsoft, neither released until a fair bit after, and in the UK at least, they were released by THQ.
And yes, I do know that Banjo Pilot was originally Diddy Kong Pilot, so that wasn’t even originally intended to be a Banjo game.
In Grunty’s Revenge you are faced with Klungo desperately trying to save Grunty from under the boulder she was squished under at the end of the first game. Then the story unfolds that her ghost will inhabit a mecha version of herself and she then time travels to the past and kidnaps Kazooie…I think with the plan to stop her own fate from the first game. I’ll be honest, this could have been a great Terminator like story where you have to save baby Banjo or Kazooie and had lots of time travel elements and references to the future games, but it doesn’t really unfold that way.
I mean, why take Kazooie to the past instead of just kill her there? It would be like Arnold Schwarzenegger arriving in Terminator 2 with the adult John Conner and saying ‘this is you as a little boy, now watch as I terminate him’. It would have just been redundant to take the older one back!
Luckily Mumbo Jumbo is there to use his magic and send you back to the past to rescue Kazooie.
And this is where the game gets interesting. For the first entire world you’ll only play as Banjo. It takes a good long while before you are reunited with Kazooie and this does give you that Banjo-Tooie experience of just playing as Banjo alone.
What’s strange is that you can complete the first level I think with everything collected despite not having Kazooie. Wouldn’t it have made more sense that you can only do so much without her and once reunited you then have to go back through the stage again and this time feel overpowered that now you can run faster, fly and have extra attacks thanks to Kazooie? I mean maybe it’s a good thing that they didn’t do that as after all, Rare were heavily criticised for Donkey Kong 64 needing players to revisit stages over and over with different characters.
In the game, it still very much follows the formula from the first game. You go about themed levels collecting jiggies and music notes, and you will also get a Mumbo Jumbo token so you can transform into other things. This includes the likes of a squid, a mouse and a candle. Unlike on Banjo Kazooie you can choose which of the transformations you want on any stage, and again this feels underutilised as it could have been a way to access new areas on earlier levels once you’ve unlocked new transformations, but it doesn’t lean into this.
It’s also of note that the Mumbo tokens are awarded when you beat a level’s boss rather than just finding the tokens hidden about on the levels like you would on the first game. Oh, and when you do get a Mumbo token, the icon used for them on the game is a thing of nightmares…
This is also strange then that you are expected to continue searching the level after beating the boss and this feels a bit anticlimactic. You could get jiggies mostly in any order on the original game and so face the boss of a level early, but this game definitely makes it so the boss fights aren’t the final challenge.
The beach themed level Breegull Beach feels just like the opening level of Banjo Kazooie, and having swamp and haunted house kind of areas in Bad Magic Bayou and Spiller’s Harbor also feels so familiar. They did a great job of making this play exactly like the full 3D games even though this is just played from an isometric view.
Instead of meeting Bottles the mole to teach you new moves as you do in the first game, you meet Bozzeye, which is a pun on him being boss eyed I guess, which like bottlesis another joke made at the fact that as underground dwelling creatures, moles have very poor eyesight. This would continue with Jamjars in Banjo Tooie.
Just like in the other games in the series you’ll occasionally meet characters who will require you to complete a fetch quest to get a jiggy, or you’ll come up to a mini game to complete. In the game there are either target based shooting mini games, or ones that are basically fishing based, but may be that you’re fishing for sheep.
Having the transformations also provide variations to the gameplay, and there is one puzzle where Canle version of Banjo has to light certain small candles in front of picture frames, and this took me a while to solve as I couldn’t figure out the logic of it. Through trial and error though I got there in the end.
I’m truly impressed how much the game stays true to the original game, and can’t really think of almost any cut ideas. You won’t be flying around as Kazooie, but can still swim underwater. Fortunately, there aren’t big underwater sections, as frankly, I have almost always disliked swimming sections in pretty much every game. Mario, Banjo, Tomb Raider, Zelda, Sonic…whenever you’re underwater, it just makes things slower, more difficult to control and harder to explore.
Bozzeye will slowly build up your moves as you collect enough music notes to pay for them. Throughout the game you’ll gain the ability to use Kazooie as a shot gun and get various different types of egg ammo. This includes regular, ice, fire and electric and these are used for various puzzles and enemies along the way.
You don’t get to explore Grunty’s lair like you do in the original game and when you go there right at the end it just takes you into the final challenges. Once again though, this feels like a missed opportunity for this being a time travel story, as when you first go in there you should have met the original non mecha Grunty and had to fight her. They could have also had the younger and mecha Grunty’s team up against you, or they could have done something fun with the time travel element and had a fight with young Grunty explain why she has always had it in for Banjo and Kazooie. That would have taken things into paradox territory, but would have been a fun way to use the time travel story.
I’m sad to say that there are no Stop N Swop features in the game, or any references that I can find. Stop N Swop was something said in the first game that would have played into Banjo-Tooie where you’d be able to swap carts between the two games to unlock hidden items in Banjo-Kazooie. As Nintendo updated the N64 hardware, this became impossible, and so its features were never really implements in the way originally intended. An updated version of these mechanics were later implemented into Banjo Kazooie and Tooie’s ports to the Xbox, and these were then tied into the release of Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts.
You have to believe that if Rare had stayed with Nintendo, Banjo Kazooie Grunty’s Revenge would have been perfect to make compatible with the then expected Banjo-Threeie on the GameCube, and that Grunty’s Revenge could have connected to the home console versions through the GBA-GameCube link cable.
I still have my original Game Boy Advance Banjo Kazooie Grunty’s Revenge cartridge, but weirdly considering how much I like the original game, it’s taken me until recently to actually play it properly. I think the Banjo franchise suffered something of an early and unfortunate demise of sorts as a late N64 game, Banjo Tooie was mostly overshadowed by the launch of the PS2 and the final days of the Dreamcast, so poor Banjo didn’t have the same impact as the original adventure did. Then of course the sale probably left a lot of fans of the original games still in camp Nintendo and when, years later Rare did release Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts it was such a radically different game, with angled graphics that to many people completely lost the charm of the original games. It was also much more of a vehicle customisation and racingish game and only had small platforming sections, so basically was Banjo-Kazooie in name only.
I did get Grunty’s Revenge when it came out, but maybe some of the excitement for the release was gone now Rare had left Nintendo. Also, truthfully, it’s taken me years to really get into Banjo-Tooie. I think Rare kept thinking bigger and bigger with their game worlds and collect-a-thons and asked themselves can they go bigger rather than should they go bigger. After Donkey Kong 64, I was disappointed that Banjo Tooie was another ginormous interconnected world instead of the tight manageable playgrounds of the original. Well, playing Grunty’s Revenge recently, I was pleased to find that this game is much more like the original than it is its sequel.
This is of course probably down to the Game Boy Advance putting some limitations of how huge each level could be, but for me this game feels much more like the original than Tooie.
I’ve always considered myself to be a big fan of Banjo, as well as all things Rare, but somehow this one had always fallen to the back burner. I am pleased to have taken the time to go through it and discover
What would you rate this game?
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