adjl posted...
This is actually what I
liked
about Tooie over Kazooie. In BK, there's exactly one Jiggy that requires backtracking in a given playthrough (either the one in Freezeezy that requires the running shoes or the one in Gobi that requires Beak Bomb, depending on where you go first). The game is presented as mostly linear series of self-contained levels, with no particular reason to explore between them. They're all fine levels, but you're never thinking about how the world as a whole fits together, and I just like the vibe of having to do that better. Certainly, some of Tooie went a bit
too
far in that direction, but I still prefer that over having virtually none of it at all.
Really, though, comparing Tooie to Kazooie is like comparing Metroid to Megaman: Neither is intrinsically better than the other, but they're structured very differently overall and therefore satisfy different things that people want out of their action platformers.
I mean, the problem that Rare ran into with both DK64 and BT was not in concept, but execution. The idea of going back to solve a puzzle with a new ability and having worlds interconnected where doing something in one world affects another is really cool. I was excited for that concept in BT when it was announced.
But so often it wasn't anything that really challenged you or made you puzzle, it was just mindless running back and forth.
DK64 was the big offender here, because you would constantly have things like a string of bananas that were keyed to Diddy Kong lead you to a door that could only be opened with Lanky Kong's gun, which led to a room with a puzzle that could only be solved by Donkey Kong, necessitating multiple trips back to swap barrels to solve puzzles (if you could even remember where it was after you'd explored and decided to go back with the other Kong). But BT did that too - again, there were lots of times where all you were doing was going and finding a split-up pad or a Mumbo/Wumba hut so you could press one button, then go back and switch back to do the next step, which was all wasted time. If you could press a button to transform on the spot, it would take out a lot of the tedium.
I mean, Zelda and Metroid are series that have historically handled backtracking well and made it feel rewarding; when BT did it, it just felt like a slog. That's not how you want people to feel playing your game.
World design played into this as well, because BK's worlds were very cleverly designed. All of them had these big landmarks that anchored "regions" in the level. In Freezeezy Peak, for instance, you had the Snowman, Boggy's Igloo, Mumbo's Hut, Wozza's Cave, and the Christmas Tree. In Bubblegloop Swamp, you had the treetop village, the reed maze, Tanktup, and Mr. Vile's lair. The levels were small enough to be loaded all at once on N64 hardware, so you could typically see the landmarks of where you wanted to go from wherever you were in the level, which made the levels easy to learn the layout of and if you ever got lost, it was not hard to find your way back to a landmark you knew to get your bearings. DK64 and BT had to break up their worlds with loading zones and/or tunnels, because they were too big for the N64 to have all of the level loaded at once, which made the levels much more difficult to mentally map out.
Finally, the way that BT used its notes was bizarre. BK used musical notes brilliantly, seemingly taking cues from Mario 64's coins but being even more explicit with it, because they were used to mark pathways to unexplored areas. Since you were required to pick up notes to progress, you wanted to gather as many as possible, and seeing uncollected ones would therefore lead you to new areas and serve as a marker of where you had and had not yet been.
DK64 did something similar, but because of the nonsensical way they used them (mismatching banana colours with the Kongs that would actually be needed to solve the puzzle at the end of them), they were not nearly as useful at guiding players, especially with the greater emphasis on backtracking and the fact they didn't respawn. If you gathered all the bananas as, say, Tiny and it led to a Chunky puzzle and/or a puzzle that required an ability you didn't have yet, you would leave and when it came time to return, the bananas wouldn't be there to show you the way anymore. If Rare had actually used the bananas sensibly (i.e. Diddy bananas leading to Diddy puzzles, Chunky bananas leading to Chunk puzzles, etc.) and had them respawn as "ghost" bananas after they'd been collected, it would have solved a lot of the game's issues.
But BT was where they really dropped the ball on this. Despite the fact that the worlds were way more massive, they kept the same 100 notes per world, but grouped them into clusters of 5 (and one of 20), so there were only 17 pick-ups per world (and, like DK64, they didn't respawn). That made them too few and far between to be useful in guiding players (and the same backtracking issue from DK64 was present, compounding the problem). Even more annoying, because enemies respawned after some time had passed, you couldn't even use their presence to guide you to unexplored areas.
Banjo Kazooie did a lot of things subtly right that its successors both just flubbed. It's annoying, because if you tweak just a couple of mechanical things, it would vastly improve both games.