How’d It Age #9 – Banjo-Tooie

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Originally Released On: N64
  • Platform: Xbox 360

When I pulled this one off my random list I realized that I don’t think I’d ever played it. I played the original for sure, and I definitely played Donkey Kong 64, but this one missed me for some reason. Going back and playing these kinds of games given the progression of the platformer genre is always interesting, and this one is definitely not an exception. However, I do think it’s showing its age at this point for a few specific reasons.

Within the context of 3D platformer games, it’s important to remember when this one came out. With it coming out at the tail end of 2000, it came out a little bit after some big hitters in the Crash Bandicoot triology and the first two Spyro games on PlayStation and the first Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast. However, it was also closely followed only a year later by the first Jak and Daxter and Sonic Adventure 2, and two years ahead of Super Mario Sunshine, Ratchet & Clank, and the first Sly Cooper title. Sitting where it is you can see it as a bit of a transition title where it showed off possibly the peak of what its hardware set was capable of. However, the 2001-2002 titles definitely show where Banjo was limited.

The first thing that really stands out is the act of traversing hrough the world. It feels absolutely glacial compared to modern games. It’s not even that it feels bad because it has plenty of weight and appropriate momentum. It just feels like there’s so much downtime going from important spot to spot. The games that came out immediately after it just had such better pace to their movement that really showed a generational leap in the act of traversal.

Jak leaned into a traditional collectathon platformer setup, but was just faster. You could rip through environments in a hurry collecting things at a high pace. Part of it was that the environments in Jak were just more visually crowded thanks to the hardware jump. However, they were also more vertical and more compact, so going to collect things had less down time. Sly Cooper on the other hand had larger levels, but encouraged the player to rapidly move in the shadows so more often than not the player wasn’t slowed down by interactions with NPCs. Ratchet and Clank had the slower movement but fed the gameplay with weapons to make moment to moment gameplay more impactful. Those three all took advantage of the better hardware to make different kinds of platformer gameplay that to me all have aged better than Banjo by simply having the player always be engaged in something.

The second thing that stood out to me was how much the game causes the player to spend time retraversing for small rewards. Obviously retraversing due to upgrades isn’t something I inherently dislike since I love Metroidvania titles. However, retraversal in those games often unlocks large swaths of new territory to run through. Retraversal here is because of small reasons that don’t necessarily feel rewarding. Talking to a mole to learn how to ground pound in a different way than your base ground pound just so you can break rocks to get jiggys feels like it’s just slowing your progress to make the game longer. Finding a magic spot that requires you to find and wander around as Mumbo Jumbo that simply causes a door to open feels like it’s significantly longer than necessary just to make the game longer. It’s all just low-reward ways to push progression that take longer than feels necessary.

Ultimately, newer games have really smoothed out things like this to increase game pace. The Mario games have always had individual stars be impactful. However, Mario Odyssey went inherently collectathon and smoothed things out by making sure the required powers were always incredibly nearby, reducing the need to run around. Ratchet & Clank literally just let you carry and swap everything at any time. Games like A Hat in Time kept some of the open nature of Banjo while reducing clutter to make the experience more streamlined. Even at the time, series like Spyro were compartmentalizing collecting into smaller more varied worlds that were less focused on powers and more focused on fun environmental interactions. These games have all resulted in better aging gameplay than the slow pace of Banjo.

All that said, it’s not like this game has aged to a place where it’s unplayable. It’s still a game that’s pretty easy to fall into. You can easily pop this in, play for an hour or two, and make meaningful progress. Playing at that pace – where you kind of come back to the game periodically – fits this game much better than treating it as a front to back experience. I think that’s the big distinction between Banjo and more modern experiences. This feels like a Sunday afternoon title, where modern games feel like they’re built as better continuous play experiences. I don’t think that’s all that accidental, and I think that’s ultimately a symptom of the industry’s growth out of the arcade. I think you can generally follow games from the NES to roughly the start of the PS2 era and see each generation moving further away from standalone or quick play experiences to something that can be played over longer continuous sessions. Games simply got better at being interesting for a continuous time, rather than being interesting in short bursts.

If this one does interest you, absolutely play the Xbox version. It’s on game pass, on the 360, on the Xbox One, on the Series consoles and it has a bunch of important improvements. Get it as part of Rare Replay and you’re going to have even more fun games to play alongside it. Framerate and resolution are the obvious boosts, but playing on something other than the N64 controller is a huge improvement on its own. Make this one your non-serious gap filler and you’re going to be in good shape.

Game Ramblings #139 – Blue Dragon

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Xbox 360

Blue Dragon is an interesting one. It was Mistwalker’s big debut game, bringing all the hype of having a bunch of high level ex-Square folks on it. It was coming to a weird platform for the genre, but with a bunch of marketing behind it courtesy of Microsoft. It was also a distinctly classic JRPG, going with a straight turn-based approach at a time when Final Fantasy XII was moving the genre in a different direction. At the time of release I had gotten through a decent chunk of it, but kind of fell away and I wanted to re-up my memory of it in order to jump into the DS sequels. Given its age, it still plays remarkably well, though it’s not without its problems.

Being quite honest, both it aging well AND it having problems comes down to its combat. This is a classic job-class system paired with a classic turn-based combat system, so there’s not much of a barrier to entry here. Your job determines your skills, your turn order determines the strategy in terms of what you kill first, etc. Where this really works well is in the small wrinkles they brought to each system.

On the job class side, you have a typical JRPG character level AND a job rank. This had been seen before, but it was implemented well here. The rank determines what skills are available to you, for example later job ranks of the black mage class allow you to use level 1, 2, 3, etc black magic spells. However, the nice wrinkle here is that you can equip skills you’ve earned while playing a different class.

Where this worked well for me was in mix and matching my melee and ranged characters. On the melee front, I focused on a specific class for each, but also made sure they had trained to at least level 11 in monk and swordsmen. This granted them the capability to do charged attacks as well as absorb HP on melee attacks. For my two ranged, I again had a focus on white/black mage, but I also let them play some time in the opposing class, as well as mixing in some early levels of other classes to give a bit of variety in terms of my skill layout. This variety allowed me to do a really fine-tuned class structure for how I wanted to approach combat, rather than being restricted to one specific thing at a time. This definitely felt better than a lot of earlier approaches to job systems where I often felt locked into specific roles because of their importance to the overall combat structure.

The turn order system within combat was also something I ended up enjoying a lot, especially as I tuned my party setup a bit. At its basic level, turn order seems static. However, as you start gaining charge attacks – both the melee charge I was doing through the monk class, as well as magic attacks – you start gaining a lot of ability to mess with the turn order. The tl;dr here is that the longer you charge an attack, the stronger the attack is, but at the cost of the attack firing later in the turn order as well as it having a longer recovery. However, the charges each have a red zone where you gain reduced cost and increased recovery if you nail the timing just right.

Being able to hit those timed zones, as well as the ability to manipulate where in the turn order you’re attacking becomes incredibly powerful, as well as a nice thing to break up the typical monotony of turn-based JRPGs. If you’re in a large trash fight, you can mess with the turn order a bit to try and line up a bunch of damage to take out targets before they can go. Against bosses, you can decide to reduce your charge a bit or defend with the mages to make sure that you have a white mage lined up immediately. This kind of variety is really key to me about why this game has aged so well. Every fight can be its own little mini strategy session to maximize how well you come out of it. You can go through trash fights with goals of reducing damage you take, rather than just going through the motions of killing things for XP. On boss fights, you add layers of strategy that act as little mini sessions between boss turns to try and keep your party safe enough to get by. It all just works really well.

What didn’t really work well is the same sin that way too many JRPGs suffer from – the end boss run is a slog. So many JRPGs fall into a trap where they have pretty decent power curves that keep users at a relatively stable difficulty level throughout the game, then at the end of the game you get thrown in a multi-phase marathon of bosses that kind of forces you to either have the perfect party or be overpowered, and this game isn’t an exception.

The specific problem I had with the end boss in this one is that it suddenly shifted into a setup where the boss was running significant MP drain. It’s not that I dislike the mechanic, but it hadn’t really shown up much to this point so I wasn’t overly prepared to counter it. The MP heal items are next to useless at the level of MP in play at this point in the game, so the real answer is to use the black mage extraction spells. This worked great on my black mage, but didn’t work so well on my white/support mage who I hadn’t trained up to this point. A white mage without the ability to heal is kind of bad news. Ultimately I was able to get pretty far in the fight, but ran out of mana and hit the point where I wasn’t able to keep healing enough while also balancing MP extraction/MP items and wiped. In general this has a pretty easy answer – go back and grind a bit to get the class levels necessary to have the extraction. However, at that point I’d also be gaining standard levels, and more than likely instead of grinding the job class up, I’d be grinding my entire party up enough to likely overpower the boss fight just in general. This also came after over an hour of OTHER boss fights and cutscenes that I frankly didn’t have problems with and didn’t want to roll through again.

This kind of rapid escalation at the end of the game has always felt cheap to me. It feels like it’s there just to squeeze out a few more hours of game time. Ultimately it’s just a punishment and massive interruption to the player at a point where they should be hitting the peak of the story. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth putting a game back on the shelf when it ends this way instead of remembering what had been good for the countless hours beforehand. More often than not, JRPGs I flag as my favorites of all time end with smooth difficulty and appropriate challenge instead of rapid escalation and a time extending ass kicking. It’s kind of funny playing this one now though, because one of the final bosses in Mistwalker’s latest title Fantasian had similar problems, where it was extremely difficult the first time I played it, but trivialized by equipping posion nullification equipment. Unfortunately Blue Dragon landed on the wrong side for me where it was ultimately a flip of the dice that my party was just built in a different direction that didn’t work out for the last fight.

Ultimately though, this was a fun game to play through and it got me to my goal of remembering the story well enough to move forward with the sequels. A lot of JRPGs generally haven’t aged that well (I’m looking at you PS1 Final Fantasy games), so finding one that still has far more good than bad to it is always a nice surprise. It’s also nice that this one has aged far better than my last 360 look back, so not all hope is lost for digging into my backlog a bit. This one is still floating around the Microsoft store on backwards compatibility for both the Xbox One and Xbox Series* so if JRPGs are your thing, go ahead and take a peak at what’s there.

Shelved It #10 – Infinite Undiscovery

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Xbox 360 via Series X compatibility

This is one that was sort of floating around in the ether for me for a long time. It’s a JRPG from a company (tri-Ace) that I’ve tended to like, but historically has had a lot of ups and downs. Critically, this one was definitely one of their down moments. It has decent combat, but the mechanics around it are often pretty questionable leading to a vague, if not frustrating experience that ends up feeling less like skill and more like trial and error grinding.

The core combat of this one typically would be fine for me to keep wanting to play. It’s action-based, but distinctly a JRPG in terms of stats, buffs, debuffs, etc. Where there’s simplicity in controls, there’s a lot of depth in their use. For example, different combos (A-B, A-A-B, etc) can have different results. Some are knockups, allowing you to juggle your enemy in the air. Some are knockdowns. Some are AoE attacks. Learning which to use at the right time is core to effective combat and has really good overall combat rhythm. You can also link with your active party members and use skills related to them. It can be a bit awkward in the 15+ year old game sense, but more often than not it works well.

Where the game really falls apart is in the specific mechanics often tied to a dungeon.

For example, the first dungeon in the game requires you to mind control two specific enemies to a door as sacrifices to unlock it. In isolation, that’s a really cool idea. However, it requires a few things – the knowledge that one of your party members has an ability that can mind control enemies, the knowledge that it can be used to do more than talk to NPC animals, and then the luck to have them actually hit the ability. There’s a bunch of things in that list of things that you just kind of have to accidentally stumble upon, because they don’t teach you.

However, the fight that ultimately did me in was one that I thought was obvious, but just downright frustrating – and as it turned out, was not obvious. I was fighting a boss that could go in and out of visibility on a timer that could lead to my failure. Of note, this was only the second time I was fighting one of these types of battles. The main character has a flute that could bring the boss out of the invis state, allowing the party to attack….except the main character could not attack him. I figured this was intended, and was just frustrated at my AI characters inconsistently attacking. Due to AI issues, I ran out of time and hit a game over, losing me a bunch of time of backtracking in the process. Looking online afterwards, it turns out that my main character had gained a skill that allowed him to attack these shifting enemies, and I had gained it almost 20 levels earlier. Didn’t know it had that secret power, sure as hell never saw it in the description or had any reason to care about it when I earned it 5+ hours ago. Now that I knew about the mechanic? Trivial fight.

It’s that level of inconsistency that follows with other tri-Ace releases. Games like the previous Star Ocean, which had really fun combat but was mechanically inconsistent surrounding it. Games like Resonance of Fate, that had interesting weapon mechanics, but pretty rough story and visuals. This one shows its bad side in those forced mechanics. They don’t make the game more fun or interesting or better. They don’t bring a level of inherent skill to the fights. They simply provide a guessing game of which thing you have in your possession that you never quite read the description of, or never quite saw the meaning of, or got hours ago and forgot existed. Once you figure out the mechanic, it’s easy, but until then it’s a wild guess, and honestly just not worth playing.