I don’t think vitriol is appropriate for Banjo-Kazooie except projecting towards the dead-end genre it helped solidify.
adventure game with light platforming and lots of wacky characters
This is right, and roughly the scope of the game’s ambitions, and it succeeds on those terms. Vast swathes of the SNES library are composed of games just like this: easy, brainless, attractive. Every time I pick up a SNES action-rpg or rpg or even most platformers (yes, I’m talking about Secret of Mana or Evermore or any of a million turn-based RPGs) I’m not getting excellent controls or tactical gameplay or resonant storytelling. I’m getting gamecruft, and I’m okay with that because it’s sometimes that’s ok. Games are active enough entertainment that we have an entire subset existed to unchallenging numbers and pictures and that’s where Banjo-Kazooie lives.
That said, I’d look down on anyone who wants to spend their time making a game like this because surely you can try to inject play into it?
I think that’s what I’ve been digging for here. I’ve played maybe 3 hours of YL and have encountered nothing of any real interest, and the disappointment is less the actual game (because I knew what I was getting into) but the lack of ambition by the developers. It’s like…the opposite of Shovel Knight, a game that genuinely relies heavily on nostalgia and yet is made by a loving team of developers who are willing to mess with the prescribed formulas for better results.
Also: this may be the reason why I got so mad about people hating on BK Nuts and Bolts. Don’t we all know by know that the BK route is a dead end? Rare actually gave a shit enough about their characters to try to make something new and fresh.
And the more I think about it, the more I feel like Nuts and Bolts is the true successor to the adventure platformer. It has all the same elements: wacky characters, bizarre environments, unlockable “moves” to progress through the story, pointless but satisfying minigames. But instead of unlocking new button combinations that are just obvious solutions to puzzles, you end up unlocking entirely new ways of thinking about movement through the world.
Anyway, thanks for wording it like this, I think you hit the nail on the head. For me at least.
oh shit I forgot about this game. I need to play that some day.
I backed a game called Scraps, which was like…a multiplayer deathmatch version of N&B. But it ended up being really boring…as I should have guessed from the description, really.
EDIT:
Oh shit we have to organize a party around this some time. It’s not out yet, but Q3 2017 is the target.
Besiege is neat as hell as a N&B follow up, yeah. I haven’t checked in on it in awhile, but last time I played, it just needed more challenges and such developed for it, but that is OK.
Robocraft
Galactic Junk League
Gear Up
From the Depths
Crossout
Homebrew
Scrap Mechanic
Machinecraft
Terra Tech
M.A.V.
Guns and Robots
Simple Planes
Literally just making lego cars and smashing them together
Kerbal Space Program
Starmade
Space Engineers
Empyrion
Gimbal
