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.
 * Breather Level: Mingy Jongo and Canary Mary notwithstanding, Cloud Cuckoo Land is nowhere near as difficult or confusing as the previous two levels.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: The final battle against Grunty in Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie.
 * Designated Hero - Kazooie in 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.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse:
 * Hot Grunty.
 * 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: Arguably, 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, to name a few.
 * Excuse Plot - Really, it's all just an excuse to make Banjo and Kazooie run around collecting Jiggies.
 * This is especially so in the intro to Nuts & Bolts; a New Character Ex Machina appears to help Banjo, Kazooie, and Grunty "settle their differences," by... throwing them into a new video game.
 * In fact, L.O.G. initially tosses them into a minigame in which the point is to collect more pointless objects than your opponent. Naturally, this scene unlocks an Achievement called "Pointless Collector."
 * Follow the Leader - The first game was basically a riff on the Super Mario 64 formula -- albeit a pretty frickin' good one. Nuts & Bolts took a sly dig at this.
 * 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 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 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.
 * Memetic Mutation: No one expected Jinjo.
 * fuckin' bitchass minjo
 * Moral Event Horizon: Gruntilda crosses it when she.
 * Most Annoying Sound: The Hotheads' laugh in Tooie.
 * Nightmare Fuel: See this page.
 * The Scrappy: Canary Mary and, to a lesser degree, Bottles.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * That One Boss - Grunty in both Kazooie and Tooie; Weldar and Mingy Jongo in Tooie.
 * That One Level - Rusty Bucket Bay, mainly due to the engine room.
 * Grunty Industries in 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.
 * Values Dissonance: Rare (a British company) having designed Humba Wumba as an extremely stereotypical Native American may be off putting to Americans.
 * 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, 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.