Coded Rules vs Implicit Rules
I've played all of Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, and Grunty's Revenge, and the three of them together were interesting for illustrating just how important the rules a developers holds themselves to are, just how intertwined they are with the explicitly coded rules, and how a failure to recognize this can go badly awry.
Banjo-Kazooie has Notes. There's 100 Notes per world, and you need to collect Notes to be able to progress in the game. In its original N64 incarnation, the approach to Note collection is a high score approach; if you collect 90 Notes and then leave a world, the game credits you 90 Notes. If you go back and collect the 10 Notes you didn't collect the first time... that does nothing for you. You'll need to collect all 100 at once.
This is the most explicit example of a larger pattern of design with Banjo-Kazooie; much of the challenge of the game isn't in completing worlds at all, but completing them efficiently, in one run, with no deaths. In fact, with a single partial exception every world in Banjo-Kazooie can be 100% completed in one go through the world the first time you can access it; the one exception is that Gobi's Desert and Freezeezy Peak each have a skill unlock that's required to complete the other, and so you can do either of them in one go but you can't do both of them in one go in the same file.
Banjo-Tooie brings back Notes (Albeit tweaked into 16 Note Nests worth 5 Notes apiece plus a Treble Clef worth 20), but it's made major changes to the assumptions of how worlds work and so in turn has to make changes to the explicit rules of the game: specifically, once you've collected a given Note Nest/Treble Clef, it's collected permanently. After all, in Banjo-Tooie the worlds are not so cleanly separated as in Banjo-Kazooie, and often it's intended to be outright impossible to get some of the collectibles from a world when you first get proper access to it, demanding you enter some later world and use a path that takes you from that world to the earlier world. Sometimes you also visit a world early through such a path, before you ever get access to the main entrance, in which case you only get to explore a small part of the world. This whole dynamic makes is unacceptable for the game to demand you do everything at once in a world. At most a single challenge might fail to allow permanent partial progress.
Grunty's Revenge is where things get odd.
Grunty's Revenge has single, self-contained worlds and has only one case of so much as being forced to backtrack with a new ability to achieve full completion. Excepting Spiral Mountain itself, the worlds essentially follows Kazooie design logic, yet Tooie-style permanent collection is the mechanical rule and trivializes much of the challenge and skill in acquiring the Jinjo Jiggies and all the Notes. (To be entirely fair Grunty's Revenge also makes it extremely easy to die, and its Spiral Mountain would be obnoxious using Kazooie-type rules) More precisely, mapping a route for efficiently and safely collecting all Notes and/or Jinjos in a single sitting requires planning and skill to conceive and successfully implement, and is a legitimately enjoyable challenge in its own right. (This is the primary fun factor of Banjo-Kazooie, with the rest of the gameplay being fairly simple and easy) As a result, Grunty's Revenge is basic and boring; just wander around collecting things and fighting things until you've beaten the game, with no larger aspect to tie these individual sequences together into something more compelling.
This was also a bit of an issue with Banjo-Tooie, but it was trying to do something new and interesting that made the old model impossible. It's unfortunate that the 'magic' was lost in its case, but it was purposeful, and if it had managed to get new 'magic' it would've been a worthwhile shift. Grunty's Revenge is much closer to 'Banjo-Kazooie, but scaled down for the Game Boy Advance, and then just cut out the magic to boot'.
An additional wrinkle: I've never played the re-release of Banjo-Kazooie for the Xbox One, but it makes the very strange decision to make Note collection permanent just like in Banjo-Tooie and Grunty's Revenge, a fact I'm aware of because this led to a glitch where the game could outright eat your Notes by Bottles' puzzle sequences. Maybe I'd change my tune if I played the game myself, but I can't help but feel like someone missed the memo on what made Banjo-Kazooie so compelling, especially since this is consistent with Grunty's Revenge's misstep.
Banjo-Kazooie has Notes. There's 100 Notes per world, and you need to collect Notes to be able to progress in the game. In its original N64 incarnation, the approach to Note collection is a high score approach; if you collect 90 Notes and then leave a world, the game credits you 90 Notes. If you go back and collect the 10 Notes you didn't collect the first time... that does nothing for you. You'll need to collect all 100 at once.
This is the most explicit example of a larger pattern of design with Banjo-Kazooie; much of the challenge of the game isn't in completing worlds at all, but completing them efficiently, in one run, with no deaths. In fact, with a single partial exception every world in Banjo-Kazooie can be 100% completed in one go through the world the first time you can access it; the one exception is that Gobi's Desert and Freezeezy Peak each have a skill unlock that's required to complete the other, and so you can do either of them in one go but you can't do both of them in one go in the same file.
Banjo-Tooie brings back Notes (Albeit tweaked into 16 Note Nests worth 5 Notes apiece plus a Treble Clef worth 20), but it's made major changes to the assumptions of how worlds work and so in turn has to make changes to the explicit rules of the game: specifically, once you've collected a given Note Nest/Treble Clef, it's collected permanently. After all, in Banjo-Tooie the worlds are not so cleanly separated as in Banjo-Kazooie, and often it's intended to be outright impossible to get some of the collectibles from a world when you first get proper access to it, demanding you enter some later world and use a path that takes you from that world to the earlier world. Sometimes you also visit a world early through such a path, before you ever get access to the main entrance, in which case you only get to explore a small part of the world. This whole dynamic makes is unacceptable for the game to demand you do everything at once in a world. At most a single challenge might fail to allow permanent partial progress.
Grunty's Revenge is where things get odd.
Grunty's Revenge has single, self-contained worlds and has only one case of so much as being forced to backtrack with a new ability to achieve full completion. Excepting Spiral Mountain itself, the worlds essentially follows Kazooie design logic, yet Tooie-style permanent collection is the mechanical rule and trivializes much of the challenge and skill in acquiring the Jinjo Jiggies and all the Notes. (To be entirely fair Grunty's Revenge also makes it extremely easy to die, and its Spiral Mountain would be obnoxious using Kazooie-type rules) More precisely, mapping a route for efficiently and safely collecting all Notes and/or Jinjos in a single sitting requires planning and skill to conceive and successfully implement, and is a legitimately enjoyable challenge in its own right. (This is the primary fun factor of Banjo-Kazooie, with the rest of the gameplay being fairly simple and easy) As a result, Grunty's Revenge is basic and boring; just wander around collecting things and fighting things until you've beaten the game, with no larger aspect to tie these individual sequences together into something more compelling.
This was also a bit of an issue with Banjo-Tooie, but it was trying to do something new and interesting that made the old model impossible. It's unfortunate that the 'magic' was lost in its case, but it was purposeful, and if it had managed to get new 'magic' it would've been a worthwhile shift. Grunty's Revenge is much closer to 'Banjo-Kazooie, but scaled down for the Game Boy Advance, and then just cut out the magic to boot'.
An additional wrinkle: I've never played the re-release of Banjo-Kazooie for the Xbox One, but it makes the very strange decision to make Note collection permanent just like in Banjo-Tooie and Grunty's Revenge, a fact I'm aware of because this led to a glitch where the game could outright eat your Notes by Bottles' puzzle sequences. Maybe I'd change my tune if I played the game myself, but I can't help but feel like someone missed the memo on what made Banjo-Kazooie so compelling, especially since this is consistent with Grunty's Revenge's misstep.
The implicit rules are important, and yet they're so easy to overlook. It's entirely possible to play a game and think to yourself 'it's got the mechanics, it's got the art style, the music... but it's missing something. It's just not fun like the previous one was.' It's easy to notice that Doom 3 changed the weapon physics, made the graphics true 3D, incorporated the need to reload periodically... it's a lot harder to pin down that Doom 3 abandons the original Doom's design of picking and choosing your fights, rationing out your ammo for the nasties you feel you can't avoid and don't want to fight 'honestly', and evade some of the nasty fights entirely, and as a result replaces a tremendous amount of depth with a surprisingly shallow experience.
The Banjo-Kazooie series having a particularly clear case where the explicit rules are so clearly shaped by the larger game design initially and then the purpose is lost is unusual, but helpful for thinking about this kind of thing.
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