Yooka-Laylee (2017) | More like a Banjo-Tooie successor than Kazooie

Yooka-Laylee’s reception perhaps has to do with the mismatch between anticipation and ambition. People expected Banjo-Kazooie—a simple, straightforward game built around the most basic, predictable, formulaic genre imaginable, which does not deviate from exactly what you expect it to do. In reality, Yooka-Laylee is more of a successor to Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64, as in, it’s more about the Metroidvania progression.

Banjo Kazooie also had a Metroidvania-style structure, where you learn new moves within each level and make a progression, but the stages themselves didn’t contain many challenges requiring moves you learn beyond that stage. It had some puzzle-like progression, but such gatekeeping was so few that such jiggies were more or less optional and easily memorized. Banjo-Tooie made the change where the entire game was designed to make you struggle for any progress. It’s why the sequel is divisive, because the whole game is a puzzle.

Every game genre has this division, this compass ranging from BOTW to Skyward Sword, from MGS1 to MGSV. You have one extreme of the collectathon genre with Super Mario Odyssey, which is about “do whatever you want”. That gives you all the fun moves from the beginning with no gatekeeping and allows the player to use all those moves to travel the world quickly to complete the stage on their own. The only thing blocking you is your skill. The other extreme of the genre is the puzzle platformer, which is about limiting the player to show a distant reward to look forward to. The stages are designed around the player progression. Banjo-Kazooie falls somewhere in between, which is why it appealed to many audiences.

I think Playtonic made a mistake in appealing to the Kazooie crowd that funded the campaign. These are not only the developers behind Kazooie, but also Tooie and Donkey Kong 64. With Yooka-Laylee, they were compelled to create an evolution of that latter formula because this is the normal gameplay loop. Purchasing a few moves from the snake per stage, the stage expansion system, and the number of inaccessible challenges that demand you to backtrack all overwhelm the player on the first visit. Half the time you explore, find something, but you can’t do anything. Then you go back and have to expand it to find that it was not even full all along. The stages gatekeep the player too much that at times the game comes across as Lego Star Wars. It constantly teases the player with the Pagies you can’t get, so you memorize them and backtrack to return hours later. You always come out of the worlds feeling like they are unfinished, unsatisfied. Completionists who like to do one-go will always feel their flow is disrupted because they are missing out half of the content of the world on their first visit.

Personally, I prefer the sandbox-type of Mario, where the game dumps all freedom, since I view a collectathon as not best suited for such puzzle-like progression, which is one of the reasons why I don’t like the Lego game. This would be all personal preference. I will say that obtaining each Pagie created much more satisfaction no power star or moon could provide. Each paper is not scattered as if they were thrown haphazardly, unlike Odyssey. Each Pagie felt special because you solve a unique challenge behind it, whether that is a small story or quest with interesting characters, a puzzle, platforming challenge, minigame, etc. There is a care to their placements. This makes the individual Pagies matter and valuable. As you are grown, you are making little incremental progress for each visit, and when the world is completed, the satisfaction is incredible. You know this feeling from the map-based games like classic Zelda, Resident Evil, and Metroid. The initial feeling of the world overhwelming you is gone once you are grown and eventually conquering the worlds.

With the direction this game has in mind, the big failing of this game is just the massive scale of the open-ended map, which doesn’t fit the type of progression this game goes for. The repeated playthroughs fit better for the small world, which makes going back and forth and backtracking tolerable and allows the player to keep track of inaccessible and accessible collectibles. Yooka Laylee’s inflated worlds don’t utilize the player movement. It’s just pressing the stick forward and rolling. Repeat. There is not much care put into the map designed around the traversal system. If the map size were reduced to two-thirds, this game would have seen a significant improvement.

So add in the lack of identifiable landmarks, it compounds confusion about where that damn snowman was, where that puzzle or challenge was… and then the initial lack of moveset and strict stamina meter making just searching for it a tedious slog. What is the purpose of the stamina meter for rolling? Is it just for power-up collectibles that exist for the progression? It exists to hinder the pacing and stretches out the playtime for no good reason. Why not make attack consume stamina instead, because at least that would have made me take a more careful approach to fighting enemies rather than mashing X.

There are many big design issues like that. It retains many of the problems present in Banjo, such as the combat being terrible, platforming itself being lackluster, a restrictive hubworld, and awful minigames, but I still enjoyed the game more than I expected. While playing it, I was bracing for the game to go terrible at any moment. I enjoyed World 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5… then I realized the game never went terrible. This is a fun collectathon romp with bumpy spots. In fact, I appreciated this more than many of the classic 3D platformers, and not just because of the nostalgia I have. I played the Banjo games relatively recently, and I didn’t think they were the masterpieces. They also had a share of frustrating bullshit (swimming, flying, platforming design), so as a whole, Yooka-Laylee was not a hard pill to swallow aside from th