Banjo-Kazooie: Ranking Every Level From Worst To Best

To put it plainly, Banjo-Kazooie is quite possibly the best 3D platform game ever made.

It took everything that Super Mario 64 had done two years prior and improved upon it. The controls, the camera, graphics, music, story - everything was leaps and bounds better than any previous offering in the genre.

But this was Rareware's M.O. back then - create the best looking, best sounding, and best feeling games on the market. They did it with Donkey Kong Country in the early 90s, and they did it again with Banjo-Kazooie in the late 90s.

And today, with Banjo hype at an all-time high thanks to his recent reveal as a DLC character for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, I figured now would be a good time to revisit the game that made him a legend. After recently completing the game, I can confidently say - without an ounce of nostalgic bias - that this still holds up better than just about anything on the N64.

In fact, it's just as good as it always has been.

Now that I have sold you on replaying the game yourself, let's examine each level individually. Not counting Gruntilda's Lair, Spiral Mountain, Grunty's Furnace Fun, nor the Final Battle with Gruntilda, here is every level in Banjo-Kazooie ranked from worst to best.

Spiking up the difficulty in the later stages of a game is one thing, but Rusty Bucket Bay borders on cruelty.

To begin, the level is called "Rusty Bucket Bay," yet there is only one ramp to get onto the "Rusty Bucket" ship, which means that you'll often have to go all the way around the circumference of the level to get back onto it. Also, the murky water depletes your air supply twice as quickly and, if that wasn't enough, makes you lose air when your head is above water (because that makes sense, right?).

Aside from this, the level has un-killable Grimlets that bite you if you go even sort of near them, random windows that you have to break to get Notes and other items, and the f***ing engine room.

Much like Ocarina of Time's Water Temple, the engine room of Rusty Bucket Bay is the bane of every Banjo-Kazooie player's existence. In this unforgiving hellscape of quickly-rotating platforms, pipes, and propellers, if Banjo and Kazooie fall off even once, they're dead. And just when you think your punishment has ended, the end of the section sees Banjo hit a switch, activating a quicktime event that sees the player rush through the unsteady section they just tiptoed through. You then have to climb up a long ladder, Talon Trot over to the stern of the ship and go beneath the muck to collect a Jiggy behind the boat's propellers, all in just over a minute.

If you can't do it, the propellers will - you guessed it - kill you instantly.

There's no mercy to this level, and it's easily the worst offering that this game has to offer.