Several Small Things About Yooka-Laylee I Want To Talk About
Sometimes, I can talk about a single game at lenght. Sometimes, I can talk about an aspect many games have in common, and link the way they are similar or different. Sometimes, I can write an entire article about a single aspect of a single game.
And sometimes, I have a lot of small things that I want to talk about on a single game, none of which deserve their own article.
So I can patch several of them into one big Franken-article. It’s my newsletter, you can’t stop me! (Actually, Franken-article was the writer…)
So let’s talk about Yooka-Laylee.
Let’s start with the primer. Yooka-Laylee is a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, a 3D platformer made by Playtonic, a company that includes a lot of ex-Rareware personal. It was released in 2017 to okay-ish acclaim, generally considered to be allright but worse than A Hat in Time, which released that same year and is generally considered to be the better game.
And the first thing I wanted to talk is this. I like Yooka-Laylee better. It’s OK if you and everyone else prefer A Hat in Time; I might even concede that it’s the better game of the two. But when I played it, I was looking for a 3D platformer, and, well, I don’t think A Hat in Time is one, at least, not any more than Portal is a first-person shooter or Double Fine’s The Cave is a 2D platformer. Yeah, the game uses the moveset of the genre, but I found the motion in Hat a bit weird, too forgiving, too directly. It was usually difficult for me to make specific moves, but moving to a certain spot tended to be easy, as long as I didn’t care how I ended up there. The secret levels that were more platformy than the main game felt weird, almost out of place.
Again, this does not mean I think A Hat in Time is a bad game, or even worse than Yooka-Laylee. It’s just that, in my opinion, it’s not much of a 3D platformer, and its main draw is allowing you to visit different worlds and talk to a bunch of fun characters. The physical actions you have to perform are almost an afterthought, and the game is absurdly forgiving on what you must do. Yooka-Laylee, conversely, is exactly what I wanted out of the genre. The movement is tight, the challenges are just challenging enough, and the worlds are fun to explore as game mechanics, not just as conceptual pieces.
Whew! I almost talked about A Hat in Time in my Yooka-Laylee article. Let’s move on!
Dr. Puzz’ Character Design is Pretty Great
Dr. Puzz is the character that came in to relace Mumbo Jumbo and Humba Wumba, the vaguely offensive characters that transformed the player into several animals and objects in the first two games. This time, instead of magic, this character uses SCIENCE!!!
But I want to point out how much you can infer about her personality from her design. Let’s take a look.
First, the obvious: she’s half octopus. That’s a simple one, a character that can change the players’ shape can also change her own shape, right? But this is a pretty genius piece of design that makes her more likeable. Her schtick is that the tech she uses to change the player is kind of new, prototypical and unstable. The might make her seem mean - but the fact that she’s also half-octopus means that she tried the tech first on herself, and, furthermore, that it didn’t quite work. She may be using the player for her experiments, but she’s used herself as a guinea pig (or a guinea octopus) before reaching this stage.
But now we move on closer. She’s wearing a fishbowl on her head. Not a helmet, a fishbowl, with a fish swimming around in it. What does that mean? Well, first, it means that after trying the tech on herself, she found herself unable to breathe on dry land. The fact that she’s wearing a fishbowl means she neither expected that change or prepared for it, and once she did she was forced to improvise. It underlines that the tech she creates is dangerous and unstable, while also showing more proof that it isn’t so because she doesn’t care about what happens to her subjects. There’s more: if she’s an inventor, why doesn’t she invent some better helmet for her? That’s because she’s too obsessed with her current work to think about other stuff. She’s got a fishbowl on her head and it kind of works; why bother working a replacement when her main drive requires so much effort?
Why is Laylee So Annoying?
Not much has changed with our duo. We still control mostly a big, burly, nice male animal that runs around, punches stuff and likes helping people. He’s still helped by a female winged animal that only speaks in sarcastic insults but ultimately has a good heart and lets her companion run the show. Laylee and Kazooie pretty much have the same personality, but Yooka seems to be a bit wiser than Banjo. Banjo has strong himbo energy and always seemed too dumb to figure out Kazooie was insulting him; Yooka seems to catch on and just not care, and he seems more willing to clamp down on his friend when she insults people for no apparent reason. So why does Laylee feel so much more annoying than Kazooie?
The answer is character animations!
See, in Banjo-Kazooie, bear and bird had very similar workloads in the platforming department. The most used move was to allow Kazooie to spread her legs and carry her friend around; she couldn’t attack enemies, but she walked faster, jumped further, and could climb steeper hills. Her powerful neck and beak were also at the players’ call; she was shown to be the attacker for some of the most powerful moves, like the ground pound and the shoulder slam.
The same isn’t true about lizard and bat. The move that lets you move faster and climb steeper hills just has Yooka rolling on himself. Even the double-jump, which in both games involve the winged half of the duo flapping them to go a little further, is a poweful, iconic move in Banjo-Kazooie, being necessary some of the time and a good assistant the rest of the time; but in Yooka-Laylee it’s more of a glide, gaining almost no height and very little distance, useful mostly to avoid fall damage. There are very few moves in which Laylee actively contributes, and almost all of them require using energy. While Banjo and Kazooie were equal partners, Yooka and Laylee are more like a burly henchman that has to babysit a useful but fragile hacker or wizard. In Banjo-Tooie, it was possible for our two heroes to explore the world separated; if this happened to Yooka and Laylee, Laylee’s movement on the world would likely by wildly different.
This, to me, reflects on how I feel about the character. Both Laylee and Kazooie are insulting, sarcasting and sardonic, but Kazooie is pulling her weight; she complains, but she helps out. Laylee’s contributions are much rarer, and it seems she only comes out to talk shit about someone or deliver useful but short-lived assistance. When Kazooie implies she’s the brains of the operation, it feels like she’s trying to annoy his friend; when Laylee does the same, it feels like she does believe it.
And the funniest thing is - you could rewrite all the dialogue and not solve this problem. It’s not a problem with the dialogue, it’s a problem with the animation concept! All parts of a game are text.
The Levels are Leaking Out
In the Banjo-Kazooie series, the levels begin before you even enter the level. All of them had a little thematic area around their entrances. Sometimes more: in Banjo-Kazooie, Mad Monster Mansion had an entire cave themed around itself, and in Banjo-Tooie the Grunty’s Industries level had a puzzle that had to be solved outside it before it was largely accessible. But Grunty’s Lair, the first game’s hub world, was mostly devoid of theme: it was just a series of caves. And the second game’s hub world, the Isle o’ Hags, tried to be more naturalistic, with world entrances that felt like they belonged there, even if they led to, like, a prehistoric location.
This is not the case with Yooka-Laylee, and I think that’s awesome.
Yooka-Laylee’s hub workd Hivory Towers is an executive tower, and that concept is carried on strongly. Some locations are industrial, some are more administrative, and the top levels are more luxurious and excessive. But the area around a level’s entrance are still tinged by the level’s aura; and, in this case, instead of simply existing on its own and creating little replicas or anterooms to the world, they infect the design of Hivory Towers. The entrance to Moodymaze Marsh is in what should have been the archives, but the area is covered in vines and swampwater. Since the story of the game involves the big villain bee stealing these worlds, not only does this look striking, but also suggests that stories are not that easily controllable. They leak out. They infect what you build to contain them.
The Second Level is Oh So Boring
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw once said that game devs should focus on the beginning and the ending of games. The beginning, to captivate new players, and the ending, to leave a lasting impression. It’s not that important if the middle of the game is kinda boring, because the player is already sold to the idea.
Playtonic seems to have taken the second part of this advice to heart. The game has only six levels, but it seems the most boring ones are front-loaded. The best level in the game, Galleon Galaxy, a strange smorgasbord in a cosmic ocean, not only is the final level to be unlocked, but also has most of the content in it locked until you ‘upgrade’ the world. What a shame!
But the second level, Glittergaze Glacier, is by far the most boring world. I didn’t like the first world much, but it was okay, it was just too much of a throwback to my tastes, but fine as a way to acclimatize to the new game and get the nostalgia flowing. Glittergaze Glacier, on the other hand, made me suffer. This is specially given that the Banjo-Kazooie games had some of the finest snow levels in the business. Freezezy Peak, from the first game, stood up against the Mario 64 levels and came out ahead; and Hailfire Peaks, from the second game, was both the snow level and the fire level, essentially bringing the concept to its denouement.
Glittergaze Glacier has nothing going for it. As an exercise, I imagined how different it would be if its theme had to be swapped with the tropical jungles of the first level. Not much would have changed. Only one of the Pagies explicitly mentions the cold by having you lose health if you stay for long in a certain spot - but even that could be retooled with poison or something like it.
The most interesting thing about Glittergaze Glacier is its expanded area. Unlike most other worlds, it doesn’t add anything to the main area, it opens an entire new location… that uses isometric camera. That’s actually cool, at first, but then I remembered that while isometric cameras are fun and nostalgic, there’s not a lot of platformers using that camera, because it makes difficult to tell distances and differences in height! That’s not so much the case here, and I suspect this level had a lot of weight in the development of the 2.5D sequel, so I suppose one can always fail forward.
…Actually, I Want to Talk About A Hat in Time Now
Ugh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t even have brought out A Hat in Time in an article about Yooka-Laylee. They’re just two platformers released in the same year! What’s it to you?
But there’s something I wanted to talk about A Hat in Time, and I don’t think I have a space for it in another article. And I certainly don’t have the material for several stories like this about this other game. So I’ll just stick it here.
I said before that I don’t like A Hat in Time much, and it’s true, but it must be said: World 2, Act 5, “The Bird Parade”, is one of the most brilliant levels I’ve ever played.
I’m always on the lookout for new metaphorical interpretations of tired-and-true mechanics, and while the metaphor isn’t expanded on that much, it still changes so much about how you navigate this mission. You are meant to lead a parade. This means that there are a bunch of musician birds following your every step; you mustn’t let them touch you. Furthermore, there was a previous act set in the same location, but the cities are now filled with a crowd; you can’t touch the streets either, and must remain on the rooftops. Again, while these wrong actions are still visibly interpreted as damage, it’s not like you’re being hurt; you’re just ruining the parade!
It’s a different interpretation of the game’s entire mechanics, which, on top of that, also provides a completely different, wildy frantic gameplay experience. I wish there were more levels like this.
Sorry for leaving you in the cold in your own week, Yooka-Laylee! I love you!
This month’s Link Roundup
I used to gather up interesting links on my Dreamwidth blag every month, but a few months ago I forgot, and even when I didn’t there were only one or two links, unless I really tried or had had a particularly boring month that had driven me to climb the mountains of my myriad unread tabs. So now I’m bringing those links here.
America Will Be Twelve Countries Really Soon
There is a lot about this article I disagree with. But there’s enough substance in there that I like. It’s the kind of political thinking that doesn’t shirk from a conclusion just because it seems science-fictional. After all, have you seen what the world is like? If anything, science fiction may be insufficient to foresee what will happen. So this article does have a lot of wishful thinking in it, but I like the central idea - and I generally agree that smaller sovereignities are ideal, and that the closer a citizen is to their representative, the higher the chances that they’ll be reading. After all, aldermen are much more easily reachable than senators.
But, in order to retain my Filthy Leftist card, I must mention this one thing. Our friend Brock seems to have a strong distaste for socialism. But that method of small governance he extolls in this article, with very small groups reponsible for very small areas and largely independent - aren’t they a lot like the Soviet workers’ councils from post-revolution Russia?
Today’s video is Scavengers, an eight-minute video about speculative alien biology and stranded humans.
Until next year, gamers.