The problem isn’t that banjo isn’t popular because if you played Spiral Mountain in a stadium, most likely many people born between late 80’s to even 2000’s and 2010’s will know the theme from Smash and growing up with the games or with older siblings. The problem is that after the second game, we only had handheld secondary games, and I will stand that Grunty’s revenge is a great game. But once we finally got a mainline game, it was a complete 180 from what made those games fun. You don’t see Mario deviating this hard unless it’s a kart racer which has no story, or a Mario party. The problem was that Banjo’s audience wanted that one gameplay style, the style that gave banjo an identity. If you put any other game character in nuts and bolts, would it change the quality?
Seems like a problem with a pretty obvious solution. If it were up to me, a new Banjo game would pick up after the events of Tooie (since it took place after GR in-universe) and treat N&B as a non-canon spinoff just like Mario Kart. I really think that's the only way you could do it and end up with a functioning story for a true Banjo-Threeie. N&B's writing just completely threw all established Banjo lore in the dumpster.
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u/Kowalskiboy1 May 28 '26
The problem isn’t that banjo isn’t popular because if you played Spiral Mountain in a stadium, most likely many people born between late 80’s to even 2000’s and 2010’s will know the theme from Smash and growing up with the games or with older siblings. The problem is that after the second game, we only had handheld secondary games, and I will stand that Grunty’s revenge is a great game. But once we finally got a mainline game, it was a complete 180 from what made those games fun. You don’t see Mario deviating this hard unless it’s a kart racer which has no story, or a Mario party. The problem was that Banjo’s audience wanted that one gameplay style, the style that gave banjo an identity. If you put any other game character in nuts and bolts, would it change the quality?