Banjo-Kazooie (1998)

People who draw favorable comparisons between this game and Super Mario 64 in anything but the loosest sense of design genre are out of their minds. SM64 is a freewheeling experience where players get to experiment and develop their own emergent play ideas by messing with the physics and Mario's robust movement capabilities. Banjo-Kazooie is an action-adventure game where you almost exclusively go on a linear scavenger hunt and pick stuff up the way the developers want you to for 5-7 hours per average playthrough.

On rare occasions you can actually sequence break or accomplish something without following all of the necessary steps, but for the most part Banjo-Kazooie is a downright incurious play experience. It's tidy to an almost fussy extent, but bloodless as a play experience. Is exploring a stage to the last corner really all that enjoyable when the developers lead you to do so constantly? Going through these stages is often like being on a conveyer belt that guides you in a predetermined circuit. It's less of a choice and more expectation. Do this, do that, like this, not like that.

Chasing 100% completion can lead to situations where you might ask "where haven't I been yet? where could the last X be?" but since the levels are designed to utilize every piece of their geography and architecture you're unlikely to ever find an essential collectible in an unexpected or nondescript area. There are no nondescript areas and if an object exists in a stage it will always be used somehow. More often, you'll miss a collectible due to the homogeneous visual design of a stage causing you to overlook an area because you thought you already went there (e.g. Clanker's Cavern, Bubblegoop Swamp, Freezeezy Peak slightly).

Banjo-Kazooie fits nicely into an imaginary genre called "child's first video game" where its charisma, presentation, and simple A to B theme park attraction layout will be the most appealing to that target audience.