Japanese Banjo Kazooie guide

Posted 26 Jul 2014 by Squid

I found that someone uploaded photographs of a Banjo Kazooie guide on imgur a short while back, and here we are to give it a little bit of a look-see, shall we?

First, I must preface this by saying that the images uploaded are pretty crappy. They are shot in the dark and the book isn’t flat on a table so please excuse my editing if anything seems distorted at all.

The Banjo Kazooie guide

Now, my Japanese is pretty terrible so I’ll spare you having to deal with my poor translation of what the guide says. I’ll safely assume that the text is just telling the player how to get the jiggys and where to get the notes and such.

The rest of it is pretty much what you’d expect of any guide – a bunch of maps and pictures of the characters. Now, what I really like about this is the bird’s eye view of the levels. It seems as though they’re taken from within the game, rather than just a reconstruction by an artist.

A screenshot I took of Spiral Mountain from Banjo’s Backpack

The map of Spiral mountain in the magazine

As you can see, the image of Spiral mountain in the Japanese Banjo Kazooie guide is polygon-perfect reconstruction except with the outer platforms trimmed for clarity and Grunty’s Lair’s hat being filled in. So you could say that these maps are pretty good and accurate for guiding yourself around the game.

I think it’s one of those things from Stephen King’s Langoliers.

Look at this guy! How could anyone not want to rescue him?

And I just gotta love the bug-eyed character models all close up without any background behind them. It’ makes them stand out a lot more so that you can appreciate their design.

That’s about all I can say about this Japanese Banjo Kazooie guide without reading any of the text in it. Have a look at the full guide if you want to.