Banjo-Kazooie: Achievements

B-K is your standard Live Arcade game, meaning it features 12 Achievements for 200 points. Before playing the game I read a few guides that boasted this game is easy points and can be finished without issue in around 10 hours.

Here's an issue: that's bullshit.

If you're already an expert on B-K and played through it a couple times on the N64, then maybe you can cruise through quickly. But if you're coming into the game new, that "10 hours" is blatantly false. Consider this one:

"Music Maestro" - 25 points
Collect all the musical notes in the game. There are 900. No, I'm serious. 900. And they're hidden throughout 9 worlds in the game. That means you'll need to thoroughly explore every single one, including finding any secret areas that might be housing notes. And if you're missing a few, it takes forever to figure out which ones you already have versus which ones you still need.

Unless you have the game memorized, this Achievement alone takes more than 10 hours. Now it's certainly the case that you can work on this while you're completing all the other Achievements. There are definitely some easy ones. But it took me at least 20 hours to finish the game with all the Achievements, and it certainly wasn't because I was taking my sweet time.

It's also worth noting that while the game is far from difficult, I wouldn't exactly call it easy either. I mentioned in an earlier post that there are some elaborate jumping puzzles later in the game, and the camera does you no favors. The game also uses the utterly outdated "lives" system, and if you run out you need to start back at the beginning and jog to wherever you were. The bottom line is that there's a lot of frustrating "fail until you succeed" challenges in B-K so don't expect those 200 points to come in a lazy evening.