Rare’s masterpiece is usually considered to be Banjo-Kazooie. I feel I agree with this take, even if my personal favorite is the foul-mouthed Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
The platforming and jokes placed Banjo’s first adventure into player’s hearts, but an important Jiggy in the puzzle was the villain of the adventure; Gruntlida.
A typical witch at the end of it. A green-skinned horror who suddenly wishes to be the fairest of them all. Despite also being proud of her gross habits such as picking her nose in public and showering in cheese. Not a full personality truth-be-told, one that outright contradicts itself as she both wishes to be beautiful and considers ugliness to be better than beauty. Yet her jokes still landed and I found an honest-to-God charm in her always speaking in rhyme as if she escaped the pages of Dr. Seuss.
Now the opening video at the top shows her resurrection from Banjo-Tooie, and I picked that game as I feel this was where Gruntilda’s real personality was fully fleshed out. Completely forgetting the world of beauty, Grunty now loves the violence of destruction and is motivated purely by the joy of revenge. She’s even meaner this time and far more of an active threat.
Gleefully ruining the lives of NPCs and even casually outright killing an entire family of Jinjos with no remorse, the darker atmosphere of Banjo-Tooie shows itself with how much of a menace Grunty and her two sisters are. We now see the aftermath of her beating her loyal servant Klungo almost to death, and even her two sisters aren’t spared from her pointless cruelty as the two will eventually die before the final boss fight just because they lose too many points in the trivia game.
Speaking of the trivia game, I find this to relate to an aspect of Grunty’s character that each game kept intact: Her love of games. No, I’m serious, even in Banjo-Kazooie it’s clear she loves the boardgame that she makes Banjo play, she loves the trivia game in Tooie to the point she uses leftover questions in the final fight, and every encounter with her in Nuts N’ Bolts is her challenging you to a minigame with specific vehicle mechanics.
She’s also surprisingly fair in terms of losing. For a villain anyway. She throws a fit, but she doesn’t go back on her word. If she wagered a Jiggy, you win the Jiggy she wagered. Her final fight questions will make the fight easier if you answer correctly, just like she promises. And while killing her sisters is a much darker example, bear in mind that dying was the stated penalty for losing, so her own flesh and blood do not change her mind in sticking to what she states are the rules of a game. The closest she comes to breaking a rule is that she will throw a tantrum and cancel the game at the last second in Tooie, but even in that case, she doesn’t stoop to killing Banjo when she has the trap already aimed at him. She just runs off and prepares for another fight.
I found myself fascinated by this character trait as it truly does flesh out what would be a generic villain. She is a witch and later a skeleton, which is not exactly the most unique idea for a baddie. But a games master and rhyme master on top of that, well there we go!
A simple character whose execution leads to someone truly remarkable. And she only got better as time went on. She’s at her most generic in Banjo-Kazooie, then Tooie ups her threat level and gives her motives better weight, and finally, Nuts N’ Bolts just does the simple solution of keeping her constant menace and humor while allowing her to rhyme again. I can’t deny it, the rhyming is important to me. When she was forced to stop rhyming in Tooie I felt a part of her character was erased for a dumb joke, and I really do think giving that trait back to her was all Nuts N’ Bolts needed to create the best version of Gruntilda.
A classic bad guy. One of the all-time greats for platformers. Gruntilda is just as important to the series as the playable heroes it’s named after. Such an ugly face, yet an important one, and I think she would be just as proud of both those observations.
All images belong to: Rare, Microsoft, and Nintendo.
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