Horrible Application for Luceti
Mun
Name: Golden
Livejournal Username: goldenkirbichu
E-mail: golden underscore kirbichu at hotmail dot com
AIM/MSN: See above for MSN, AIM aurumkirbichu
Current Characters at Luceti: semper_cogitans
Character
Name: Kazooie
Fandom: Banjo-Kazooie
Gender: Probably-cisgendered woman
Age: It’s difficult to tell; with Kazooie being a breegull, and her history being so vague on any kind of detail, her age is really up in the air. With the way she acts, though, she’s probably the equivalent of a late adolescent or early adult.
Time Period: After the end of Banjo-Tooie, but before Nuts and Bolts.
Wing Color: A red-crested breegull red, fading to a bright yellow at the wing-tips... so, basically the same as her actual wings.
History: Not sure what to include here... http://banjokazooie.wikia.com/wiki/Kazooie seems like an obvious link. Maybe also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo-Kazooie_%28series%29 and specific subsets...? :|a Not sure. Herp derp how does I canon character.
Personality: The most prominent thing about Kazooie is that she’s, quite frankly, an ass. There’s no real better way to put it than that. She doesn’t take garbage from anybody or anything, including the people that she cares about the most (though she may never let on just how much she does care). She tells it like it is, bluntly, with no compromise, and the fact that she never filters her opinion means she gets Banjo in trouble more than pretty much everything else in the game. But does she let that faze her? Absolutely not. In fact, she craves that sense of danger and adventure. Since the time the bear and bird started living together, Kazooie has constantly complained about being bored by the dull, quiet life of the honey bear. She’s the half of the duo that pushes everybody else around - and without that push, who knows if anybody would do much of anything? Really, she provides a driving force for most of the other characters in the game - whether that’s positive or negative (and most of the time it’s both at once).
Kazooie’s sharp; she’s not intelligent in the mathematical or scientific sense, no, but she’s got a great sense of intuition and has enough brains to beat the occasional puzzle that crops up in the worlds in Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie. She was the one who predicted Grunty’s comeback after the end of Banjo-Kazooie, and encouraged Banjo to keep training even after the danger had seemingly passed - she ended up being completely right when Mingella and Blobbelda showed up to bust Grunty out of the ground with their HAG 1 drilling machine. If it wasn’t for her, it’s likely that the two would’ve been completely pulverized when Grunty got out to wreak havoc in Banjo-Tooie. She’s also got some musical skill with her kazoo (her namesake, of course, though hers looks a lot more like a bugle), and can play a mean ditty; she’s only ever seen playing part of the main theme for Banjo-Kazooie, but doubtless she could learn to play something else if given the opportunity. And she’s not above cheating, which requires quick thinking skills, whether that’s in the course of the game or in something more minor like poker - even if it’s a little (or a lot) underhanded, heck, cheating is part of the B-K series what with Cheato.
The red-crested breegull’s sharp in another way - her wit. She is sarcastic and often downright scathing, especially to individuals that threaten to walk all over Banjo. It’s likely her way of compensating for his soft, gentle demeanour (which she complains about to him; she really wishes he had more of an attitude) - of course, Banjo usually ends up apologizing for her remarks (and these apologies often fall on deaf ears), but she stops him from getting pushed around all the time from anybody besides herself. And she figures she’s got his best interests in mind; whether she does or not is up for some debate, but she clearly has a goal for them both with her pointed remarks, whether it’s to stick up for herself or just to push a few buttons. She knows how to rile people up, and how to direct that anger - oftentimes, that’s the push that people need to put them in just the right place for Kazooie to walk all over them.
She’s not that great at dealing with emotions at all, though. Not that emotional situations come up often in the B-K-verse - for example, Bottles’ death wasn’t exactly a depressing occasion, considering that his ghost was still around to complain loudly about the condition of his corpse. But she shows a remarkable lack of tact even for a cartoon character who’s inured to such things as generic Gruntilda’s-army-esque bad guys exploding into chunky bits in her face after she pecks them to death. For example, in the aforementioned state of Bottles’ death, she was prepared to march right up to his extant family (his nameless wife and three young children) and promptly inform them just where their dad had gotten to after the poker game. Naturally, she had to be talked out of this by Banjo, and even that was ineffectual at best.
It’s safe to say that Kazooie is as terrible at handling her own emotions as she is at handling the emotions of others; as far as can be gleaned from the game, whatever she feels is generally buried under a layer of annoyance at everything except herself, and she doesn’t express herself except in the most raucous, direct ways. A master of subtlety, Kazooie is not. Fear, especially, is something she rarely ever shows. If the breegull seems vulnerable in any way, one can bet that something extremely drastic has happened. (Though Kazooie’s characterization may simply have been shakily dealt with in Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge, her almost-browbeaten quietness may suggest lingering fear and discomfort, masked ineffectually, from the effortless kidnapping that Grunty pulled off and her subsequent chaining-up in a cage.)
Like most Rareware characters (and particularly in this series), Kazooie is also strongly aware that she’s a character in a game series. Also like a lot of the characters in Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie, she’s very flippant about it - she knows what she’s gotten herself into, and she uses it to her advantage. Her blasé attitude towards boss battles means she’s not afraid to get right up in the face of a baddie and taunt it, and she has the firepower behind her statements to back herself up. In other words, Kazooie isn’t just bluster without substance - she knows what she’s talking about from several years of adventuring experience, and while it’s not quite what most of the standard protagonists in Luceti have under their respective belts, it’s still an impressive list of abilities.
And Kazooie flaunts them. She has no problem bragging about her exploits and making herself sound good. Why shouldn’t she? She’s a hero. Even the other characters in game know and respect it - even Bottles, who dislikes her almost as much as she hates him. She knows that she’s cool, she knows that she can kick witch butt - why should she let people tell her otherwise? She’s got enough self-confidence for herself and Banjo besides (and that’s a good thing, because Banjo needs it). She can take on the world, and live to tell about it. That attitude, combined with her skill set and the support of the steady, patient Banjo, means that she’s able to power through most of the obstacles that her life throws at her.
She’s not a useless sidekick at all, even if her name comes second in the title. In fact, she arguably does a lot more than Banjo most of the time (considering she’s usually hauling him around via the Talon Trot...). Generally, she finds this an irritating but acceptable amount of nuisance for the fun of getting to pound Grunty into paste and explore and just generally go on grand adventures - sometimes she loses her patience, though, and actively complains to whoever’s teaching her moves (usually Bottles or somebody related to him). This might be why she has absolutely no patience for the mole or his family - though it probably doesn’t help that they trade insults all the time.
Despite her usually harsh exterior, though, even Kazooie has a side that’s as soft as her feathers. It doesn’t come out often, but she’s expressed genuine caring before - even if it’s veiled under a layer of irritation. Everything from hatching eggs for Terry, the distraught pteranodon father, to admitting that Bottles “isn’t so bad” after the successes of Banjo-Kazooie... she’s got a fluffy side, but like hell if she’ll ever let on to it most of the time. And generally, when she does things for others, it’s for material gain, or a specific purpose. Or at least, that’s what she’ll tell you. The real reason might be a bit different from that, but good luck prying that from the breegull’s beak directly.
Banjo is the only person Kazooie seems to really care about without inward reservation. He’s the guy that brought her in to live with himself and Tooty (who mysteriously disappears after Banjo-Kazooie, after serving as a generic-princess to be captured...) so very long ago after scooping her and the eponymous blue backpack up off Breegull Beach. Maybe she feels she owes him something; maybe she likes the big furry lug more than she lets on; maybe she just appreciates the rent-free housing that the backpack provides. Either way, she’s the one consistent companion in Banjo’s life, and he in hers’. He’s probably the closest thing she has to a true friend - someone who seems to have no trouble putting up with her good-natured (and not-so-good-natured) jabs, insults, hot temper and loud mouth. (Beak?) Heck, he even helps her perform a lot of her moves - and while Kazooie is more useful solo than Banjo is when it comes to combat, without his assistance she’s stuck on such simple tasks as climbing.
Overall, Kazooie is a wisecracking smartass who has no qualms about stepping on a few feet - or even a few faces - to get what she wants. She wants to save the world. She wants to beat the bad guy. And she won’t stop at anything to fulfill those goals. She’s an unorthodox hero, in an unorthodox game, winning with unorthodox methods - and she loves every damn minute of it.
Strengths:
Physical: For a less-than-five-foot (probably) tall bird, Kazooie is a powerhouse. Presumably in the prime of her life, with several years of training and adventuring under her belt, and being able to wield an arsenal of surprisingly dangerous attacks, Kazooie is not a breegull to be underestimated. She has enough power behind her whirling wings and jabbing beak to put quite a few enemies down (though, without the grounding Banjo provides, she’s going to be short several moves in that regard). Don’t forget, she’s been lugging a bear almost twice her size - and probably more than twice her weight - around for several years.
That isn’t even counting her ability to launch volleys of Eggs from both her front and her rear (with no real explanation as to how she can pull the latter one off... she’s a cartoon character) - ranging from simple but dependable Blue Eggs to literal Grenade Eggs that explode on impact. Since she’s coming from Banjo-Tooie, she not only has access to Banjo-Tooie’s five types of Eggs (as well as the Battery Eggs from Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge, as it occurs between Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie), but she also has the Amaze-O-Gaze goggles - which, in game, give her extremely accurate sighting when combined with a first-person perspective. This should translate into some impressive Egg-sniping skills in Luceti - with the obvious cost that she has to stand completely still if she wants to aim well, otherwise she’ll be stuck with clumsily-aimed attacks. And if she’s close enough to somebody to tolerate it, she might even be able to be wielded like a living gun via Breegull Blaster.
Her tiny body is strong enough and light enough for her to be able to launch herself high in the air with moves like the Shock Spring Jump (when she can find the pad to do it with...) or the Leg Spring, which she can pull off on her own. She’s also capable of flying (which requires Red Feathers and a Flight Pad to pull off) and gliding (which requires neither), which suggests she’s got pretty strong wings. Were she to have a Banjo along to wear the blue backpack she resides in, she could do the Wonderwing too, which conveys temporary invincibility at the cost of Gold Feathers...
She’s also quick, able to sprint along at a fairly impressive pace - while there isn’t any specific information given about how fast she’d be in real-life terms, she’s a heck of a lot faster solo than most of the other things in Banjo-Tooie. Smaller and more manoeuvrable than Banjo, she can accomplish many tasks that require finesse that the bear just doesn’t have, and her size means she doesn’t have to worry about space constraints nearly as much.
Her cartoon “biology” provides her with some interesting benefits as well. For example, her skeleton doesn’t have to behave normally - her legs bend backwards during Breegull Blaster mode, she can cram her entire body into a backpack half the size of her torso, and she can be literally crushed flat by Stomponadon and survive (the second time kills her, though). Her organs are far from usual either - after all, she can swallow the entire collection of Banjo-Kazooie’s Jiggies (which are made of solid gold and are larger than her body is) with no discomfort. While this doesn’t make her invincible by any means, it does mean she might be able to elude deaths that would strike a more realistic individual down.
Mental: Kazooie’s not a bird-brain, even if she’s a bird. She’s got enough wits about herself to get past some very difficult puzzles along with Banjo (and Banjo is implied to be the slower of the two, mentally). Things like putting together traditional jigsaw puzzles that are animated (like the Jiggywiggy Temple Challenges), short-term memory puzzles (like Tiptup’s Choir), or even just being able to navigate a large, cluttered world without getting lost are all examples of her brainpower. She’s got a strong sense of intuition, though her logical processes aren’t as great - but when she’s a cartoon, how good is her logical sense going to be?
She’s capable of thinking on the fly - sometimes very literally at that - and can make quick decisions under pressure, due to all those time limits she’s had to deal with and boss battles in cramped quarters. She can anticipate what people are going to do fairly well, and though her unique situation might make some of her assumptions go wildly off the mark in Luceti, she’ll probably be able to adjust soon enough. She knows what power-ups and abilities to use, and when to use them - and that’s a pretty long list; the fact she retains them effortlessly suggests she has a really good memory, too, though that may simply be from using them over and over. She learns quickly too (however, as a gameplay element, it may simply be that she’s used to instantly knowing things - so this can also be a weakness depending on how one looks at it).
Kazooie can be strongly focused when she’s got a goal in mind, and she’ll stop at nothing to obtain what she’s set her eyes on, whether she has to beat somebody up, do a bunch of pointless puzzles, perform some ridiculously precise trick, or just stand around and wait for it to show up. She isn’t normally very patient at all, nor willing to help (with some rare exceptions), but the promise of a reward is often enough to spur her into action when the sheer thrill behind adventuring isn’t enough.
Emotional: Kazooie is extremely hard to shake, emotionally. The layer of harsh cynicism and wisecracking attitude prevents people from getting under her skin for very long, most of the time, and though there’re never very many harsh emotional situations in the B-Kverse, she nonetheless is insulated from the worst of them due to this. She is almost fearless, facing down the toughest enemies in her world with a raised eyebrow and a snarky insult. She won’t allow people to manipulate her, nor will she allow them to manipulate her close friends (assuming she has any). Fundamentally, she is tough, and it’s going to be hard to do anything to punch through that layer to make her vulnerable.
Weaknesses:
Physical: ... Well, she’s a less-than-five-foot-tall cartoon bird. Obscenely powerful though she is for something of her stature and species, she can’t hold a candle to many Lucetians. Without her partner Banjo, Kazooie also can’t access many of her most basic moves - it might translate a little differently in Luceti, but a solo Kazooie can’t dive underwater, can’t climb ledges, and is restricted from many of her beak-jabbing attacks due to lacking the leverage given by Banjo’s weight.
She’s also a lot weaker - she canonically has one Honeycomb less energy than Banjo does, solo (at maximum, seven as opposed to his eight, and ten when they’re together). She’s limited in terms of her ammo - since it’s a pickup item, and without Cheato codes she’s going to have a maximum of 100 Blue Eggs (and smaller maximums for the other kinds of Eggs). Any other power-ups she uses are only temporary, so she won’t get to keep them indefinitely, and a few of her moves rely on things like pads that won’t exist in Luceti unless she requests them.
If she wasn’t a cartoon, her species would probably mean her bones would be stupidly easy to break. As it is, though, she has several important limitations, like the lack of hands - Banjo normally compensates for this, but a solo Kazooie can’t grab items in anything except her beak. This is going to make using the journals somewhat difficult for her at first.
Mental: Kazooie’s not stupid, but she’s not a genius either. She can be outwitted, and her impulsivity means she gets Banjo in trouble due to not thinking ahead. She’s intellectually lazy - she doesn’t bother to find things out beyond what she needs to know, and she doesn’t see the value in learning things if they don’t directly benefit her (see her treatment of Bottles and company as a good example of this attitude). She hasn’t had a typical education, either, being a cartoon bird - she won’t recognize a lot of appliances, for example, beyond their most basic characteristics. And any kind of hold-up will inevitably end up frustrating her.
Her mindset will also be strongly entrenched in her cartoondom - she thinks everything is part of a game, and so there is a specific goal, always some tangible reward for everything, other people are NPCs, et cetera. This mindset will permeate nearly everything she does, and in a place like Luceti so far removed from that setting, she’s going to have a hard time dealing with this. This’ll also mean a plethora of strange behaviours - everything from wanting to burst into every building she can find and grab everything not nailed down, to seeking out villains on the Villain List as “boss battles”. Naturally, combined with her brashness, her attitude and her temper, this isn’t going to make her a lot of friends.
Emotional: See that aforementioned brashness, attitude and temper. Actually, most of Kazooie’s emotional traits are negative to a lot of people. Though she’s a hero, she really doesn’t act like one. Even if she doesn’t always intend to be, she comes off as cruel and uncaring, and this means she’ll probably be forced to work on her own for a long time - something that’s really going to knock her for a loop. Being almost dependent on Banjo to a degree she’d rather not admit, lacking the bear will shake her up. And without his mediating influence, there isn’t going to be anybody to save her tail feathers when she picks a fight with the first half-dozen people she meets.
She’s also going to be hugely stereotyped about people - because everybody she meets in the worlds of Banjo-Kazooie and its sequels are some kind of stereotype, generally an exaggerated parody of a real kind of person. It’s funny when observed in a third-person perspective - but Kazooie doesn’t have the luxury of that perspective. To her, it’s all reality is. So when she meets people that have actual depth of personality, she might find herself at a loss. And that will lead to the familiar vicious cycle of closing herself off and being an ass.
In fact, that closing herself off is a major problem too. Normally, Kazooie doesn’t have too many problems - she’s a hero, she always wins, always saves the day, always beats the bad guy in the end. In Luceti, she can’t always win. She’s just a nameless girl in a sea of heroes, some of which have done some admittedly impressive things. Even with all her toughness and composure, Kazooie still has a point where things will be difficult for her. But she’s too strong-willed to admit this, and so it’ll just fester... until she snaps.
Samples
First Person:
[The silence over the journal feed is suddenly interrupted with a loud, angry squawking.]
Listen here, Grunty... The moment I find your cauldron-sized butt in this latest dump of yours, I’m going to peck it into the ocean! I’ve been looking around this stupid place for hours and I can’t find the entrance to any of your dumb worlds! I don’t know where you hid them this time, but you’re really going to pay when I find them... I haven’t forgotten my moves from the last game, y’know. I kept ‘em up real good, just to beat you around!
[Audible hesitation, and a soft, almost muted “breee”, follow this outburst. Finally, a more subdued:] Now, maybe if I could figure out where that stupid bear got himself to, I’d be able to get outta here... where’s the big lug when you need ‘im? Figures that they’d split us up in Threeie... though I didn’t think it’d be right away. Geez!
[Red feathers come into view as a short bird peers into the screen of the journal.] And what the heck is this thing...? Hey, it’s got my name on it. At least somebody knows who the hero is around here... ha, and my name’s first for once! Eat it, Banjo! [And the journal is unceremoniously snapped up in a yellow beak.] Now just to track him down, and I’ll be in business.
Third Person:
Not even cartoon birds are supposed to have four wings. That’s just silly.
Kazooie found herself more than a little annoyed to wake up in a strange place - nowhere she recognized on the Isle O’ Hags, at any rate - with absolutely nothing on her person and with a stupid pair of extra wings that served no purpose whatsoever. There wasn’t anything that went with them besides discomfort when she tried to flap them - no catchy little jingle or anything like that. Heck, she couldn’t even hear any trace of theme music for the place she was in at all. What a bore! She was really going to have to give whoever dumped her in this backwater area a good swift peck. Or maybe an Egg to the face; it might have to depend on how forgiving she was feeling, and that generally wasn’t particularly forgiving in the first place.
An initial scope of the region presented nothing out of the ordinary - no paths that screamed “this way to the Jiggy”! Annoying for a starting area, but Kazooie figured that she needed a good challenge after awhile without a real adventure. What she wouldn’t give for a good nest or two of dependable Grenade Eggs, though... it felt weird not having any, and starting areas were supposed to have them, right?
... What was up with the extra wings, anyway? And where the heck was Banjo? Kazooie couldn’t see the furry dope anywhere, not even scanning the area with Amaze-O-Gaze vision. Where in the world could he have gotten himself to?
Eh, nothing that could be done about it. Kazooie would just have to figure out where she was. There were usually helpful characters in these starting areas, right? It’d be easy. After all, she was a seasoned hero after a few good adventures, and people were bound to help her out. They pretty much had to, after all, ‘cause she was important. Yeah... important.
Satisfied with this notion, Kazooie pointed herself down one of the closest paths she could make out in the dense tangle of unfamiliar forest, and, clucking softly to herself with a purposefulness that only she could muster, trotted down towards what had looked vaguely like a town in the distance.
Name: Golden
Livejournal Username: goldenkirbichu
E-mail: golden underscore kirbichu at hotmail dot com
AIM/MSN: See above for MSN, AIM aurumkirbichu
Current Characters at Luceti: semper_cogitans
Character
Name: Kazooie
Fandom: Banjo-Kazooie
Gender: Probably-cisgendered woman
Age: It’s difficult to tell; with Kazooie being a breegull, and her history being so vague on any kind of detail, her age is really up in the air. With the way she acts, though, she’s probably the equivalent of a late adolescent or early adult.
Time Period: After the end of Banjo-Tooie, but before Nuts and Bolts.
Wing Color: A red-crested breegull red, fading to a bright yellow at the wing-tips... so, basically the same as her actual wings.
History: Not sure what to include here... http://banjokazooie.wikia.com/wiki/Kazooie seems like an obvious link. Maybe also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo-Kazooie_%28series%29 and specific subsets...? :|a Not sure. Herp derp how does I canon character.
Personality: The most prominent thing about Kazooie is that she’s, quite frankly, an ass. There’s no real better way to put it than that. She doesn’t take garbage from anybody or anything, including the people that she cares about the most (though she may never let on just how much she does care). She tells it like it is, bluntly, with no compromise, and the fact that she never filters her opinion means she gets Banjo in trouble more than pretty much everything else in the game. But does she let that faze her? Absolutely not. In fact, she craves that sense of danger and adventure. Since the time the bear and bird started living together, Kazooie has constantly complained about being bored by the dull, quiet life of the honey bear. She’s the half of the duo that pushes everybody else around - and without that push, who knows if anybody would do much of anything? Really, she provides a driving force for most of the other characters in the game - whether that’s positive or negative (and most of the time it’s both at once).
Kazooie’s sharp; she’s not intelligent in the mathematical or scientific sense, no, but she’s got a great sense of intuition and has enough brains to beat the occasional puzzle that crops up in the worlds in Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie. She was the one who predicted Grunty’s comeback after the end of Banjo-Kazooie, and encouraged Banjo to keep training even after the danger had seemingly passed - she ended up being completely right when Mingella and Blobbelda showed up to bust Grunty out of the ground with their HAG 1 drilling machine. If it wasn’t for her, it’s likely that the two would’ve been completely pulverized when Grunty got out to wreak havoc in Banjo-Tooie. She’s also got some musical skill with her kazoo (her namesake, of course, though hers looks a lot more like a bugle), and can play a mean ditty; she’s only ever seen playing part of the main theme for Banjo-Kazooie, but doubtless she could learn to play something else if given the opportunity. And she’s not above cheating, which requires quick thinking skills, whether that’s in the course of the game or in something more minor like poker - even if it’s a little (or a lot) underhanded, heck, cheating is part of the B-K series what with Cheato.
The red-crested breegull’s sharp in another way - her wit. She is sarcastic and often downright scathing, especially to individuals that threaten to walk all over Banjo. It’s likely her way of compensating for his soft, gentle demeanour (which she complains about to him; she really wishes he had more of an attitude) - of course, Banjo usually ends up apologizing for her remarks (and these apologies often fall on deaf ears), but she stops him from getting pushed around all the time from anybody besides herself. And she figures she’s got his best interests in mind; whether she does or not is up for some debate, but she clearly has a goal for them both with her pointed remarks, whether it’s to stick up for herself or just to push a few buttons. She knows how to rile people up, and how to direct that anger - oftentimes, that’s the push that people need to put them in just the right place for Kazooie to walk all over them.
She’s not that great at dealing with emotions at all, though. Not that emotional situations come up often in the B-K-verse - for example, Bottles’ death wasn’t exactly a depressing occasion, considering that his ghost was still around to complain loudly about the condition of his corpse. But she shows a remarkable lack of tact even for a cartoon character who’s inured to such things as generic Gruntilda’s-army-esque bad guys exploding into chunky bits in her face after she pecks them to death. For example, in the aforementioned state of Bottles’ death, she was prepared to march right up to his extant family (his nameless wife and three young children) and promptly inform them just where their dad had gotten to after the poker game. Naturally, she had to be talked out of this by Banjo, and even that was ineffectual at best.
It’s safe to say that Kazooie is as terrible at handling her own emotions as she is at handling the emotions of others; as far as can be gleaned from the game, whatever she feels is generally buried under a layer of annoyance at everything except herself, and she doesn’t express herself except in the most raucous, direct ways. A master of subtlety, Kazooie is not. Fear, especially, is something she rarely ever shows. If the breegull seems vulnerable in any way, one can bet that something extremely drastic has happened. (Though Kazooie’s characterization may simply have been shakily dealt with in Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge, her almost-browbeaten quietness may suggest lingering fear and discomfort, masked ineffectually, from the effortless kidnapping that Grunty pulled off and her subsequent chaining-up in a cage.)
Like most Rareware characters (and particularly in this series), Kazooie is also strongly aware that she’s a character in a game series. Also like a lot of the characters in Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie, she’s very flippant about it - she knows what she’s gotten herself into, and she uses it to her advantage. Her blasé attitude towards boss battles means she’s not afraid to get right up in the face of a baddie and taunt it, and she has the firepower behind her statements to back herself up. In other words, Kazooie isn’t just bluster without substance - she knows what she’s talking about from several years of adventuring experience, and while it’s not quite what most of the standard protagonists in Luceti have under their respective belts, it’s still an impressive list of abilities.
And Kazooie flaunts them. She has no problem bragging about her exploits and making herself sound good. Why shouldn’t she? She’s a hero. Even the other characters in game know and respect it - even Bottles, who dislikes her almost as much as she hates him. She knows that she’s cool, she knows that she can kick witch butt - why should she let people tell her otherwise? She’s got enough self-confidence for herself and Banjo besides (and that’s a good thing, because Banjo needs it). She can take on the world, and live to tell about it. That attitude, combined with her skill set and the support of the steady, patient Banjo, means that she’s able to power through most of the obstacles that her life throws at her.
She’s not a useless sidekick at all, even if her name comes second in the title. In fact, she arguably does a lot more than Banjo most of the time (considering she’s usually hauling him around via the Talon Trot...). Generally, she finds this an irritating but acceptable amount of nuisance for the fun of getting to pound Grunty into paste and explore and just generally go on grand adventures - sometimes she loses her patience, though, and actively complains to whoever’s teaching her moves (usually Bottles or somebody related to him). This might be why she has absolutely no patience for the mole or his family - though it probably doesn’t help that they trade insults all the time.
Despite her usually harsh exterior, though, even Kazooie has a side that’s as soft as her feathers. It doesn’t come out often, but she’s expressed genuine caring before - even if it’s veiled under a layer of irritation. Everything from hatching eggs for Terry, the distraught pteranodon father, to admitting that Bottles “isn’t so bad” after the successes of Banjo-Kazooie... she’s got a fluffy side, but like hell if she’ll ever let on to it most of the time. And generally, when she does things for others, it’s for material gain, or a specific purpose. Or at least, that’s what she’ll tell you. The real reason might be a bit different from that, but good luck prying that from the breegull’s beak directly.
Banjo is the only person Kazooie seems to really care about without inward reservation. He’s the guy that brought her in to live with himself and Tooty (who mysteriously disappears after Banjo-Kazooie, after serving as a generic-princess to be captured...) so very long ago after scooping her and the eponymous blue backpack up off Breegull Beach. Maybe she feels she owes him something; maybe she likes the big furry lug more than she lets on; maybe she just appreciates the rent-free housing that the backpack provides. Either way, she’s the one consistent companion in Banjo’s life, and he in hers’. He’s probably the closest thing she has to a true friend - someone who seems to have no trouble putting up with her good-natured (and not-so-good-natured) jabs, insults, hot temper and loud mouth. (Beak?) Heck, he even helps her perform a lot of her moves - and while Kazooie is more useful solo than Banjo is when it comes to combat, without his assistance she’s stuck on such simple tasks as climbing.
Overall, Kazooie is a wisecracking smartass who has no qualms about stepping on a few feet - or even a few faces - to get what she wants. She wants to save the world. She wants to beat the bad guy. And she won’t stop at anything to fulfill those goals. She’s an unorthodox hero, in an unorthodox game, winning with unorthodox methods - and she loves every damn minute of it.
Strengths:
Physical: For a less-than-five-foot (probably) tall bird, Kazooie is a powerhouse. Presumably in the prime of her life, with several years of training and adventuring under her belt, and being able to wield an arsenal of surprisingly dangerous attacks, Kazooie is not a breegull to be underestimated. She has enough power behind her whirling wings and jabbing beak to put quite a few enemies down (though, without the grounding Banjo provides, she’s going to be short several moves in that regard). Don’t forget, she’s been lugging a bear almost twice her size - and probably more than twice her weight - around for several years.
That isn’t even counting her ability to launch volleys of Eggs from both her front and her rear (with no real explanation as to how she can pull the latter one off... she’s a cartoon character) - ranging from simple but dependable Blue Eggs to literal Grenade Eggs that explode on impact. Since she’s coming from Banjo-Tooie, she not only has access to Banjo-Tooie’s five types of Eggs (as well as the Battery Eggs from Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge, as it occurs between Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie), but she also has the Amaze-O-Gaze goggles - which, in game, give her extremely accurate sighting when combined with a first-person perspective. This should translate into some impressive Egg-sniping skills in Luceti - with the obvious cost that she has to stand completely still if she wants to aim well, otherwise she’ll be stuck with clumsily-aimed attacks. And if she’s close enough to somebody to tolerate it, she might even be able to be wielded like a living gun via Breegull Blaster.
Her tiny body is strong enough and light enough for her to be able to launch herself high in the air with moves like the Shock Spring Jump (when she can find the pad to do it with...) or the Leg Spring, which she can pull off on her own. She’s also capable of flying (which requires Red Feathers and a Flight Pad to pull off) and gliding (which requires neither), which suggests she’s got pretty strong wings. Were she to have a Banjo along to wear the blue backpack she resides in, she could do the Wonderwing too, which conveys temporary invincibility at the cost of Gold Feathers...
She’s also quick, able to sprint along at a fairly impressive pace - while there isn’t any specific information given about how fast she’d be in real-life terms, she’s a heck of a lot faster solo than most of the other things in Banjo-Tooie. Smaller and more manoeuvrable than Banjo, she can accomplish many tasks that require finesse that the bear just doesn’t have, and her size means she doesn’t have to worry about space constraints nearly as much.
Her cartoon “biology” provides her with some interesting benefits as well. For example, her skeleton doesn’t have to behave normally - her legs bend backwards during Breegull Blaster mode, she can cram her entire body into a backpack half the size of her torso, and she can be literally crushed flat by Stomponadon and survive (the second time kills her, though). Her organs are far from usual either - after all, she can swallow the entire collection of Banjo-Kazooie’s Jiggies (which are made of solid gold and are larger than her body is) with no discomfort. While this doesn’t make her invincible by any means, it does mean she might be able to elude deaths that would strike a more realistic individual down.
Mental: Kazooie’s not a bird-brain, even if she’s a bird. She’s got enough wits about herself to get past some very difficult puzzles along with Banjo (and Banjo is implied to be the slower of the two, mentally). Things like putting together traditional jigsaw puzzles that are animated (like the Jiggywiggy Temple Challenges), short-term memory puzzles (like Tiptup’s Choir), or even just being able to navigate a large, cluttered world without getting lost are all examples of her brainpower. She’s got a strong sense of intuition, though her logical processes aren’t as great - but when she’s a cartoon, how good is her logical sense going to be?
She’s capable of thinking on the fly - sometimes very literally at that - and can make quick decisions under pressure, due to all those time limits she’s had to deal with and boss battles in cramped quarters. She can anticipate what people are going to do fairly well, and though her unique situation might make some of her assumptions go wildly off the mark in Luceti, she’ll probably be able to adjust soon enough. She knows what power-ups and abilities to use, and when to use them - and that’s a pretty long list; the fact she retains them effortlessly suggests she has a really good memory, too, though that may simply be from using them over and over. She learns quickly too (however, as a gameplay element, it may simply be that she’s used to instantly knowing things - so this can also be a weakness depending on how one looks at it).
Kazooie can be strongly focused when she’s got a goal in mind, and she’ll stop at nothing to obtain what she’s set her eyes on, whether she has to beat somebody up, do a bunch of pointless puzzles, perform some ridiculously precise trick, or just stand around and wait for it to show up. She isn’t normally very patient at all, nor willing to help (with some rare exceptions), but the promise of a reward is often enough to spur her into action when the sheer thrill behind adventuring isn’t enough.
Emotional: Kazooie is extremely hard to shake, emotionally. The layer of harsh cynicism and wisecracking attitude prevents people from getting under her skin for very long, most of the time, and though there’re never very many harsh emotional situations in the B-Kverse, she nonetheless is insulated from the worst of them due to this. She is almost fearless, facing down the toughest enemies in her world with a raised eyebrow and a snarky insult. She won’t allow people to manipulate her, nor will she allow them to manipulate her close friends (assuming she has any). Fundamentally, she is tough, and it’s going to be hard to do anything to punch through that layer to make her vulnerable.
Weaknesses:
Physical: ... Well, she’s a less-than-five-foot-tall cartoon bird. Obscenely powerful though she is for something of her stature and species, she can’t hold a candle to many Lucetians. Without her partner Banjo, Kazooie also can’t access many of her most basic moves - it might translate a little differently in Luceti, but a solo Kazooie can’t dive underwater, can’t climb ledges, and is restricted from many of her beak-jabbing attacks due to lacking the leverage given by Banjo’s weight.
She’s also a lot weaker - she canonically has one Honeycomb less energy than Banjo does, solo (at maximum, seven as opposed to his eight, and ten when they’re together). She’s limited in terms of her ammo - since it’s a pickup item, and without Cheato codes she’s going to have a maximum of 100 Blue Eggs (and smaller maximums for the other kinds of Eggs). Any other power-ups she uses are only temporary, so she won’t get to keep them indefinitely, and a few of her moves rely on things like pads that won’t exist in Luceti unless she requests them.
If she wasn’t a cartoon, her species would probably mean her bones would be stupidly easy to break. As it is, though, she has several important limitations, like the lack of hands - Banjo normally compensates for this, but a solo Kazooie can’t grab items in anything except her beak. This is going to make using the journals somewhat difficult for her at first.
Mental: Kazooie’s not stupid, but she’s not a genius either. She can be outwitted, and her impulsivity means she gets Banjo in trouble due to not thinking ahead. She’s intellectually lazy - she doesn’t bother to find things out beyond what she needs to know, and she doesn’t see the value in learning things if they don’t directly benefit her (see her treatment of Bottles and company as a good example of this attitude). She hasn’t had a typical education, either, being a cartoon bird - she won’t recognize a lot of appliances, for example, beyond their most basic characteristics. And any kind of hold-up will inevitably end up frustrating her.
Her mindset will also be strongly entrenched in her cartoondom - she thinks everything is part of a game, and so there is a specific goal, always some tangible reward for everything, other people are NPCs, et cetera. This mindset will permeate nearly everything she does, and in a place like Luceti so far removed from that setting, she’s going to have a hard time dealing with this. This’ll also mean a plethora of strange behaviours - everything from wanting to burst into every building she can find and grab everything not nailed down, to seeking out villains on the Villain List as “boss battles”. Naturally, combined with her brashness, her attitude and her temper, this isn’t going to make her a lot of friends.
Emotional: See that aforementioned brashness, attitude and temper. Actually, most of Kazooie’s emotional traits are negative to a lot of people. Though she’s a hero, she really doesn’t act like one. Even if she doesn’t always intend to be, she comes off as cruel and uncaring, and this means she’ll probably be forced to work on her own for a long time - something that’s really going to knock her for a loop. Being almost dependent on Banjo to a degree she’d rather not admit, lacking the bear will shake her up. And without his mediating influence, there isn’t going to be anybody to save her tail feathers when she picks a fight with the first half-dozen people she meets.
She’s also going to be hugely stereotyped about people - because everybody she meets in the worlds of Banjo-Kazooie and its sequels are some kind of stereotype, generally an exaggerated parody of a real kind of person. It’s funny when observed in a third-person perspective - but Kazooie doesn’t have the luxury of that perspective. To her, it’s all reality is. So when she meets people that have actual depth of personality, she might find herself at a loss. And that will lead to the familiar vicious cycle of closing herself off and being an ass.
In fact, that closing herself off is a major problem too. Normally, Kazooie doesn’t have too many problems - she’s a hero, she always wins, always saves the day, always beats the bad guy in the end. In Luceti, she can’t always win. She’s just a nameless girl in a sea of heroes, some of which have done some admittedly impressive things. Even with all her toughness and composure, Kazooie still has a point where things will be difficult for her. But she’s too strong-willed to admit this, and so it’ll just fester... until she snaps.
Samples
First Person:
[The silence over the journal feed is suddenly interrupted with a loud, angry squawking.]
Listen here, Grunty... The moment I find your cauldron-sized butt in this latest dump of yours, I’m going to peck it into the ocean! I’ve been looking around this stupid place for hours and I can’t find the entrance to any of your dumb worlds! I don’t know where you hid them this time, but you’re really going to pay when I find them... I haven’t forgotten my moves from the last game, y’know. I kept ‘em up real good, just to beat you around!
[Audible hesitation, and a soft, almost muted “breee”, follow this outburst. Finally, a more subdued:] Now, maybe if I could figure out where that stupid bear got himself to, I’d be able to get outta here... where’s the big lug when you need ‘im? Figures that they’d split us up in Threeie... though I didn’t think it’d be right away. Geez!
[Red feathers come into view as a short bird peers into the screen of the journal.] And what the heck is this thing...? Hey, it’s got my name on it. At least somebody knows who the hero is around here... ha, and my name’s first for once! Eat it, Banjo! [And the journal is unceremoniously snapped up in a yellow beak.] Now just to track him down, and I’ll be in business.
Third Person:
Not even cartoon birds are supposed to have four wings. That’s just silly.
Kazooie found herself more than a little annoyed to wake up in a strange place - nowhere she recognized on the Isle O’ Hags, at any rate - with absolutely nothing on her person and with a stupid pair of extra wings that served no purpose whatsoever. There wasn’t anything that went with them besides discomfort when she tried to flap them - no catchy little jingle or anything like that. Heck, she couldn’t even hear any trace of theme music for the place she was in at all. What a bore! She was really going to have to give whoever dumped her in this backwater area a good swift peck. Or maybe an Egg to the face; it might have to depend on how forgiving she was feeling, and that generally wasn’t particularly forgiving in the first place.
An initial scope of the region presented nothing out of the ordinary - no paths that screamed “this way to the Jiggy”! Annoying for a starting area, but Kazooie figured that she needed a good challenge after awhile without a real adventure. What she wouldn’t give for a good nest or two of dependable Grenade Eggs, though... it felt weird not having any, and starting areas were supposed to have them, right?
... What was up with the extra wings, anyway? And where the heck was Banjo? Kazooie couldn’t see the furry dope anywhere, not even scanning the area with Amaze-O-Gaze vision. Where in the world could he have gotten himself to?
Eh, nothing that could be done about it. Kazooie would just have to figure out where she was. There were usually helpful characters in these starting areas, right? It’d be easy. After all, she was a seasoned hero after a few good adventures, and people were bound to help her out. They pretty much had to, after all, ‘cause she was important. Yeah... important.
Satisfied with this notion, Kazooie pointed herself down one of the closest paths she could make out in the dense tangle of unfamiliar forest, and, clucking softly to herself with a purposefulness that only she could muster, trotted down towards what had looked vaguely like a town in the distance.