A masterpiece.
It's not so surprising that the graphics are top-notch, after seeing some gorgeous Rare games like Banjo-Kazooie, but you really can't hope for much more than this out of the system. The environments are lush and colorful, the characters well-designed, and graphical flaws nearly non-existent. One thing that is a bit annoying and at times an impediment is the character pop-up that is common to Rare N64 games, but it's a limitation of the hardware. Rare showed that they knew the system well and I think that they chose a very smart trade-off, as the game has nearly no slowdown. One of my favorite highlights is the laser show going on in the background of the rave level.
But by far, even better than the graphics is the sound. I was absolutely shocked by it. First of all, there's no text to read in the game, unless you want to read what the characters are saying. And they have a ton to say, which is what surprised me. Rare put a TON of speech into this cart, and the sound quality doesn't suffer from it. Also deserving mention, the music in this game is great, too. Again, for me the highlight was the pumping techno music of the rave level (okay, I admit that I like raves). One more notable thing about the sound is that it is an integral part of the game play. Musical cues will tell you a lot about what is happening, and it's much more than just the background music of most games.
The game controls well enough and is easy to play. It took me a while to master and for those first 20 minutes or so, I was pretty frustrated, but it's rather funny to run back through, say, the first level and see how much easier it is because you've mastered the controls. However, the game itself is not at all easy to master. For one thing, there were quite a few parts that I required a walkthrough for, either because I couldn't figure out what I had to do or I couldn't figure out how to do it (I'm no master gamer though, so sometimes I miss some obvious things). Secondly, even with a walkthrough and cheats, there were a few parts of the game that were still extremely tough. I didn't cheat throughout the whole game, but I know for a fact that there's at least one level that I never would've been able to beat without cheats.
Also, the camera can be a bit frustrating at times. It's probably the best camera in any 3D platformer, at least on the N64, but it still sucks. I chalk this up to it being pretty much impossible to consistently provide a view in a 3D world without any level of depth perception. There are a few instances where, even if you reposition the camera, you have to jump onto a small area and it's pretty much impossible to tell where you are in relation to where you're trying to land. I've decided that 3D game cameras will always suck until we finally get 3D displays to play them on. Of course, they will probably still suck, but hopefully not nearly as much.
Okay, so the game is too hard in some parts, has slight graphical "glitches" (due to hardware limitations only, I won't knock Rare for that), and a rather crappy camera (but as good as it gets, so I won't knock Rare for that either). I think this is about as close to perfect as games get. This is the first game, in a long time, that was so $%^&ing fun to play that I didn't want to turn it off. Even when I got really stuck and kept dying over and over and over and over (and over)... aqain, I still wanted to keep playing. This game kept me up. I'd say "Okay, after I beat this, I'm done." But then the next cut scene would suck me in. It's pretty hard for a long game like this to hold my attention, but the story really pulled me in.
Oh, and speaking of that, a word about content. First off, it's not "gimmicky" as the gamespot reviewer said. No, Rare responded to the grief they were given when it seemed as though Conker was going to be a fluffy animal title. They took the game in the exact opposite direction, to such an extreme (way more than I could ever expect) that it becomes satirical (at one point, you're controlling the cutesy squirrel, trying to aim his urine at another character while he stumbles around in a drunken stupor... how can you not see the satirical genius in that?). In a way, Rare is poking fun at the gamers complaining about "kiddy" titles, by giving you gratuitous amounts of gore, sex, and foul language. It's as if that's all you care about, so that if Rare fills the game up with it, then people will buy it, because apparently they didn't give a rat's #$* about gameplay when they thought the game was a kiddy title. Get it? Well, the joke is on them because there's an incredibly great game underneath it all. Somehow, Rare takes all those superficial qualities and manages to combine it with a great story AND a really good game, and make it somehow all fit together so that nothing feels even remotely "tacked on." Basically, the total is much more than the sum of its parts.
It's so excessive, it was constantly going beyond my expectations. There's very few characters in this game that don't die a bloody death. There's very few that don't cuss like a sailor. There are very few females that don't have huge breasts and skimpy clothes. This is a VERY mature game, and while I disagree with the ESRB that 17 is mature, I don't think that anyone younger than, say, 15 should be playing this game, and the one regret that I have is that I bet a lot of parents bought it for their kids anyway, since it was a "squirrel" game. I'm usually pretty lax on the sex, violence, and cussing thing but this is far too gratuitous for kids. It's more of a parenting responsibility than anything, but unfortunately far too many parents are clueless about game content, and that's the fatal flaw of the rating system (but I digress...).
The levels are all very unique and very few that I found annoying enough that I just wanted to rush through, but some are definitely better than others. There's a little bit of everything though: Dracula, a battlefield, a rave, even a whole level that takes place inside a giant mountain of #$!&. Not to mention getting hammered and peeing on people, making cows #$%& themselves, riding a dinosaur... too much to mention. It's pretty ingenious game design. The humor is outstanding, too, and helps make the cut scenes one of the best parts of the game.
But I found the biggest weakness of the game is the ending. I mean, I guess I couldn't have expected it to be much better, since the story actually starts at the end (so you know how the game ends up), but I was quite a bit dissatisfied with the ending, not only with how the story ended but how abrupt the final cut scene was. It didn't feel like much of a reward for taking the long, hard journey through this game, but then the journey itself IS the reward, and the entire reason to play the game.
Anyway, if you live your life without playing Conker's Bad Fur Day, you are missing out on something you can't even imagine. I knew this game was good, but I had no idea it was this good. Despite its few flaws, the story makes the game so entertaining that I enjoyed it more than any other game in a long time (and this is 2008, I missed out on this game the first time around).