The game is still beautiful in its own right, and its multiplayer soldiers, though they don't feel like they really belong in Conker's world, are still good examples of caricatures.
That said, I don't want to sell Rare short at continuing to do what they did best. The added multiplayer canon distances them even further from what was supposed to be their role in Conker's story. Live and Reloaded's Tediz look like actual, biological bears, and bleed like them too. They're supposed to be literal Teddy bears that the professor has customized to make them into soldiers, and the original version goes far in showing that they look like actual Teddy bears with a healthy dose of uncanny, raggedy, Tim Burton-like aesthetic, they're filled with stuffing rather than blood, and again, this all ties back into the original vibe of the game being all about cherished childhood icons being dragged forcibly into adulthood and only-just managing to perform adult tasks. Replacing the frying pan almost immediately with a spiked baseball bat ruins that dichotomy that places it immediately in a zone more like GTA. It's merely the presence of blood in things you whacked that set it over that edge, again calling back to the notion that this wasn't just another adults' game but rather a children's game wherein something was going horribly wrong, and getting wronger, as becomes obvious once guns enter the picture. Conker using a frying pan as a weapon, something that has also literally been done by a Disney princess, felt like just the right mix of cartoony slapstick and violence. The tweaks they made to the mythology also didn't help. Make everything look more realistic and that joke about straddling the line between two diametrically opposed types of games gets weaker. It also increases the juxtaposition between the day and night segments of the game the latter of which involved Conker entering parodies of R-rated movies and becoming a shooter.
The original Conker is a cartoony game, and while that isn't objectively better than a realistic game, it was better for the purpose of spoofing other cartoony games, and up to maybe the Uga Buga chapter, the game had a Tex Avery-like tone that fit it well. In retrospect, the joke wasn't built to age well, but there's still lots of things tied to it that give the game its identity, and when changed, it arguably doesn't have the same punch. If you grew up with cartoony mascot platformers, many of them starring anthropomorphic animals, as well as that growing accusation that said market was oversaturated and cliche, thus it was time to grow up an move on, the joke of that genre losing its innocence so quickly that it goes bonkers, in the process managing to be even more raunchy than some of the other "mature" games at the time, was really funny. Conker's Bad Fur Day is special to some Nintendo fans because it was spoofing some things rather specific to their childhood.
However, possibly there isn't enough there to compensate for that disadvantage, in the eyes of many fans.Īlso, while zealous loyalty to Nintendo and hatred of Microsoft is a dumb thing to hold against the game, it could be argued the brand was reinvented a bit too much in an attempt to pander to the XBox crowd. I don't think the extra censorship is a big deal, even if it's incredibly strange for it to exist in an era with far more vulgar games and on a console with less of a family friendly reputation to uphold.
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