I’ve played Banjo-Tooie countless times over the years.  And so it’s hard to make one of my favorite games of all time feel fresh.  Partly, this is because I tend to do the same thing every single time.  For example, I always head left upon entering Terrydactyland and climb the vine behind the waterfall.  This time, believe it or not…I went right.  Impressive, huh?  Anyway, the biggest experiment I wanted to conduct (yes, even bigger than my astounding attempts to walk in…gulp, different directions) revolved around this question: can you complete Jolly Roger’s Lagoon without having Mumbo oxygenate the water?  Entering these underwater caverns with limited water seemed like a fool’s errand.  But dang it, someone had to do it!  Preparing myself by saving the goldfish in Spiral Mountain for extra oxygen and faster swimming, I took a deep breath, and dove into the center of the lagoon.

Swimming down past a bunch of giant anemone and the sunken UFO, my first obstacle was the giant octopus blocking my path to the left.  You need to freeze them with ice eggs in order to get past, but I panicked, and after failing to hit its body a single time even after a flurry of ice eggs, I had to return to the surface for more air.  Well, this already wasn’t going very well.  My second attempt went just a bit better, and after freezing that tentacled fiend, I was able to swim past and reach the underwater city of Atlantis.  The first thing I did was enter the tall thin building housing the Talon Torpedo ability, where I was able to get some air.  And then I entered the Seaweed Sanctum, which is also filled to the brim with that sweet, sweet oxygen.

After activating the warp pad near the giant fish, but not yet having the courage to hang out underwater long enough to blast its teeth, I returned to Atlantis, activated the wrap pad there, then kept on swimming to Humba’s wigwam (well, teepee) so that I could get transformed into a submarine.  Which, as you’d expect, made my exploration of Atlantis and its neighboring caverns a whole lot easier, as I no longer needed oxygen to survive.  Along the way, I activated more warp pads for easier navigation, defeated the anglerfish with the questionable name, and took care of the minigame in the deepest part of the level.

Unfortunately, not everything could be completed with the sub.  Talon Torpedo is absolutely required to break various objects and get items out of those clear fish, and strangely enough, the sub’s torpedoes aren’t able to knock out the big fish’s teeth, even when they seem just as explosive as grenade eggs.  Huh, go figure.  And so I was forced to transform back into our familiar bear and bird duo.  Fortunately, the rest of these tasks proved fairly easy, especially since I could warp straight to wherever I wanted to go.  Even blasting the big fish until all its teeth fell out (I always felt bad doing this) was an easy task, even on limited oxygen.

The only place where I drew the line and relented on my mission was the minigame with Chris P Bacon, where you must protect him for 60 seconds from fish that seem to enjoy the taste of pork.  This might have been doable, as you have time at the start to shoot a fish or two, then get more air that will probably last you for the rest of the minigame, but it was just too annoying and stressful.  But then again, this minigame is annoying even on unlimited oxygen, so…maybe holding my breath was not the problem.

And there you have it, folks.  This most important of questions has finally been answered.  Jolly Roger’s Lagoon is totally navigable without unlimited oxygen.  The most annoying thing you’ll deal with is Chris’s minigame, which is aggravating at the best of times.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I really need some fresh air.

Banner image is a screenshot from Flickr User: Tyler Burgess