I never really played these games. They looked even more insultingly twee than the usual platformer stuff - like something Enid Blyton shat out. This looks like a big improvement.
If I was in the army and had to torture a Taliban POW to make him tell me where his buddies are hiding so we can kill them, I'd make him listen to this music really loud, then kill myself from shame over the act 5 years later.
What the hell happened to rareware? They were unfuckingstoppable on the SNES and N64 (At least in my opinion as a platform gamer.) between all their 'mascot games', Goldeneye, Killer Instinct, and Perfect Dark.
Then one day out of the blue they decided it was time to suck. What went wrong?
They were never good. Sometimes by accident they'd make a cool game like Goldeneye. Nothing's really changed as far as I can tell - haven't played the latest Banjo or Viva Pinata, but visually at least they are the only Rare games that don't look like total crap and they're supposed to play well.
Interior feud with Nintendo Corporate is what went wrong, mostly over Conker 64, which was postponed and pushed back for over four Christmases to prevent competition with Nintendo franchise games, leading to Conker's developers going berserk like they did and Nintendo attempting to bury the game. for it's adult content.
Basically, Nintendo has no real desire to be congenial to non-Japanese developers, so they took their business elsewhere when Microsoft entered the game.
It's like the makers of this were on a mission to condense anime culture into a single thing for storage before the world exploded and time was running out.