| Gruntilda Winkybunion | |
|---|---|
 | |
|
Series |
Banjo-Kazooie |
|
Debut |
Banjo-Kazooie (1998) |
|
Console of origin |
Nintendo 64 |
|
Species |
Witch/Undead |
|
Gender |
Female |
Gruntilda Winkybunion (sometimes called Grunty) is the main antagonist of the Banjo-Kazooie series. She is a wicked witch with magical spells capable of doing anything, even going as far as death. She also enjoys rhyming, which her three sisters seem to dislike. Grunty also keeps her spells in a book named Cheato, who doesn't enjoy Grunty's plan of becoming beautiful.
In Banjo-Kazooie, Grunty kidnaps Banjo's sister Tooty and plans to steal her beauty so she can be the most beautiful woman in all of Spiral Mountain.
Two months later in Grunty's Revenge she inhabits a robotic form of herself called Mecha-Grunty, and plots to prevent Banjo and Kazooie from ever meeting.
Two years later, in Banjo-Tooie her sisters Mingella and Blobbelda join her in an attempt to restore Grunty to her former body.
History[]
Banjo-Kazooie[]
In the first game, Gruntilda played the role of the stereotypical "evil witch". She spoke only in rhymes and was known for being extremely vain, which is odd considering how ugly she appears. She has a bad habit of picking her nose, as seen in the Banjo-Kazooie intro cutscene. Like most witches, she uses a broomstick for transportation.
When Dingpot revealed that Tooty, Banjo's sister, was the "prettiest and fairest in the land", Gruntilda became infuriated and kidnapped Tooty (however, the manual implies that Gruntilda was already planning on snatching a denizen from Spiral Mountain to steal their beauty to one-up her sister, Brentilda. According to the manual, she was actually deep-down glad that Tooty was prettier than her as it gave her an excuse to subject her as her first test specimen). She selfishly plotted to use a "Beauty Transfer Machine" to drain Tooty's youth and beauty and transfer it to her own ugly self, which would result in Grunty becoming pretty and thin and Tooty becoming ugly, fat and green. Banjo and his good friend Kazooie chased the witch through her massive lair, where she had created several worlds filled with her minions and various challenges to stop the duo.
As the pair progressed, Gruntilda shouted rhyming taunts and various insults in an attempt to keep the pair away. But with the help from various sources, including her nicer sister Brentilda who told Banjo and Kazooie interesting secrets regarding Gruntilda, the bear and bird duo were able to complete the worlds and reach Grunty's last challenge before rescuing Tooty: a twisted game show called Grunty's Furnace Fun. After the duo won the game show, Gruntilda ran away and Banjo and Kazooie rescued Tooty. Later, the bear and bird journeyed to the roof of Gruntilda's Lair and faced off in a battle with Grunty.
The Final Battle[]
Despite her comical nature, Gruntilda proved herself to be Banjo and Kazooie's strongest enemy. She spends most of the fight riding her broomstick. During the first phase, she flies down fast and tries to impale Banjo and Kazooie with the teeth on her broom. However, her broom starts to slow down after a few passes (two the first and second time around, three the third time around, and four the fourth time around), leaving her vulnerable to the Rat-a-tat Rap. After every successful attack from the player, Gruntilda will attack with an easily dodge-able fireball.
After taking enough damage, she uses a homing spell. Kazooie can protect Banjo from this by using the Golden Feathers. After, she starts to hover in place and throw fireballs. In a rare moment, she displays some intelligence when doing this because if the player tries to run away from the fireballs before she fires, Gruntilda will throw them into the player's path. After throwing four fireballs, she will take a short pause (the pause shortens every time she moves from one part of the tower to the next), leaving her vulnerable to three Eggs.
After repeating this process four times, she uses another homing spell which once again will be destroyed if Kazooie uses a Golden Feather. Then, Gruntilda flies high into the air to avoid being shot at, but fortunately Bottles comes to the duo's aid and creates a Flight Pad for them to use. Banjo and Kazooie can hit Gruntilda at any time with the Beak Bomb but it's best to attack her when she's not moving (again, the time she's not moving will shorten every time she's hit). Try not to attack her from above, otherwise you risk falling off the tower to your doom. Every time she's hit, she'll throw fireballs at you (one after the first hit, two after the second, three after the third, and four after the fourth).
After taking another four hits, Gruntilda will create a force field around her that Banjo and Kazooie cannot break through. At this point the Jinjos realize the two of them are in need of their help and intervene by creating four statues around the area. After three eggs are shot into the statues, a Jinjo will fly into the air like a missile and break through Gruntilda's barrier. The witch, however, doesn't remain idle during this time and will continue to attack the pair with fireballs. Unfortunately, Banjo and Kazooie cannot take cover behind the Jinjo statues as Gruntilda's attacks fly through them.
After all four Jinjo missiles fire, Gruntilda's broomstick will break and she will fall to the edge of the tower. She is still standing, however, and her force field still renders her immune to any of Banjo and Kazooie's attacks. At this point a larger statue containing The Mighty Jinjonator appears. This statue has four holes that the player must shoot four eggs into each side. Like the smaller Jinjo statues, the statue provides no cover and Gruntilda's attacks will still pass through it. She is quite possibly at her most dangerous in this phase, partly because she will attack with several consecutive fireballs followed by a homing shot. After each homing shot she will take a short breather, allowing Banjo and Kazooie to shoot eggs into the holes. Once the Mighty Jinjonator is activated, he will attack Gruntilda and knock her off the tower.
Gruntilda falls off the tower and crashes into the ground. Seconds later, a large falling rock traps her beneath, sealing her first defeat. Banjo, Kazooie and Tooty take a vacation to celebrate, during which Gruntilda's minion Klungo spends two years attempting to remove the enormous boulder and save Gruntilda. Unfortunately, she remained alive and vowed her revenge upon the pair one day.
Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge[]
Klungo builds her a mechanical body, aptly called Mecha-Grunty, for her ghost to inhabit. Rather than fighting the duo as the main antagonist in a body of her own, she operates Mecha-Grunty and causes chaos by going twenty years back in time and kidnapping Kazooie. However, after Banjo's first battle with the robotic witch, Kazooie was freed and Mecha-Grunty fleed.
Their next battle involved fighting her up above the lighthouse and taking out her mechanical parts one at a time. After her second defeat, Grunty had enough and wanted Klungo to upgrade her up to supreme strength and battle the duo in her lair when it was under construction.
Facing them at the top of her lair, Mecha-Grunty charged at them, fired electric balls, ground pounded, and dropped airborne mines. Even with her body destroyed, she was not ready to give as she used her ghostly power to defeat the duo, which failed. She is beaten once more and returns to her body in the present, setting the events of Banjo-Tooie in motion.
Banjo-Tooie[]
After two years had passed, Gruntilda was suddenly freed from her prison by the sudden appearance of her sisters Mingella and Blobbelda. Their evil spells levitate and destroy the rock that trapped Grunty and they discover that she had been degenerated into a skeleton. Furious at her new bony body, Gruntilda asked her sisters for help in restoring her. "Mingy" and "Blobby" had already planned for such an event, and the three prepared to leave Spiral Mountain.
Before they did, when Mumbo had wandered out of Banjo's house to find the source of the ruckus caused when Mingella and Bloddelda entered with the Hag 1 digging machine, Grunty chased him and tried to kill him with magic spells. Seeing him enter Banjo's house, she prepares a bigger spell to destroy it and while Banjo, Kazooie and Mumbo escaped, Bottles stayed behind assuming Mumbo was lying and trying to win at their poker game, resulting in him being killed by the blast, which also ruined Banjo's house.
After destroying Banjo's house, the trio of witches used the Hag 1 to reach Cauldron Keep on Isle o' Hags, where Mingella and Blobbelda revealed their B.O.B. machine. It was designed to suck the life out of anything captured in its beam; Gruntilda practiced this on King Jingaling for giving Banjo and Kazooie a Jiggy, reducing him to a zombie. It is also interesting to note that Gruntilda stopped speaking in rhyme at this point (her sisters found it "annoying"). Gruntilda then wanted to use B.O.B. on the whole island, but is informed that it will take time for it to charge up before that can happen.
For the rest of the game, she stays in Cauldron Keep but will usually talk to Banjo and Kazooie whenever they enter a mini-game. They eventually meet her again in Cauldron Keep where she makes an attempt to destroy Banjo and Kazooie with another game show called Tower of Tragedy, this time competing against her two sisters in which the loser would have a 1-ton weight dropped on them. Her plan failed and she ended up killing her two sisters, but because of her temper, declares Banjo and Kazooie's win "invalid due to the faulty scoring equipment".
Not sure of what to do next, Gruntilda takes Kazooie's advice to "escape in a cowardly fashion like in Banjo-Kazooie", and she tells the duo she'll be at the top of the tower, though she of course boasts she will win this time. Sure enough, Banjo and Kazooie found Gruntilda in the Hag 1 waiting for them at the top of Cauldron Keep. Although she had more success the last time she attacked Banjo and Kazooie (she killed two of his allies, but were brought back by reversing the B.O.B.), Gruntilda's revenge plans failed and was defeated yet again, reduced to nothing more than a talking skull. Later, Banjo, Kazooie, Humba Wumba and Jamjars use her head as a ball in a game of "Kick Around" and she loses one of her eyes (again) in the process. She swore that she would get her revenge in Banjo-Threeie.
Gruntilda is also a playable character in the multiplayer games Targitzan's Temple Shootout, Ordnance Storage Shootout and Clinker's Cavern Shootout. In these games, Gruntilda is the tank character with her health at a whopping 16 honeycombs, enabling her to endure four Grenade Eggs; however, it comes at the cost of being the largest target and moving the slowest.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts[]
Grunty continues her role as an antagonist in this game as well, and has taken up her annoying rhyming once more. She makes her way back to Spiral Mountain, even though she is still a skull (probably why it took her eight years to get there). A now fattened Banjo and Kazooie challenge her to another showdown, but the Lord of Games pauses the battle and states they shall fight in true Banjo-Kazooie style, by collecting random useless objects. A fat Banjo and bodiless Grunty start to collect the thousands of badges L.O.G. put in front of them, but soon grows impatient of a skull and a fat bear with a fat bird in his backpack running around. He restores Banjo and Kazooie to fighting fit shape and gives them a Magical Wrench, while giving Grunty a robotic form of her original body with a jar for her head and a cat named Piddles. The three characters go to Showdown Town, where Gruntilda tries to stop Banjo and Kazooie from earning Jiggies and returning to Spiral Mountain and fight her once more. She appears in all the levels of the game. In Showdown Town, she treats the time off she has from attempting to beat the heroes as a vacation.
Personality[]
Like the rest of the characters in the series, Gruntilda has a very comical personality and often breaks the 4th wall. While possessing high intelligence and a sarcastic wit, Gruntilda is very arrogant and overconfident, never expecting Banjo and Kazooie to overcome all the trials and challenges placed before them. However, even though she's comical, she is nonetheless very evil and has never shown any form of kindness or concern for anybody or anything, even her own sisters.
She is shown to be very power hungry and sadistic, hurting others for simply having a carefree and kind nature and longing to rule over the Isle' of Hags. Aside from the plan she had to take Tooty's beauty away in the first game, her evil nature is also shown in her abuse of her minions throughout the game as well as her abductions of the Jinjos. In the first game, Gruntilda had a fairly typical witch personality with her goal of being the best looking and trying to stop Banjo and Kazooie from interfering with her evil plans. She is also shown to be responsible for the numerous misfortunes of the countless lands she seized control of and has spread much chaos and suffering with her army of monsters.
During the second game, Gruntilda is overall much more evil and sadistic, though she is still just as comical. She is forced to stop rhyming (because her sisters won't help her get her body back if she doesn't stop) and actually murders several characters, including an entire family of ten Jinjos, and her own two sisters in cold blood after they failed to stop Banjo and Kazooie. Klungo himself would be viciously beaten and tortured by Gruntilda throughout the entirety of the game despite being her most loyal follower and planned to have him killed, but due to Klungo swithcing sides and deserting his sadistic boss, he avoids this grim fate.
Her aim is also considerably more fiendish in that she wanted to use B.O.B. to suck the life from all of Isle O' Hags to restore her body, which would of left countless living creatures as undead entities devoid of any life or energy. Due to Banjo and Kazooie foiling her plans and burying her under a rock, she holds a strong grudge against them and has a hunger and appetitie for vengeance against them, which she greatly relishes in the final battle against the pair. Despite this, she takes them just as lightly as she did in the first game, presumably due to her having so much more technology and numbers on her side, leading to yet another defeat.
In Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge, her rise to power prior to Banjo-Kazooie is explained while the villian herself is shown to display a considerably more evil and intelligent demeanor. Her plans include abducting Kazooie and going back in time to alter history to erase her defeat and regain control of the island and resume her original plans. The game shows that prior to Banjo-Kazooie, Gruntilda abducted the Jinjos, seized control of their home to construct her lair, enslaved others, and stole the Jiggies from Master Jiggywiggy to exert her control over the lands she took over.
It is additionally shown that the witch built up her army into huge numbers by heavily recruiting other monsters and beasts from the island. Her main objective is to round up all bears and birds and eradicate them entirely to ensure Banjo and Kazooie never exist, thus changing history to where Gruntilda would've never been defeated and her rise to power remaining unopposed. Gruntilda's plans in this game took a much more strategic approach as her operations were laid out more carefully and she craved to have pure power and control. In addition, she also wanted to continue her original plans of obtaining beauty once Banjo and Kazooie were taken care of.
In Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, she displays a high level of intelligence, as she built the Gruntbots who assist her and the vehicles she uses. Unlike previous games, Gruntilda does not value upgrading her personal appearance, as she seems quite fond of her new mechanical body, but to solely have Spiral Mountain once again in her grasp and become its ruler.