Playing Rare games in languages you don't know

[Gorjo]

Did you ever have to play a game without being able to read it? How has it affected the experience or how do you think it would affect it? How "accesible" do you think games should strive to be regardless of the language they are set.

While the most important thing is arguably the gameplay, it just so happens that part of the Rare experience are the puns and dialogue, that some times may be important in order to know what to do.
Games like the first DKC and Battletoads are very intuitive and playable anywhere, but I wonder if it's even possible to beat Banjo-Kazooie without reading the dialogue unless you are willing to endure A LOT of trial and error.

[Taylor]

I've never had to play in a foreign language, but I have played the French and Japanese versions of Banjo-Kazooie while I was learning the languages. I do not know what it truly feels like to not know the original English translation (except when I was a child), but my experience of going through a foreign language version after knowing all the English dialogue was quite interesting. It was fun noticing all the differences; in the Japanese Banjo-Kazooie, for example, Grunty doesn't rhyme at all. I still class the English dialogue as the most 'authenic' version, due to the humour puns as you rightly mention.

However, I disagree that Banjo-Kazooie is not intuitive. Unless I am biased by knowing the entire game throughout, I think it is quite obvious that you need to collect notes and Jiggies to progress. The note doors have a picture of a note and the number required, and you quickly learn about Jiggies as soon as you enter Grunty's Lair and stumble upon the giant jigsaw. I certainly could not read when I first played Banjo-Kazooie, but I had tons of fun and it was my favourite game.