The Nintendo GameCube – the little purple prism that could...or couldn't. While the system's middling performance was a rough patch for The Big N, many young gamers grew up cherishing its library of games. But do they hold up today? Join Anthony on his quest to find out as he reviews every classic title offered on Switch 2's Nintendo Classics service.
And now, in what’s certainly a timely twist of fate, our latest GameCube game compels a segue from the last Cube Chronicles—namely in how I’d played Super Mario Sunshine a week early courtesy of New York City’s Toys R’ Us. A lovely childhood memory, wherein this wonderful surprise allowed a peek at next-gen gaming’s future. However, I’d neglected to mention one crucial detail—amidst the hubbub, past the kiosks and beneath the giant monitor where I’d bounced around Bianco Hills, stood a very strange man: giddy, authoritative, and dressed head-to-toe in a graduation gown. None other than our nerdy host of the hour, this college graduate was to tour guiding as a reclusive anime fan was to room volume, loudly broadcasting the inner workings of Mario’s new water-spray device and MCing an ill-fated match against Petey Piranha.
A cruel analogy, perhaps; the mystery graduate was clearly hamming it up for the audience, and the excitement of the whole experience readily suppressed any irritation on my end. But things cratered once it was time to showcase Star Fox Adventures; namely, the game’s opening where Star Fox’s new heroine in Krystal rides a pterodactyl one stormy night, ready to infiltrate General Scales’ flying galleon. It was as she spoke in that fictional dinosaur language did this man, his hat’s golden tassel whipping about as he turned to us, deign to ask us the following question:
“Alright, everybody, who is this? Is she a good guy, or a bad guy?”
Very suddenly, amidst the ensuing silence, did I realize I had my fill—stricken by a case of second-hand embarrassment that I took as my cue to leave.
To this day, I have no idea who this person was. I don’t know why he asked us a rhetorical question no one bothered to answer. I don’t even know if he was affiliated with Nintendo or not. And I certainly haven’t the slightest idea why he was wearing that silly outfit. Not that the patronizing display turned me off Star Fox Adventures; rest assured, I’d delighted in whacking innocent dinosaurs with Fox McCloud’s new staff on a nearby kiosk, and I eagerly anticipated continuing my sadistic pleasures back home when the game would launch one month later.
But damn me if it’s not as confounding as the actual game! For over two decades, Star Fox Adventures has continually vexed me, and each passing year has raised more questions than the last. It’s one thing to graft one property onto an unrelated concept—a practice certainly quite familiar to Nintendo, what with the Arabian-themed Doki Doki Panic being reskinned into Super Mario Bros. 2 for Western audiences. It’s quite another to shift genres entirely by taking one of the industry’s most famous space shooters and ground it by way of an otherwise promising Zelda-like in Dinosaur Planet, a Rare-developed adventure game originally designed for Nintendo 64. Gone were the lasers, space operas, and branching paths that’d defined Star Fox, substituted with spell-casting, ancient Krazoa lore and dinosaurs with funny British accents.
Within the laboratory of Nintendo’s ever-constant tinkering, it might’ve not seemed so strange: it’s been well-established that Star Fox is a favored seedbed for experimentation, with its steward in Shigeru Miyamoto always seeking to surprise players. Ever the ardent gardener of new ideas, it was he who instructed fellow greenskeeper Takaya Imamura to pursue an adventure-style game following Star Fox 64—a concept that, to his mind, had already been perfected. Never content with merely reiterating ideas, Miyamoto’s desire for new frontiers called for Star Fox to finally leave his cockpit; after all, what better way to broaden one’s horizons than leaving one’s shell?
An admirable approach, yet one proving far too hasty: a move to GameCube was necessary following the Nintendo 64’s imminent end, yet the disc-based console proved ill-suited for its instant-loading world—causing no end of development headaches for its measly five programmers. The Star Fox rebranding mandated familiar shoot-‘em-up sequences with no time to refine them into well-oiled cogs, instead sloppily glued upon Dinosaur Planet’s posterboard like an overnight school project hackjob. Rare’s penchant for constant delays ensued, eventually placing Star Fox Adventures under the slightly awkward, not-at-all demanding circumstances that was the impending Microsoft acquisition—a looming timer forcing a very unready game out the door. (The last Rare release on a home Nintendo console, as it were. Unceremonious, much?)
Did I mention it was Ground Zero for Star Fox’s decline—one constantly judged upon Star Fox 64’s benchmark? Whoopsie!
My animosity towards Star Fox Adventures should come as no surprise; indeed, I’d already elaborated on the game’s failures in this Star Fox retrospective some three months ago, so you’ll forgive me for retreading familiar ground. Really, I would not exaggerate in claiming it’s my very least favorite of Nintendo’s output for the little purple cube that couldn’t. I don’t know if that necessarily makes it the worst—if we’re counting the system’s middling Pokémon offerings, there’s more than one contender for the crown—but its persistent mediocrity and paradoxical…everything certainly renders it the frontrunner in my book.
The problems with Star Fox Adventures begin and end by virtue of its identity crisis. It's a dungeon spelunker much as Rare’s design philosophies at the time—that being ripping off Super Mario 64 whenever possible—constantly misdirect it into a frivolously tedious collectathon. It's a tale of swords and sorcery much as the Star Fox property demands poorly-implemented shmups. It’s a series of puzzles built around a pet-raising simulator, constantly force-feeding your plucky dinosaur so he can perform not-so-spectacular stunts.
It’s too unfocused; too messy to commit to any one vision. And to the unassuming newcomer, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise from the presentation alone: Star Fox Adventures was a graphical standout in its heyday, with press previews and forum posts gushing at length over Fox’s luscious fur-shading. The animated jank and low-poly models may be obvious today, but between the rippling waters and gorgeous vistas, the visual delights successfully distracted many from the odd premise—a feat helped along by the game’s mystical soundscape of tribalistic percussion and vocals, painting a primitive paradise isolated from the intergalactic wars plaguing the Lylat System.
A honeymoon period, alas, quickly dashed by the game’s ensuing tug-of-war. For one, Star Fox Adventures is gratuitous in its fetch quests: it is a constant assembly line of collectibles, all keys for the never-ending locks impeding Fox’s journey. The hapless critters he encounters constantly demand gifts, food, and trinkets of all sorts, earned from constant backtracking and spending. The game wastes little time with these frivolous asides, greeting players with the following non-sequitur:
Why is he telling me this? Why should I care about this? Star Fox Adventures attempts to speak the language of Rare’s prior collectathons in Banjo and Donkey Kong 64 without understanding how, even within their bloated excesses, the myriad of movement options engages the player in constant conversation with their respective sandboxes, be it experimenting with freeform approach or simply gobbling up everything in sight. Whereas they invite constant feedback, the rigid confines of an adventure game demand a different approach to collecting, and a game as patchwork as Adventures is ill-equipped to tackle such a task with its garbled speech, flubbing basic needs in convenience (no fast-travel system!?) and signposting (maybe tell me to grab and install these bridge-raising artifacts before enlisting me on an entirely separate scavenger hunt?).
Running the distance to install Spellstones and Krazoa Spirits at their respective dungeons. Scrounging up Scarabs to pay whatever toll impedes your progress. Grabbing enough Fuel Cells to fly from landmass to landmass. It’s all too proceduralized to entertain, emulating the mundanity of crossing off errands on your paid day-off rather than embarking on a globetrotting quest. Worse still, every McGuffin is punctuated with the same five-second cutscene, accompanied by the same five-second jingle, of Fox giddily raising his latest trinket to the heavens—an exhausting, maddening, and flatly patronizing sequence every bit as fun as watching Cocomelon nursery rhymes on repeat. And by “fun”, I mean “this aural hellspawn will permanently brand itself upon your brain amidst the five million times you’ll hear it”.
Because the game won't stop.
I mean, really.
Even when it's the same damn key item!
Naturally, as all forms of interactive torture are, they’re unskippable. Fair is fair: the war crime that was unskippable cutscenes remained an industry-wide learning process in 2002, and even Adventures’ role model in Zelda hadn’t quite figured out the rhythm of text prompts. (In fact, as seen in the overbearance of the Wii/DS era, it’d eventually give Adventures a run for its money.) Yet I’m astounded by how much it commits to the bit: in what I’m hoping was a concession towards the visually-impaired, the game, at times, plays the sequence immediately after an item was already handed to you with explicit intent. Time and again, it is oblivious to its circus show of self-parody.
Indeed, Star Fox Adventures is insistent on procedure, heeding all the wrong lessons from its Nintendo mentor. Whereas Zelda dungeons are organic affairs in their lock-and-key set-up, Adventures only cares for pulling from its same bag of tricks with barrel, switch, and fire puzzles. Cracked walls indicate a prime spot for explosions, yet Adventures demands we walk up and down multiple floors just to grab one stupid bomb barrel. Combat is a mere formality, offering little options in favor of mindlessly whaling on whatever Sharpclaw crosses our path. Its brand of order-of-operations game design never engages, either being too simple to exercise our brains or protracts its puzzles to the point of wasting our time.
And where Ocarina of Time had the well-meaning but irritating companion in Navi, we get here Star Fox’s own Jar Jar Binks in Prince Tricky: an insipid little triceratops who constantly demands food and yells constant non-sequiturs (“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” and “LET’S PLAY!”) throughout your journey. Boy, do I hate that thing. It’s not even that he’s annoying—his laughing amidst us falling off cliffs or being fried alive has earned him well-deserved karma with Fox’s staff—but that the food element shines a tonal dissonance in Rare’s collectathon mindset; as in, the very kindergarten problems that already populated (and later bloated) their cartoonish N64 platformers. Which is how we wind up with nonsense like dinosaurs randomly crying over their nightlights. In a Zelda-like Star Fox. Yeah.
Star Fox Adventures is a series of non-sequiturs masquerading as game design, and it’s why I’ve never bought the “it’s fine if you just ignore the Star Fox motif” argument—it’s mediocre partly, if not largely, because of this property mishmash. The mandated Arwing segments are all bite-sized trivialities, featuring neither the depth nor punch of Star Fox 64 while lacking distinct visual flair in their mess of purple asteroids and non-descript temples. What’s already a contracting game in ever-shortening levels completely collapses at the finish line: its anti-climatic twist sidelining the original antagonist (General Scales) for a clumsy, nonsensical attempt to incorporate Star Fox canon. (Gosh, I wonder who that floating head could be?)
Point being, there’s a pervasive wrongness the game simply cannot escape on account of its IP shift. Star Fox is not the right setting to collect Dumbledang Pods and Bafomdads—let alone the correct genre to apply third-rate fantasy linguistics. General Pepper should not be lecturing me about Spellstones and King Earthwalkers. And Fox is not supposed to be playing ball and catching Grubtub mushrooms with his pet reptile. No matter how far Star Fox Adventures retreats into its Dinosaur Planet persona, we are buffeted with constant reminders that it is nothing but an imposter—one having no business wearing Star Fox’s pelt.
It's too bizarre to accept as Star Fox and too roundabout to work as Zelda, and once the shine wore off, even kid me knew something was off—namely in that these jokers were not the Star Fox team that took me to the skies on N64. When they’re not strangers speaking in tongues, they are exaggerated caricatures: adding some bite to the otherwise noble Fox is a poor Peppy somehow left hacking and wheezing at the ripe old age of 49, and merely listening to Slippy is akin to nails on chalkboard given voice. Not to drag my boy drag Chris Seavor (Conker’s Bad Fur Day) too hard, but they’re why I could never fully appreciate the famous Fox/Falco taunt trick in Super Smash Bros. Melee. (How fun that these've been immortalized on the Corneria/Venom stages forever and ever!)
At least the game’s widescreen option complements Switch 2 nicely. Sick of those bland NSO borders pervading every game on the service? As per their typical technical wizardry, Rare future-proofed Star Fox Adventures to take up the handheld’s entire screen estate. The HUD gets a bit stretched in the process, but it’s otherwise a terrific fit for the picturesque scenery—one I think works quite nicely without the CRT filter. Fans are appreciative, I’m sure.
What I certainly didn’t appreciate was how Switch 2’s input lag reared its ugly head in certain spots—one would expect the infamous Test of Strength and its copious amount of button mashing to pose a problem, but I’m pleased to report no pencil trick was necessary. (No, really, somehow I cleared that sucker the ol’ fashioned way in five seconds.) Yet I’m not the only one to notice barrels suddenly slipping from my hands at inopportune moments, and I certainly don’t remember the final boss fight being this hard; specifically, when you’re supposed to spam the barrel roll to escape their suction breath—a strategy that suddenly stopped working and left me swallowed whole by those disgusting, hyper-detailed lips again and again. Ever the persistent nemesis, Star Fox Adventures just couldn’t stop itself from vexing me right at the very end—the imperfect cherry on top courtesy of this shadow-dropped release, ruining what would’ve otherwise been a lovely four-day weekend.
So what are we left with, then? Questions, my dear reader; burning, insatiable questions. It’s easy to say hindsight is 20/20, and Nintendo could not possibly have foreseen Microsoft’s takeover complicating matters. And yet, I’m left to ask: did no one ever consider the fundamental incongruity at play? Did anyone ever look beyond the dollar signs and stop to ask, “yes, but why is Star Fox necessary for this fantasy-based project? Why, beyond the vulpine leads and vague sci-fi gestures, are we doing this? Can a project of this scale afford thematic and interactive reworkings into an established universe?” Developer comments claim steps were taken to attempt a smooth transition, but the irreconcilable differences are laid bare everywhere you look, and so we’re left with a shockingly careless example of how an insulated drive for creativity can run up against audience expectations—one, I imagine, proving a valuable lesson for Nintendo quality control moving forward. (Well, okay, future Star Fox sequels weren’t up to snuff either, but none were so radical as Adventures.)
Yet such observations ignore the game’s core foundation, and I’m left to prioritize a more sobering matter: did Dinosaur Planet ever stand a chance? This ardent passion project was admirable in straddling the tonal line between Rare’s library of cutsey cartoons (Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong Country) and gritty bloodbaths (Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark), but the deck was stacked against it from the get-go. The protracted development would’ve likely already pushed it to GameCube, or perhaps even further into Xbox’s inevitable embrace. The ambition displayed in the prototype, while impressive, presents a nebulous case for its dual-protagonist system. And there’s no reason to believe the design pratfalls littered across Star Fox Adventures wouldn’t have afflicted this original venture, what with Rare’s endless drive to stuff their games with more, more, more.
Maybe it was always destined to be vaporware. Maybe it would’ve been middling no matter what path Rare took. Yet better an uncompromised vision that tried its damnedest than corporate meddling stripping it for parts—not the least in former protagonist Krystal being reduced to an objectified damsel in distress, left comatose for an ogling Fox as a suggestive saxophone plays straight from a bad porno. (No, seriously, what the hell?). And if Rare was truly destined to leave their bosom buddy in Nintendo, then surely their parting deserved better than this limp parody emblematic not merely of their recent output, but the unfocused direction that would soon plague the studio under Microsoft’s watch.
And certainly, Star Fox deserved a better career change than this aimless, inebriated, exasperatingly cynical fever dream. The series has donned many costumes in its drive for experimentation, yet none have baffled more than this hastily-strewn cosplay; a proverbial hat upon a hat, one leaving as many questions as that fateful Toys R’ Us visit so long ago.
And before you ask, yes, I’ve heard the whispers of a new “Star Fox adventure” game. I’m hoping the “adventure” descriptor was a poorly-worded, openly broad one, contextually framed around Star Fox’s tried-and-true sci-fi. (Think an improved, reconceptualized Assault). Better yet, why don’t we say that wires got crossed, and that they meant this re-release on Switch 2? Boom. Done. Already here. No need to punch yourself in the face and erase all the goodwill from the new remake by revisiting Star Fox’s most bizarre chapter for no reason, right? Right?
