- Star Fox
- Star Fox 2
- Star Fox Adventures
- Star Fox: Assault
Rare was Nintendo’s golden boy studio throughout much of the Nintendo 64 era, having expanded their roster of 3D platformers with Donkey Kong 64 and the two Banjo Kazooie games. What’s more, they introduced the competitive FPS phenomenon to console players with GoldenEye. One of their later projects was Dinosaur Planet, heavily modeled after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, starring an anthropomorphic cat duo named Sabre and Krystal and taking place on…well, a planet of dinosaurs. This game went through two major shifts before it was released, first being moved from the Nintendo 64 to the GameCube. Additionally, it was also integrated into the Star Fox franchise, changing the story and replacing the main character with Fox McCloud. (This was reportedly at the behest of Shigeru Miyamoto, who once mentioned in an interview noting the similarities between Sabre and Fox.)
The game opens with a different version of Krystal, now depicted as a fox instead of a cat. She’s searching the galaxy to discover the mystery behind the destruction of Cerinia, her home planet. Krystal is called to the Krazoa Palace, the ruins of an ancient race floating above Dinosaur Planet, a previously unmentioned world in the far regions of the Lylat system. (There was a planet full of dinosaurs in the SNES game, though this one is completely different from Fortuna.) Here she encounters the evil General Scales, who’s fighting for control of the world. In order to stop him, she needs to collect all of the Krazoa spirits, but her task is cut short after she captures the first, leaving her trapped in crystal.
Shortly afterwards, the Star Fox team is sent to investigate Dinosaur Planet, primarily because parts of it have literally broken off and are floating in space. Before long, Fox McCloud picks up where Krystal left off, exploring the planet and fighting off the attack of General Scales and his army of the SharpClaw tribe.
The first thing for players to do is get acquainted with the planet’s denizens, particularly learning of the various dinosaur tribes and their fight against Scales, as it’s pretty obvious that his actions are what’s causing Dinosaur Planet to break to pieces. This quest eventually leads to recovering the four Spellstones, stolen from the planet’s temples, as well as the remaining Krazoa Spirits, in order to save everything.
The game opens with some typically Star Fox-esque action sequences (first as Krystal riding on a pterodactyl fighting General Scales’ ship, then as Fox as he descends onto Dinosaur Planet’s surface), but most of your time is spent walking around on foot. The comparisons to Ocarina of Time are immediately evident in the way everything controls. For example, Fox can’t jump on command and instead automatically leaps off of platforms when he gets close. The lock-on melee combat even works the same way, right down to the manner in which the screen dramatically letterboxes when engaging enemies. General Pepper actually disallows Fox from using his blaster (not wanting to cause wanton destruction is a rather dumb reason), leaving Fox to pick up Krystal’s staff, which has coincidentally fallen on the planet right where he landed. In addition to whacking enemy dinos with it, it also has some magical properties, including harnessing the elements to shoot fire and ice, cause earthquakes, or flying upwards by placing it in a fissure. Peppy and Slippy spend most of the adventure aboard the Great Fox, giving advice when requested (Falco had left the team after Star Fox 64 but he does make a quick appearance at the end). Fairly early on, Fox also rescues a dinosaur named Tricky, a mini triceratops that’s the prince of the EarthWalker tribe. He tags along and helps with puzzles, though ultimately he’s far more obnoxious than Navi ever was, especially as he constantly complains about his voracious appetite.
Dinosaur Planet is broken up into several areas, with ThornTail Hollow acting as the central hub. It’s not nearly as expansive or as fun to explore as any given Zelda overworld, though. The orbiting areas of the planet can be reached by flying to them. In these parts, you play a brief Arwing sequence where you need to collect a bunch of rings to continue. These are the few times where it remotely feels like Star Fox, even if they’re pretty simplified (there’s no lock-on laser, for example).
Star Fox Adventures also has some of the worst aspects of Rare’s typical design, including its infatuation with collectibles. By the end of the game, your inventory will consist of GrubTubs (mushrooms that are given to Tricky so he’ll cooperate), Fireflies (used to light up dark hallways), Fuel Cells (needed to hop into your Arwing and fly to space), Scarabs (the currency used in the shop), Bomb Spores (plants that act as explosives), and the goofily named Bafomdads (basically the game’s equivalent to Zelda’s fairies, that resurrect you when fallen). Then there are also the health restoratives and the staff’s energy to keep track of. Having lots of items in itself isn’t terrible, but there are plenty of times where you need to use some and don’t have any, so you need to wander off to collect more (lifting up every rock you see to find more scarabs gets old the second time you do it, much less the tenth).
This is accompanied by the fact that many areas have some kind of character that requests “X” number of some kind of item found in the area, requiring you to scavenge around for it. These sections typically aren’t very big, but fetch quests are still pretty exasperating, and take the place of any meaningful exploration. This is accompanied by some puzzle design that’s absolutely pedestrian compared to Zelda.
Despite some of these issues, Dinosaur Planet is still somewhat fun to explore because it looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous. Rare was ahead of the curve when it came to these areas, going way back to the Donkey Kong Country games on the SNES, and Star Fox Adventures shows them at their finest. The character models look spectacular, particularly the fur rendering. The expressive animations are impressive too, even if the “Fox gets really excited and picks up new item” cinema scene gets a little old the hundredth time you’ve seen it. The environmental design is a little plain, but many areas look gorgeous thanks to the colored lighting, as well as a real-time system that changes the time of day, from morning to afternoon to nighttime. As an early title for the GameCube, it really shows off the platform’s strengths compared to the PlayStation 2, especially during its initial release, but it still looks pretty decent nowadays.
The music likewise is fantastic, being the work of legendary composer David Wise. Here he remixes songs from Star Fox 64, as well as provides more appropriate, tribal-themed tunes for the dinosaurs. Even the voice acting is generally pretty decent, although the gibberish Dino Talk language sounds ridiculous, and Slippy’s high-pitched voice makes him seem like he could be a Monty Python character. There are some secondary cast members that also make the game feel distinctly British, as opposed to something made by Nintendo’s Japanese team, particularly the strangely hostile shopkeeper. (The game was actually dubbed in English in all territories, even Japan.) The writing can occasionally get pretty funny too, especially with Fox’s occasional exasperation and annoyance at all of the crap he has to put up with.
Unfortunately, Star Fox Adventures is unable to escape a very basic truth: this is a game that began as something else before being reconfigured to fit a different property, and rather hastily at that. Again, dinosaurs aren’t outside the realm of the Star Fox universe, but it’s always been a distinctly sci-fi series, so the mystical talk of spirits and magic just doesn’t fit at all. Plus, the Arwing segments (and the floating planet pieces) come across like total afterthoughts. One gets the impression that they were stuck in there just to maintain some semblance of the flying action the series had been previously known for. This serves as an attempt to make the shoehorning of the Star Fox license less transparent, but it doesn’t really work. There are a couple of bike racing sequences, too, which somewhat fit the Star Fox mold, but these are more annoying than anything since they’re easy to fail the first couple of times and require replaying.
The problems go much, much deeper than this, though. The game just flat-out isn’t finished. The cover seems to present Krystal as a partner, but no. You play as her in the introduction, then she’s trapped for the rest of the game, only helping via her telepathic communications. Indeed, in the original Dinosaur Planet design, she was supposed to act as a second playable character, complete with her own dinosaur helper (a pterodactyl named Kyte, who does pop up in the final game, though obviously not in the same role).
With that in mind, it’s a shame that she was relegated to being a simple damsel-in-distress. She was also supposed to help in a fight against General Scales at the end, but that too is another problem. This is because despite being the primary antagonist, you never actually fight him. Literally as you’re gearing up for the final battle, a booming voice comes out of nowhere, quickly revealed to be Andross, who’s somehow back again. You then take off into space to fight your old foe, after which the game ends. There’s no other climatic confrontation, no sense of closure. The game doesn’t even resolve anything regarding Krystal or her mission, either. The cited development reason is that Rare was in the middle of being sold to Microsoft at this point, and they needed to hastily get the game out the door before the transaction could be completed. This resulted in a whole ton of cut content.
Of course, even though it’s fun to see an expanded adventure of the Star Fox crew, it’s easy to get a little bummed that a new franchise was basically killed so it could happen. The original Dinosaur Planet didn’t seem to have been near completion (at least from a development standpoint), and no prototype ROM has been leaked, though there’s a decent amount of gameplay footage available from back when it was demoed. This shows that a lot of characters and scenarios are more or less identical to how they ended up in Star Fox Adventures. One of the bigger changes is that Sabre and Krystal were supposed to be adopted siblings, so it probably wouldn’t have had the romantic angle that later Star Fox games played up with her and Fox.
Ultimately, Star Fox Adventures ends up as a middling Zelda clone, only held together by the nice visuals and strong core design. Otherwise, even at the time, it was just meant to be a holdover until the real Zelda and Star Fox titles arrived. Fans got the former with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, released just a few months later at the end of 2002, but a new Star Fox wouldn’t arrive for a few more years. The issues with Star Fox: Assault are a whole other story.
