The Cruel March of Time; Remembering Star Fox Adventures

Star Fox Adventures was released on the GameCube in 2002, and was one of the first games that I got for the system that I hadn’t got included with the console. This game I got as a recommendation from the employee in store.

Time has not been kind to Star Fox Adventures, after slipping into obscurity for a while the game was picked up by JonTron to be comedically derided for its departure from Star Fox tropes and for simply being a strange game. The critical consensus of nowadays is decidedly mixed; many praising its graphics and stating that as far as games go, Star Fox Adventures wasn’t ‘bad’ per se, it just wasn’t Star Fox.

I think that’s what makes Star Fox Adventures so interesting to me. This is a game that for all intents and purposes was perfectly serviceable, and could even be called ‘good’. The graphics still stand up well to this day (look at the fur animation), even though 15 years have passed. The gameplay is unoriginal, but as a Zelda-lite, it is certainly among the better clones. The sound design, however, leaves a lot to be desired, but is certainly not awful enough to ruin the game.

However, the game is now fairly obscure except for being derided by critics on YouTube. Most gamers agree that this wasn’t a positive step forward for the franchise, with Star Fox still struggling to recover any kind of critical success to this day.

Star Fox Adventures was my introduction to the ‘3D Zelda’ formula. This may sound like a sinful thing to admit, but I honestly enjoyed the game for what it was. Adventures was enjoyable enough, even if the gameplay wasn’t developed thoroughly, given the unusual shoehorning-in of Star Fox elements (for a game that started life as an IP of its own named ‘Dinosaur Planet’). It was also my first introduction to Star Fox at all; unfortunately I haven’t gotten the chance to get my hands on the more ‘core’ series titles that are closer to the original gameplay, though I intend to get around to it.

It’s interesting how times have changed the game. Though at the time Adventures was well-received, and I certainly enjoyed it, the game has developed a reputation for bastardising both Star Fox the brand and Dinosaur Planet the new IP. This goes to show that games don’t exist in a vacuum. It is a cautionary tale to how time and marketing can influence the perception of a game so powerfully that something that is relatively well-designed and a fairly decent game in its own right can become the object of ridicule and satire.

What made Star Fox Adventures so easy to ridicule are three things; the poor sound and voice design, the cheesy story, and thirdly, the marketing environment surrounding the game. So many of its story elements haven’t aged well at all; the cheesy attempt to speak in a ‘different’ language for much of the game’s introduction (“LEE DOOMSOO TAVOOK GENERAL SCALES!”). 

Adventures’ story is odd, and poorly done. Look at JonTron’s review, or any other Let’s Play to see how cheesily the game is handled; if you take a shot for every time you cringe, you’ll probably die of liver poisoning after just ten minutes of watching.

Importantly, however, it should be stressed that Star Fox Adventures would have happily faded into obscurity as a forgettable, slightly-above-average game that was just ‘okay’, and didn’t need to be anything more. But the kicker in what made this game just so poorly-received today is the fact that it’s a Star Fox game. Admittedly, I didn’t even know what Star Fox was when I first picked it up, but I can certainly imagine the disappointment of fans of the series when they realised that Adventures had nothing to do with the Star Fox formula. Add on to that the whole controversy surrounding Rare at the time with their departure from Nintendo (to be soon bought out by Microsoft and relegated to the level of Kinect Shovelware Developers), and we have a formula that gave the game far more critical attention than it needed.

Ultimately, while I think Star Fox Adventures was a serviceable game at its core, it’s a shame that it is so ridiculed in the modern day, but thanks to internet critics, and poor design and marketing decisions made throughout, I feel that the game has been bastardised probably more so than it deserves.

The problem is made worse by the fact that the newer Star Fox games still haven’t returned any kind of form to the series, and since this was the first game that signalled the end for Rare as a serious developer, Star Fox Adventures was trampled under the cruel march of time, and now it stands as obscure satirical fodder for YouTube comedy channels.