I have a problem that I’m sure at least a few other people can relate to. I have a backlog of games from my childhood that I never finished. And it’s ruining my life. Nowadays, if I don’t vibe with a game, I don’t feel bad about putting it down and moving on to something else. But for games that I grew up with, I can’t let them go. I keep coming back to them. It doesn’t matter if they’re good or bad, all I know is that I never beat them and that it makes me a worse person. Trying to forget about the games doesn’t work. Years removed, I’ll randomly think about one of these ghosts of gaming past, it popping into my head against my will. And that’s what happened here. On an otherwise peaceful night, I tossed and turned in my sleep, fighting my demons. Gripping and pulling at my covers, my teeth clenched and my toes curled. Finally, I awoke, half alive and covered in cold beads of sweat. I only could utter one phrase: “Star Fox Adventures.”
Star Fox Adventures had a strange and winding road to release. Starting life as Dinosaur Planet, a title veteran studio Rare was creating for the N64, development was going smoothly. But after a meeting with some big heads at Nintendo and specifically Shigeru Miyamoto, the suggestion was floated to convert this title into a Star Fox game. Rare must have thought this sounded great because they pretty immediately threw themselves into revamping content. During the process, they also decided to scrap the N64 version and just bring their dreams for a really fuzzy fox to life on Gamecube. When it was released, people were generally positive. But over time, fans didn’t exactly take to this new game that pretty transparently had the skin of Star Fox stretched taut over it. And so it became a black sheep in this franchise of foxes. But nowadays, all us olds have left to do is sit around and reevaluate the media we consumed as children. Yes, partly to see what value it holds today but mostly because we’re all very profoundly sad inside. So with all that said, how does Star Fox Adventures hold up?
Barrel Rolling In The Deep
In Star Fox Adventures, team Star Fox get assigned to go and save Dinosaur Planet, which has been broken apart by the evil General Scales. You play as Fox, the leader of the team, and touch down on the planet for reconnaissance. He quickly comes to terms with the locals and figures out that the four Spellstones need to be returned to their rightful place in order to save the planet. Also, prior to Fox landing on the planet, series newcomer Krystal tried to help the situation and take on General Scales but instead found herself stuck in a crystal, slowly dying. Now, to save both the planet and Krystal, Fox needs to bring together all the Spellstones and the lost Krazoa Spirits. Oh yeah, there are things called Krazoa Spirits and they need helping too. They’re like ghostly Crash Bandicoot masks and they’re the key to saving Krystal. So, Spellstones for Dinsoaur Planet, Krazoa Spirits for Krystal. Go get ’em.
You can probably tell, but this is, put charitably, a gameplay-over-story title. You set out to grab a couple of maguffins and beat the big bad. The story beats that are here really only do the bare minimum to point you in the direction of your next objective. It’s serviceable but the larger let-down comes from the inhabitants of the world. Because if you’re going to have a boring story, a good way to keep a player engaged is to have interesting characters tell it. But there’s no such luck here. Characters in general are either eyes-glazingly bland or just jerks in general. And these are dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs. I was always going to be on board for a cast made up of dinosaurs. But Adventures just fumbles the bag and makes dinosaurs boring. Unforgivable. Fox himself comes off like a fussy plumber in this title. He’s reliable, and he gets the job done but is constantly annoyed by almost everyone and everything involved in it. And as good as this game looks for its time, the emotive work on display here is baffling. In any given scene, Fox’s face will contort and run the full spectrum of moods, regardless of what’s being talked about. It goes past the point of lunacy whenever the game attempts comedy, with jokes landing two beats too late and half the characters on screen seemingly chewing bees in the meanwhile. For a while, I got into the headspace of enjoying it as a so-bad-it’s-good product, but I think this may be giving Adventures too soft of a hand. I actually see a lot of Rare’s previous title Conker’s Bad Fur Day in this game. In both games, you barely have any plot pushing you forward to the next task, saddled with a rotating door of pretty stupid/angry characters. And while I don’t have much love for Conker’s version of storytelling, I think it was more successful in that title due to how irreverent it was. It didn’t matter that everything and everyone was a cliche since the world of Conker didn’t really factor into why you were playing. You were playing to fight the giant opera-singing poo with rolls of toilet paper. But in a more narrative-driven title like Adventures, the weak motivation puts the damper on your time. And while it tries to be charming with its quirks and attitude, Adventures just comes off cynically, in both world and tone.
A Fox And His Grapes
Far from its rail-shooting past, Star Fox Adventures is a Zelda-like. All the pieces are there: a seamless open world, plenty of varied characters to talk to, new tools and powers to unlock, a good handful of dungeons. It’s a comfy formula and it delivers here, to somewhat mixed effect. Coming so long after Zelda’s first forays into 3D, there are some improvements to the recipe. The act of movement is much smoother than anything seen in Link’s adventures. Navigating Fox around just feels good; momentum feels good, locomotion feels good, it all just feels good. The inventory issue has been streamlined as well, being able to shift through your stock in real-time without needing to pause. You’re given Tricky, a little partner dinosaur, which allows the opportunity for some inventive puzzles beyond the abilities of Fox. There’s even tribute paid to the past of the franchise, with flying Arwing missions sprinkled throughout for some variety. All this is good stuff. The real tragedy is how you can make out the shape of what the developers were going for, but it just didn’t come together too well in the end. The world, though beautiful, feels empty without interesting characters inhabiting it. Puzzles, which had such potential with the addition of Tricky, just aren’t ever that taxing on the player, which leads to dungeons being toothless. Combat is generally pretty basic too and you can easily get by just spamming the attack button and stun-locking anything in your way. Honestly, Adventures is a pretty breezy time, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with a charming, easy game to just sit back and relax with. The only things that should give players too much trouble are the handful of minigames that absolutely crank on the difficulty. But when it can get in its rhythm, this game can be a pretty good time.
So here’s where the other shoe drops. Because, with all of the previous being said, actually playing this game is so tedious. It’s a shame. But the thing that kills Adventure’s momentum is its pacing. The amount of times that you need to backtrack to grab maguffins is just too damn high. As stated before, all areas in the overworld are connected to one another. The way this is done is through carefully placed transitional spaces. But you only need to go through these areas once to see how they’re purposely convoluted just to stall you while the next area loads in. Released pretty early into the Gamecube’s life and also being converted from an N64 title, it’s easy to imagine they just couldn’t find a more elegant way the make the hardware do what they needed. So, pair the need to backtrack with these areas that are designed to make backtracking take as long as possible, and you have a pretty slow game. Also, the dungeons themselves are separated from the planet. So whenever you need to go to one of them, you’ll have to make your way back to the hub, hop on your ship, do the Arwing mission, then finally land on the dungeon. All this busy work is apparent when you finish the game and compare the events with the actual amount of time it takes to complete it. For a game where, it seems, barely anything happens, it sure feels like forever to get through it all. This turns what is, at its core, a fun and charming time, into a fifteen-hour slog where the only brief bits of fun you get to do are in between your chores.
Trust Your Instincts
All that being said, Star Fox Adventures does look pretty great. The art direction as well as the technology for things like fur and water carry the experience and lend a lot of charm to the entire package. The world is pretty vibrant and there are plenty of different biomes to explore through. There’s just a comforting vibe around your hub, Horntail Hollow, with its dinosaurs lazing about and the waterfall acting as a centerpiece. Even though the themed areas are pretty stock fare, with there being an ice level after the fire level after the water level, they’re all pleasant enough to look at. And although I think the actual models of Fox and Krystal toe a line into bobblehead proportions, being able to see the individual strands of fuzzy hair on them just makes them cute. And cute things are good, I don’t feel I have to justify that further. The dinosaurs are all pretty stock but serviceable. You get your classics, every species that a kid growing up watching The Land Before Time would expect on screen. I liked seeing them. They’re not A+ material, but I’d rather have dinosaurs than not. The animation work in Adventures is pretty stellar as well. But it only gets really interesting when the anthropomorphized characters come into play. With the dinosaurs, they move essentially how you would expect, mostly lumbering and slow. Think big meaty tanks. But when Fox and Krystal are shown in cutscenes, it’s so strange, they move as if they were mo-capped. Their body momentum, from hands flailing to working their way into a run, it’s all so deliberate and laborious. There is a lot of effort and the animators need their props. And although it’s oftentimes in service of pretty generic material, the direction and artistry of the visuals are a constant highlight throughout the title.
Star Fox Adventure’s soundscape is honestly a bop, though it gets interrupted constantly by annoyances. A combined effort from Dave Wise and Ben Cullum, the soundtrack is a really solid effort that hits above the caliber of the game it’s in. There’s something instantly nostalgic about tunes like the ones that play in Horntail Hollow and Krazoa Palace. The tunes change to fit the locales but expect a pretty percussion-heavy jaunt with the strong melodywork you would expect from Dave Wise’s catalog. The music does a lot to lend charm to locales and ease the monotony of the gameplay. On the other hand, things like sound design are a bit more hit-or-miss. While all of the sounds of the game fit well, it’s hard not to notice the abundance of stock sounds that you’ve heard in a million other properties. The voice acting is a little more egregious. Most of the voice actors ended up being people from the studio. Nothing wrong with that, it’s Rare, they’re all about that shit. But none of these people are professional actors. And they all seemingly only know one voice. Mix in some dodgy direction, a little smattering of made-up dino language, and just overall camp, and you have a very heady mix. Honestly, if you can’t pick up the tone of this game from the opening scenes of a busty fox lady screaming pseudo-pig Latin at a pterodactyl, that’s on you. If you don’t take it overly seriously, it can be fun. But after I was done laughing at it, I did find myself wishing I could just listen to the game’s music in peace without being assaulted by splat.wav every five seconds.
Can You Believe They Changed The Name To Sauria?
Ok, let’s address the elephant in the room. I feel like you can’t talk about Star Fox Adventures without talking about Krystal. Without a doubt its largest addition to the franchise, Krystal was added for very specific reasons. Those reasons being little boy boners. Longtime series art director Takaya Imamura as well as Nintendo head honcho Shigeru Miyamoto both thought that Star Fox needed more sex appeal. Miyamoto thought that Star Fox was a pretty mature title compared to the rest of Nintendo’s ilk and what’s more mature than furry titties? And so Krystal was born, wearing a bra, loincloth, and barely anything else. A holdover from the Dinosaur Planet days, Krystal was originally meant to be the co-protagonist of the game before plans shifted and it turned into the Fox show. I’m sure there’s something to be said for the scantily-clad vixen of the story being literally frozen out of said story but I don’t know if there needs to be. Fridging women in stories sucks at the best of times, but in this case, she’s also a prize for Fox to win at the end, so it might be even worse than usual? Krystal does go on to be a bigger part of the franchise going forward. But that fact is somewhat neutered when as of this writing, there have only been three mainline games released since, only two of which she starred in. Did I mention this game came out in 2002? But Krystal’s character or lack thereof did not stop the message from being received. This character awoke things in people. Krystal, queen of furries, managed to cultivate the imagination and blood flow of many a youngin and they prayed at her altar through copious fan art and other stuff too I’m sure. And at this point, she probably has better legs than the franchise she came from. Pun fully intended.
On a more somber note, Star Fox Adventures also signaled the ending of a partnership that defined a generation. Rare would be purchased by Microsoft soon after this game came out. Although the company would make a few games for Nintendo’s handheld consoles, this effectively saw the end of Rare on Nintendo hardware. Rare staffers would express surprise that Nintendo wouldn’t fight harder to acquire the studio outright, but they could only keep pushing forward. The studio would go on to produce somewhat mixed efforts in the intervening years with Microsoft. For every Kameo and Viva Pinata, there was a Grabbed by the Ghoulies and a Perfect Dark Zero. And we don’t even need to go into the years spent in the Kinect Sports dungeon. It was a bittersweet end to a pretty great pairing. It stings all the more that the last title Rare would go on to produce would be as middling as Star Fox Adventures. In more recent years, Nintendo and Rare have been allowed to work together again and collaborate on a few projects. Whether or not a full game could ever be in the cards is up in the air. But with all that said, I don’t think that anyone should hold their breath for the OG squad to come back with Star Fox Adventures 2: Electric Boogaloo.
An Honorary Member Of Star Fox
So that’s Star Fox Adventures, a game whose biggest cultural impact is porn. But even though that’s true, I can’t completely write this game off. Even though the process of playing it can be mind-numbing and there’s no challenge to speak of, there’s too much effort on display for me to fully disregard. Despite myself, I’m charmed by the aesthetic of Adventures. The game is cute, even unintentionally, and it’s clear to see the personality and love of the developers behind it. And for whatever reason, that’s enough for me to recommend that you play it. Beat it? I dunno about all that, but at least try it out. If for no other reason but to find out why early YouTubers hated it so much.
If you want to ask Shrek to send you to Krazoa Palace, you can pick up the game here. It’s never been re-released in any other way. And I mean, Gamecube stuff can be pretty pricy, but I’ve seen some pretty reasonable sellers online. And if you’re really curious, a build of the original Dinosaur Planet leaked back in 2021. Fully playable. Just saying.