The slow descent of Star Fox has been a tragic occurrence in the world of Nintendo. For a series that was once worthy of standing prominently alongside the other AAA faces of the company brand, the series has fallen into the third tier filler software category. Such a fate is unfitting of the golden standard for air based rail shooters. Somewhere along the journey, Star Fox lost its way, and yet here in the near future, there may be a chance for revival. Star Fox 64 – arguably the greatest installment in a franchise whose growth was stunted far too young – is soon set to make a return on the Nintendo 3DS, a platform whose 3D display will likely be well suited to the closed, corridor-like nature of a rail shooter.
Star Fox (co-developed by EAD and Agronaut software) was originally just a technical showcase – a display of polygon prowess on hardware never meant to run 3D. That was it. It was only near the end that Nintendo shoehorned in a story of intergalactic warfare alongside a set of then semi-generic anthropomorphic animals that would quickly become beloved icons in the world of video games. This left Nintendo at somewhat of a crossroads. Once Star Fox was a hit, the SNES polygon graphic showcase was in need of a sequel. Originally, one such sequel was planned for the Super Nintendo. This sequel would have pushed the series away from its straight and linear design into something far more open ended. That game was Star Fox 2.
The cancellation of Star Fox 2 (and later unintended release on the internet) is pretty well known. What isn’t known are the reasons and the ramifications. Star Fox 2 was shit-canned so as to not distract from the impending release of the Nintendo 64. However, the launch titles for the N64 were behind schedule, so the console was delayed, so the Nintendo 64 followed suit. Suddenly the cancellation of Star Fox 2 was for no reason – a waste of a perfectly good game.
Star Fox would make a grand return a couple of years later on the N64 in the form of the boringly titled Star Fox 64. We all know this game to be a defining title of the era, famous for its fantastic gameplay, tight controls, high difficulty level, and notoriously corny-yet-endearing dialog. It was also essentially a remake of the original Star Fox. Remake or not, Star Fox 64 was a grand game. Why Nintendo saw fit to reset the story of a franchise only four years old is odd, but what is odder was the decision to hand the brand off from this point forward. Fans demanded a sequel, but that sequel would not come – at least not from Nintendo.
The next “Star Fox” game would be Star Fox Adventures from Rare. Star Fox Adventures is a fraud. In 1998, Rare announced an original game named Dinosaur Planet. It was a brilliant, ambitious, and completely original creation – easily Rare’s most ambitious project for the Nintendo 64. Nintendo used their influence to “convince” Rare to replace their lead character Sabre with Fox due to their similarity. This move was likely so that Rare would have less one original franchise that they could take with them should Nintendo later part ways with Rare (which they eventually did). In effect, Dinosaur Planet ceased to exist and became a sloppy template for a Star Fox game that was never meant to be. Both suffered for it. Star Fox Adventures was still a good experience, but it was a fraction of the experience Dinosaur Planet promised to be, and it set Fox on a downward course, taking the franchise away from what made it famous in the first place: flight.
After Star Fox Adventures, the series was handed off to Namco for a game that started out as a more classic styled space shooting experience titled Star Fox Armada, originally planned for arcades. This game saw development hurdles and eventually came out three years late as Star Fox Assault for GameCube, a game that received mixed reviews for being incredibly short and dragging the franchise even further away from its roots by only spending a third of the time in the air and the rest with tacky ground combat. Next up would be the hostilely received Star Fox Command in 2006 for Nintendo DS; a game that attempted to build on the franchise’s abandoned non-linear concepts from Star Fox 2, but failed due to poor controls, tacky layout, repetitive design, and a goofy story. It just fell dramatically short of the legacy befitting the classics that graced Nintendo 64 and Super NES. Since the failure of Star Fox Command, the franchise has laid dormant.
Now with Star Fox 64 3D, Nintendo is presented with an opportunity to rewrite the past. Nintendo can now go back in time and forget all the destruction, erosion, and loss of focus that took place after the passing of the glory days on the Nintendo 64. With Star Fox 64 3D, we can step back to the franchise’s grandest moment and move forward from there. Should Nintendo chose to keep the franchise in-house this go around, we can possibly avoid the shoeing in of other incompatible genres, distracting spin-offs, and unnecessary variety.
This time, let’s keep Star Fox in the sky, looking towards the stars where he belongs.
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