LogFAQs > #947012607

Star Fox Adventures (Game Cube)

It's hard to really review this game without explaining a bit of its history. This actually started development in the mid-late 90s as an N64 game called Dinosaur Planet, an original IP that was going to be Rare's answer to Zelda and according to some their best game ever. The game suffered numerous delays and was further pushed back when half the team split off to make Jet Force Gemini, eventually looking to be the console's swan song and ultimately pushed to Game Cube. Additionally, Miyamoto noticed a striking resemblance between the male lead (I say male lead because originally Krystal was going to split lead duties with said male, although her role was greatly reduced in the finished product) and Fox McCloud, so he worked his magic to get the Star Fox IP added, which resulted in many plot changes. The game was released in September 2002 for the Game Cube, with extremely unfortunate timing - a month after Super Mario Sunshine and about six weeks before Metroid Prime. Needless to say many Big N fans glossed over this one in favor of those two heavy-hitters. Additionally, Microsoft's buyout of Rare was announced concurrently with the game's launch, so fans were pretty disappointed.

While playing this game, there were times when I tried to think of it as Dinosaur Planet instead of Star Fox Adventures, because it's nothing like any other Star Fox game. For the first Zelda-like game from a company that primarily made Mario 64-esque platformers, it was... not a bad attempt. There were some really fun areas to explore, and puzzles to solve, but also some dull areas, a ton of repetition (including a few dungeons that you had to do multiple times with very little variance between the two visits), and some puzzles/tasks that were either needlessly difficult, extremely frustrating or tedious, or what you were supposed to do was so incredibly cryptic. Combat was also very repetitive and boss battles were not fun. They did incorporate some classic Star Fox gameplay, but even that was boring and repetitive. The voice acting was bad. Fox was pretty good (in fact I really liked Fox's personality overall in this one even if it was pretty inconsistent with everything else he's ever been in), but everyone else was meh-to-bad, Tricky being particularly atrocious. The graphics were nice though. Definitely one of the best-looking Game Cube games.

Overall this had me longing for what it was originally supposed to be. I wouldn't call it a bad game and I guess overall I'm glad I finally played it and knocked it out of my gigantic collection of games I never beat, but I don't think I'd play it again. Not for many years anyway.

---

darkx