Star Fox Adventures (GameCube)
Star Fox Adventures is an unusual departure from the Star Fox series’s usual focus on sci-fi vehicle combat, but it becomes clear why when you take a look at the game’s origin. Rare originally was developing an entirely unrelated property called Dinosaur Planet when Nintendo took a look at the game and couldn’t help but draw comparisons between it’s humanoid fox character Sabre and Star Fox character Fox McCloud. Rare was told to retool the game into a Star Fox title, and it’s fairly easy to see how stapled on the Star Fox elements are when playing the title. Still, being an odd duck in a franchise doesn’t truly impact the individual quality of a title, and Star Fox Adventures is an interesting detour into the action-adventure genre.
Adventures’s story begins as a distress call is sent out in space from Dinosaur Planet, a world suffering under the rule of the anthropomorphic tyrannosaurus General Scales and his Sharpclaw Tribe. Dinosaur Planet is a planet brimming with magical energy, but by displacing the SpellStones and scattering the Krazoa Spirits, General Scales has upset the magical balance and huge chunks of the planet are breaking off into space. The first responder to this distress call is a blue fox woman named Krystal, but her efforts lead to her getting imprisoned, appropriately enough, in a crystal. Later, the Star Fox mercenary team are contracted to investigate the distress signal, and while at first it seems like Fox McCloud only has to deal with the troubles of a single triceratops, the true breadth of the situation is revealed to him and he must reclaim the SpellStones, Krazoa Spirits, and save Krystal all to ensure Dinosaur Planet and its inhabitants aren’t destroyed. It all sounds like a fairly lofty and serious goal, but the game is actually fairly light-hearted for the most part, with many characters having cheesy over-the-top accents and the main cast delivering jokes right up until the end of the game. The end of the game is sadly a bit rushed and lacking though, putting an odd cap on an otherwise interesting and varied trip through the game’s world.
Dinosaur Planet is definitely an interesting world to explore, even if the Dinosaur part of it’s name is a little strained. You encounter talking dinosaurs, all of them having Land Before Time-like nicknames for their species, but the planet also contains mammoths, pterosaurs, a giant stone Scotsman, and its native creatures include weird cartoon monsters like frog things with crab claws and laughing reptilian bats. Most of what you do encounter at least has that prehistoric feel both in regards to the characters and where they live, and the music design backs it up quite well with tunes containing tribal percussion and chanting. The contrast between Star Fox’s sci-fi elements and the world actually doesn’t come up as much as a player expects, mostly because the designers shunted most of those aspects off to the side. The bulk of the action in Star Fox Adventures involves Fox using a magical staff Krystal had lost to fight foes and solve puzzles with its special abilities. Early in his adventure Fox also befriends a young triceratops named Prince Tricky, the small companion coming with his own abilities to help with the action-adventure gameplay style.
The staff’s abilities and Tricky are both good fits for the puzzle-solving side of your adventure. While most skills are given fairly clear indicators they need to be used at a certain moment, the challenge is rarely just figuring out what you need to do. Shooting fire at a switch with your staff or having Tricky dig up hidden objects are a supplement to a skill test such as the player needing to avoid danger while a timer pressures them. A lot of the challenges are about successfully navigating a 3D space without getting injured or losing track of some secondary element. Many puzzles are about figuring out how to make a more straightforward action possible, like delivering a time bomb to the right area by disabling fire vents at the perfect time or activating wind lifts to let it cross gaps. The dungeon design is excellent in Star Fox Adventures, many of them having a feeling of natural progression due to deceptive designs that feel open for exploration despite always herding you forward to avoid you getting lost or confused. Your inventory does get cluttered over the course of the game as it likes to introduce abilities and items that are mostly just useful in one or two areas, but there is a fairly clever C Stick menu that lets you access them without interrupting the action too much and a shortcut button to let you hold onto the skills you need more often. Despite being a constant follower controlled by the game, Tricky is surprisingly reliable during the puzzle solving. He gets stuck while following you sometimes, but he’s easy enough to sort out and rarely required for timing sensitive challenges. His dialogue makes him fairly endearing as well just for matching the general cheesiness of the game’s voice acting, and while he and the staff both are limited in their special uses by food and magic respectively, environments are designed to ensure that if you need the powers, you can find the ways to refuel them.
The world design of Star Fox Adventures isn’t infallible though. Your adventures may take you back and forth between locations, and to try and make the world feel connected but not letting you head off to where you aren’t meant to be yet, little puzzles that are more timewasters than challenges exist. After completing objectives, you often go back to Thorntail Hollow as a sort of hub point to get your next goal for plot progression, but its connection to a place like the Snowhorn Wastes involves solving a water current puzzle that slows the game flow down with repetition. While the design of places you go to makes it feel like an adventure in a natural world, these odd connecting areas bog down the navigation between its parts. Luckily, you shouldn’t have to wander around aimlessly if you missed what you need to do next, since Fox can pause and talk to his support team to get hints on what to do and a location marker on where he should be. The more annoying mode of navigation is surprisingly the one most faithful to the Star Fox series: Arwing flight. To get to the parts of Dinosaur Planet already blown off by the magical disruption, you must fly to them in your spaceship, flying through a certain amount of gold rings to open the barrier around them to land. While definitely meant to appease Star Fox fans, I’d actually say these segments would be better of not existing as all, as they are uninspired and dull. So many of them have you fly through space filled with purple rocks with enemies who hardly put up a fight. Your Arwing has so much health you’d be hard-pressed to die and flying through the gold rings isn’t even difficult when you realize firing your anemic laser or unnecessary bombs is basically pointless. Even worse, these segments must be done any time you go between these areas, and while the chunks of Dinosaur Planet orbiting around it are rarely visited, after visiting one you must fly back down to the planet, the game having you repeat the same easy course over and over with no alteration to do so. While it might be jarring to have the space animals of Star Fox investigating a seemingly primitive magical world, it’s these Arwing segments that are truly out of place.
The Arwing segments are at least essentially minigames in the grander scope of things and can be tolerated in the small doses they come in. What’s a bit harder to grin and bear is the shallowness of the combat. Fox’s staff has a simple combo that he can use on enemies, and while you can change the attacks in it, there is no point. Attacks either work or they don’t and the combo variation doesn’t really produce appreciably different results. It can be tolerated in small bursts, but the game likes to draw attention to it for mandated fights with groups of similar enemies. Many of the enemies you face are the Sharpclaw troops, all of which can block your attacks and get better at it as the game progresses. What this means now is that these bland battles are stretched out as you have to wait for them not to block to strike with a generic combo that won’t even kill them on completion, meaning you have to repeat that even on one single enemy. You can try and get saucy and get your staff powers or Tricky involved, freezing being particularly good on larger enemies, but Tricky is weak and slow to act and your own magic will drain to nothing if you rely on it, potentially not even finishing the combat before it is exhausted. You’ve got to learn to pick your battles, and not because of a fear of death since you can easily get revives and health. Instead, it’s the time sink you need to avoid, and it will come as a relief to see that most of the game focuses on the adventuring instead of the action, and the variety in the puzzle-solving and execution challenges make up for the moments the game gets lazy and asks you to just fight a bunch of guys. The bosses are actually fairly decent for having to break away from the combat to work. There are very few of them, but they touch on figuring out weaknesses rather than smacking them mindlessly with your staff.
THE VERDICT: It is definitely likely Star Fox Adventures would have turned out better if it had remained Rare’s Dinosaur Planet project, but the Star Fox elements don’t diminish the game too much. The Arwing sections are tacked-on and half-baked, but the world of Dinosaur Planet is vivid and full of excellent challenges that tap into a player’s ability not to just figure out a puzzle, but to execute it properly without falling prey to traps and danger. Unfortunately, any enemy that isn’t quick to kill serves as an unexciting deviation from the top-notch dungeon design, but it makes up a much smaller fraction of the game, allowing the title to remain strong with what it does do well.
And so, I give Star Fox Adventures for the Nintendo GameCube…
A GOOD rating. Dinosaur Planet is a great world to explore thanks to its visual design, music, and the challenges players face in its major locations, it’s just the small things interrupting that exploration that keep Star Fox Adventures from being more. Repetition reveals the basic designs of the combat, Arwing segments, and the connecting areas, so the game would have benefited a lot from their removal or heavy adjustment. These are brief breaks in the game’s momentum though, Star Fox Adventures still offering a thrilling experience as you enter a new area and begin to figure out what needs to be done. Even when you’ve returned to a location you’ve been before, you’re given new challenges that you had only caught a glimpse of earlier in your adventure, ensuring that side of the gameplay doesn’t drag.
Star Fox Adventures definitely has a vibe similar to games like The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. While its dungeons, world, and puzzles are on par with what the monumental Zelda has to offer, Adventures didn’t focus enough on its smaller parts and they distract from the parts that are well executed a little too much to let the game on the whole shine. While taking on the name of one Nintendo franchise and aping another, Star Fox Adventures ends up a little too conflicted to be great, but its incredible strength in some areas means it still has some value.