DoctorIssa
BACKER
Star Fox Adventures 2002
Log Status
Completed
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
--
Platforms Played
To the people who played Zelda: Breath of the Wild and thought "I really wish this had traditional dungeons", go and play this game. That is right, Star Fox Adventures is just a Zelda game with a Star Fox skin, but this time almost every level is designed like a Zelda dungeon. Too much Zelda dungeon if I may.
I picked this game up back in the day at full price fully excited to give this a try. I was kinda expecting an action game where you get to play Fox on foot as I always wanted to do that in Star Fox 64's singleplayer. I played through the first hour and never touched it again as it was not at all what I was expecting. Fox only has a staff? It's more of an adventure game than action? Damn, I just wanted to run around a dinosaur planet as Fox and shoot things. And it went up there with one of the most disappointing purchases I had saved up for with my allowance.
20 years later, I gave Star Fox 64 another try and found it to be one of my favorite games of all time. With that, and playing pretty much all of the Zelda games during the pandemic, I became both a massive Zelda and Star Fox fan. Having remembered Star Fox Adventures was just a marriage of those two franchises, I was more than willing to revisit this one.
Now I won't get into the Dinosaur Planet details, because it's pretty much a known fact by everyone that Star Fox Adventures was meant to be another IP, but Nintendo forced Rare to slap the Star Fox IP on this. With playing this game you could clearly see that.
The story here is really basic and not at all intriguing like a Zelda game, you're just saving a planet from an evil general. Collect X amount of thingamaobs and defeat the final boss. Pretty straightforward. You can tell all the "Star Fox" aspects of the story were stiched on. All the important characters you'd expect to see from a Star Fox game is either put to the sidelines as an excuse for the UI, or they are left out until the end of the game. Most of the characters that are in the limelight are fox himself and the uninteresting dinosaur races you meet.
Considering Star Fox was a shooter prior to this, you'd expect this game to have some decent action. This cannot be further from the truth as somehow the combat is so barebones, it makes Ocarina of Time's combat look like Dark Souls. There will only be 2 or 3 enemy types you will be facing in the whole game and they all die with the same strategy, going up to them and mashing the A button. With that said, there's only like 3 bossfights here too, which aren't even that good. That's 2 for 2 so far where Zelda mogs this game in both Combat and Bosses.
Where the game's main strength is the level design and puzzles. As previously mentioned, the best way to describe the structure of this game is that you're playing dungeon after dungeon with sometimes having an on-rails shooter in between. But there is too much dungeon here. The good thing is that the puzzle design is great and not once did I have to ever look up a guide. At the same time, nothing was too simple that it felt like it was easy.
One of the really sinful things this game does is the amount of backtracking. Now I know backtracking is a thing in these type of adventure games, but I never thought about how painful the backtracking once when playing a Zelda or Metroid game for example. Here, you are forced to go through every section you've already been through twice, sometimes even 3 times. This is including some dungeons you need to backtrack to. This singlehandedly kills so much of the pacing and enjoyment of this game, it is probably my biggest gripe that prevents me from calling this a great game.
There are also little nitpicky things like the aiming segments not controlling well. The on-rails shooter segments not being as nearly as good as Star Fox 64. The annoying little dinosaur companion that you need to keep finding mushrooms to feed it. A lot of tiny aspects hold this game from being the great singleplayer adventure it could've been.
It's still a good game and worth playing through once if you enjoy Zelda dungeon design. But if you had a GameCube and had to decide between this or Wind Waker, I would play the Wind Waker a hundred times over.
I picked this game up back in the day at full price fully excited to give this a try. I was kinda expecting an action game where you get to play Fox on foot as I always wanted to do that in Star Fox 64's singleplayer. I played through the first hour and never touched it again as it was not at all what I was expecting. Fox only has a staff? It's more of an adventure game than action? Damn, I just wanted to run around a dinosaur planet as Fox and shoot things. And it went up there with one of the most disappointing purchases I had saved up for with my allowance.
20 years later, I gave Star Fox 64 another try and found it to be one of my favorite games of all time. With that, and playing pretty much all of the Zelda games during the pandemic, I became both a massive Zelda and Star Fox fan. Having remembered Star Fox Adventures was just a marriage of those two franchises, I was more than willing to revisit this one.
Now I won't get into the Dinosaur Planet details, because it's pretty much a known fact by everyone that Star Fox Adventures was meant to be another IP, but Nintendo forced Rare to slap the Star Fox IP on this. With playing this game you could clearly see that.
The story here is really basic and not at all intriguing like a Zelda game, you're just saving a planet from an evil general. Collect X amount of thingamaobs and defeat the final boss. Pretty straightforward. You can tell all the "Star Fox" aspects of the story were stiched on. All the important characters you'd expect to see from a Star Fox game is either put to the sidelines as an excuse for the UI, or they are left out until the end of the game. Most of the characters that are in the limelight are fox himself and the uninteresting dinosaur races you meet.
Considering Star Fox was a shooter prior to this, you'd expect this game to have some decent action. This cannot be further from the truth as somehow the combat is so barebones, it makes Ocarina of Time's combat look like Dark Souls. There will only be 2 or 3 enemy types you will be facing in the whole game and they all die with the same strategy, going up to them and mashing the A button. With that said, there's only like 3 bossfights here too, which aren't even that good. That's 2 for 2 so far where Zelda mogs this game in both Combat and Bosses.
Where the game's main strength is the level design and puzzles. As previously mentioned, the best way to describe the structure of this game is that you're playing dungeon after dungeon with sometimes having an on-rails shooter in between. But there is too much dungeon here. The good thing is that the puzzle design is great and not once did I have to ever look up a guide. At the same time, nothing was too simple that it felt like it was easy.
One of the really sinful things this game does is the amount of backtracking. Now I know backtracking is a thing in these type of adventure games, but I never thought about how painful the backtracking once when playing a Zelda or Metroid game for example. Here, you are forced to go through every section you've already been through twice, sometimes even 3 times. This is including some dungeons you need to backtrack to. This singlehandedly kills so much of the pacing and enjoyment of this game, it is probably my biggest gripe that prevents me from calling this a great game.
There are also little nitpicky things like the aiming segments not controlling well. The on-rails shooter segments not being as nearly as good as Star Fox 64. The annoying little dinosaur companion that you need to keep finding mushrooms to feed it. A lot of tiny aspects hold this game from being the great singleplayer adventure it could've been.
It's still a good game and worth playing through once if you enjoy Zelda dungeon design. But if you had a GameCube and had to decide between this or Wind Waker, I would play the Wind Waker a hundred times over.