The history of Star Fox Adventures is well documented, especially considering a mostly playable build of Dinosaur Planet is easily accessible now, but to sum it up: Miyamoto took a look at this little action RPG Rare was making and suggested the lead character should be Fox McCloud. When the guy who told you to give DK a coconut gun has an opinion on what you should do with your game, you god damn listen, and so Rare threw out a bunch of key characters and changed plot points to accommodate the Star Fox crew. Ask some people and they'll tell you this is where everything went south, that Dinosaur Planet would have been a great game if not for all the Star Fox baggage.

To be fair, I kind of get this point. I think a lot of games with notoriously bad reputations made over one or two egregious flaws are dog piled on unnecessarily and are worthy of a reevaluation. Games like Dark Souls 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog have changed a lot in the public eye as people have come around on them years later. They were always great games, though. Classics, in fact. People just wouldn't give them a fair shot at the time. Star Fox Adventures is now 20 years old, so I knew exactly what it was going in, and considering I never played it back in the day, I figured I'd have a well-informed perspective that would allow me to see the game for exactly what it is and evaluate it accordingly.

This game sucks so much, holy shit.

I figured calling it a "Zelda clone" would actually be reductive, but honestly that's precisely what it is, and it is so in the most derogatory sense possible. Star Fox Adventures is to Ocarina of Time what Hydlide is to The Legend of Zelda. The puzzles in this game are so braindead easy that they just start to get dull and drag the game down, making it feel far longer than its length. You'll need to use spells Fox gains throughout the story in order to solve most of these, but they are often finicky and feel awful to use. You're also given some assistance from Prince Tricky, who I want to hold under water until the life leaves his eyes. A lot of Tricky's abilities could have been consolidated into Fox's moveset, allowing Rare to simplify the menu and streamline puzzles, but I guess they felt it was important to not have Fox experience the adventure alone and wanted to give him a sort of Navi equivalent. Developing a rare form of tinnitus where "hey, listen!" reverberates in my skull until I'm driven to madness would be preferable to Prince "I'm hungryyy" Tricky.

To be honest, for as lackluster and boring as a lot of this game is, it was probably a 2.5 for me until I got to Dragon Rock, a late game dungeon that makes frequent use of an early game ability: the Fire Shooter. This ability is exactly what it says on the tin, you activate it and can aim your staff around to shoot little fire balls. The problem is that the game forces your reticle back to the center of the screen if you're not forcing the analog stick where you want it, meaning you're constantly fighting against the controller to line up your shots. This thing swings around wildly at the slightest input, too, so it's also easy to overshoot your targets. The vast majority of Dragon Rock's puzzles are based around this one skill, with many of them being timer based as well. I know third person aiming in video games was in an altogether different place than it is now, but it's astonishing to me this made it into the finished product. Maybe they didn't have time to fix it because they were too busy figuring out how the hell to fit Andross into this thing, I don't know!

Dungeons are broken up with short flying segments modeled after Star Fox 64, but it's clear that Rare had neither the passion nor skill to create a proper Star Fox game. They just feel lazily thrown together with all the elements you'd expect from a typical Star Fox level, but without any of the nuance or design sense. Similar to how Star Fox Adventures feels like a flat version of Zelda, so too does it feel like a flat version of Star Fox. Completely uninspired from top to bottom.

The story is of course the most involved narrative in any Star Fox game to this point, but it's also very clear what parts were in the original Dinosaur Planet and what parts were shoehorned in at the request of Miyamoto. Even the way Fox is written feels distinctly out of character for him, and it's not like there was a whole lot of content out there to properly define who he was prior to that point. I haven't played Dinosaur Planet so I suppose I can't say with any authority, but Fox is written in such a way that it wouldn't surprise me if they simply swapped the lead character's model, rewrote maybe 10% of his lines to reference his crew, and called it a day.

General Scales and Krystal also seem like casualties of Rare retooling the game. Scales is the main antagonist, but he very rarely shows up and a lot of his evil deeds are told to you by other characters. In fact, he doesn't even get a boss fight at the end of the game, being done away with unceremoniously in order to move you right along into a battle with Andross. Krystal is also a total non-character, which I found a little more surprising given people's uh... fascination with her. She shows up in the prologue and is then reduced to a damsel in distress for the rest of the game. You're never given any context about who she is or why she's important, she's just a piece of meat stuck in a crystal, and to punctuate this point the first time Fox sees her you're treated to music that sounds like it's ripped straight from a 1970s adult film. It's ridiculous. When this theme shows up again during the end credits I laughed until it hurt.

Star Fox Adventures is rarely bad in a way that's actually interesting, and frankly I think it's irresponsible to not put an FDA warning on the box about its sedative nature. Sure, it suffers from the needless inclusion of Fox McCloud and his idiot friends, but it was never a good game to begin with. It controls poorly, puzzles are either uninteresting or just plain unfun, and the only real identity its able to create is owed entirely to the elements that were never meant to be there to begin with. I think a lot of games with notoriously bad reputations made over one or two egregious flaws are worthy of a reevaluation, and my evaluation is this game sucks ass.