Pandora's Box: The Ultimate GameCube Tier List

#65: Star Fox Adventures

Rating: T

Players: 1

Price Range: ~$34 USD

A 3D action-adventure game set within the Star Fox series.

We got a bit of a story with this one.

This is RareWare's final game before being bought out by Microsoft.

It is a bit of common knowledge that this game was originally a Nintendo 64 game called Dinosaur Planet before Nintendo approached Rare about the idea to turn it into a Star Fox game due to the similarities of the main protagonist being a fox.

The prototype of the rom is even floating around the internet I believe.

This decision to completely rebrand it as a Star Fox game may make little, if any sense. However, upon watching several videos about the game, the possibility was thrown around that Nintendo wanted it to be turned into a Star Fox game in order to prevent it from going multiplatform in the future, which, is unfortunately the case as the game has never been rereleased.

As for the game itself?

Well, there is definitely one compliment that everybody can agree upon, and that is the graphics. This is easily some of the best presentation ever for a sixth-generation game, and you could argue that it looks one console ahead. Not only are details well fleshed out, like the strands of fur on Fox McCloud, but the game runs at a buttery smooth 60 FPS, which, for 2002, is insanely impressive. As for why this is above the two Zelda games in the C Tier? Well...this at least looks better.

The rest?

Well...

This is a 3D action-adventure game that is very much akin to Zelda.

In fact, it is considered a Zelda clone.

Not that it means that it is a bad game, but another issue is that it is not a Star Fox game, or at least doesn't feel like one.

Arwing sections are only used for long-distance travel and kind of feel out of place, and there is no on-ground shooting to speak of.

Still, this wouldn't matter if the gameplay was stellar, which it is definitely not.

It's...fine, but even then, the design is very rugged.

For one, the combat. Outside of guarding every now and then, button mashing is the go-to way of dealing with threats, which is a bit disappointing. Some of the world design makes no sense, as the map has a hub in the center, with branches growing away from it. This would be fine if the end of these routes had fast travel, but nope. There is even infamously a late area that has only one route takes about five or so minutes to get to or go back from, which is utterly ridiculous.

Also, parts of the story are legitimately awful. Krystal at first seems like a rather interesting member of this foreign planet where you actually play as her in the opening minutes of the game...only to be reduced to a damsel in distress for pretty much the rest of the playthrough and is displayed as some sort of object of sexual infatuation and love interest for Fox, which is purely lazy and terrible writing. She is somewhat developed in Assault, but we'll get to that eventually. General Pepper ordering Fox to not use his own blaster to 'not blow the place up' is also incredibly forced. Metroid: Other M was worse, but this is kind of bad. And Andross being the final boss is so unbelievably shoehorned in, that it is enough to make anyone cringe.

Also, the aiming controls for the fire ball shot from the staff are atrocious, as not tilting the stick while aiming causes the reticle to revert back to the center, as if veering of from the middle causes a rubber band to pull it make it difficult shoot at all.

Still, there are some cool ideas here, such as being able to actually barter the shop keepers in the main hub to lower the price to an extent is kind of cool, and some of the mechanics involving Prince Tricky aren't half bad.

Still, if you have an itch for 3D action-adventure games in the same vain as Zelda, you could do much worse.