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Not even two minutes after Fox McCloud makes his entrance into the story, we're belted into an Arwing fighter and faced with a view of the Great Fox's hangar doors opening wide. We admire the carbon scoring on Fox's ship. The texture, like gnawed metal, comes through as poignant as an action scene in a sci-fi flick. And it's not even moving. Not yet. We're sitting here, getting ready to blast off, and we're thinking: Namco *is* making a new Star Fox arcade game, right? Or is it Sega?
Seconds later, we're flying. Oh, flying. And the graphics are smooth. They're what our imaginations weren't good enough to picture when we first beheld the chunkiness that was the original Star Fox, when we got a vague urge for something more after the wonder of Star Fox 64. When you tip the stick down, the Arwing reacts, giving your thumb the impression of silk against silk -- dress socks in tennis shoes. You're floating. And then you fire a shot, and an asteroid blows up. You dip down, blast open a crate, grab a twin blaster, barrel-roll to the left (no tilting?), and blow something else up. Slippy informs you that you only need to fly through one gold ring to lower Dinosaur Planet's force-field (???), and you keep it in the back of your mind. You fire, fire, fire. Three enemies show up, and you hold down the fire button: fire-fire-fire. No lock-on? you wonder. Well, maybe it's a power-up -- maybe it's in that next crate . . .
It's not in the next crate. A bomb is. You keep the bomb, and then -- what's this? It's a gold ring. You fly through it.
"You did it, Fox!"
"That I did, Slippy," you think. Now where's that boss?
ALL-RANGE MODE!
There *is* no boss. Those are the only thirty seconds of Arwing-action you're going to get for the next four hours.
Four hours later, you're in what looks like the exact same stage, except you have to fly through THREE gold rings. And there's still no boss.
[Your question: Is there ever a boss? My answer: no comment.]
There's no good reason to use the bombs, either.
This, my friends, is a horrible disgrace. This calls to mind the Chocobo Radar quest in Final Fantasy VIII; I grit my teeth, and say: give me FFVII's Chocobo racing, or give me no Chocobos at all.
I'm not expecting shooter gameplay brilliance on par with Ikaruga here; I'm just saying I want something more than a half-assed, pretty (oh SO pretty) pandering to Fox's devoted fans.
Do these dry-as-HELL Arwing missions make Star Fox Adventures less of a game? Do they stick out in such a way as to make us think regular old Dinosaur Planet would have been a better game? Answer: absolutely not, and absolutely not.
They just make me mourn for the next true Star Fox game. Imagine that -- the game's not even playable yet, and I feel like it just committed an unpredicted suicide. The feeling I feel in my heart (go ahead and call me a loser for having a place in my heart for videogames) is a tender, deep one. I feel like Star Fox has left me, leaving only a terse email in an account I never check. "We'll meet again," it's saying, long after I'd started to suspect the worst -- does Fox no longer want me to blow up asteroids with him? -- and it makes the imminent arrival of that game a much, much more joyous occasion.
Never has playing one game made me want so many other games.
Playing Landstalker makes me want Landstalker 2. Playing Ikaruga makes me wish I'd bought Radiant Silvergun when I had the chance. Playing Star Fox Adventures makes me want Shinobi, a true Star Fox sequel, the new Zelda, Panzer Dragoon Orta . . .
It certainly doesn't make me want Kingdom Hearts (even though I already have it). Where that little mess of a game (also a hodgepodge of familiar characters -- what do you know?) has horrific camera problems, Star Fox Adventures is able to achieve wonders with only a camera-centering button. The camera follows at a reasonable distance, not looking like it's too eager to show off Fox's pants (*ahem*). In battle, the enemies stand back and wait in an unrealistic manner while the camera zooms out to give a perfect view of the combatants. First-person look mode, even when not aided with the hi-definition sensor, is smooth as butter, even though I keep forgetting the Z-button is there.
In Star Fox Adventures, I don't have to worry about grinding slowly around mushrooms in blind defiance of absent collision-detection. The auto-jump, borrowed directly from Zelda's N64 outings, has never worked so perfectly well. The dungeons require you to use your brain every once in a while, as opposed to hacking everything in sight and then repeatedly tapping the action button until you pick up the fallen key/magic gem/coconut that you need to complete your mission. The bosses are classic Zelda, and maybe even a little inspired. One boss, a la Prince Froggy in Yoshi's Island, sucks you inside, where you whack his uvula until you're vomited out.
The game is not without its virtuoso moments. Two reptilian guards casting barrels out of hut windows down a snowy hill you're trying to climb has never felt more inspired. Several well-placed hover-bike chase sequences achieve the mysterious task of offering you a break from the long, dark, torch-lit dungeon-questing while testing your twitch skills.
Then again, maybe anything will seem like a breather after you've just broken free of an hour of dungeon monotony. Hell, throwing a toy ball to your triceratops assistant Tricky seems like a break after you finally find your way out of the *shop*.
And therein lie two of Star Fox Adventures' deepest design flaws. The shop is a perfect, spoiler-free microcosm for all the dungeons to come. There is a central hub, with three doors. Each door leads to a beautifully torch-lit hallway that goes on for a hundred scale meters or so, until opening into another hub room, this one containing two or three items. The three rooms contain, from left to right, food, items, and maps. Why they have to put them in three rooms, where it's frustrating to find the exit, I don't know. Why it had to take me ten minutes to escape the shop the first time I went in, I don't know that, either. Why Tricky has to wait outside on the ledge, when he's mysteriously teleported up countless ladders and across pools of lava before, I haven't the foggiest.
In the same way, you'll spend much time wandering back and forth in dungeons -- only in dungeons, you can be killed, sometimes by the most frustrating means: in order to keep the largest, most empty, sparsely puzzle-populated spaces "interesting," little burrowing reptilian monsters can jump out of the dirt and soundlessly cast an invisible, unavoidable fireball at you from two hundred scale meters away.
As always, Rare is carefully skirting around true innovation (they ran out of that back with Solar Jetman on NES -- anyone remember that one?) by making us think they're being clever when, really, they're not. Tricky the triceratops, your assistant, can dig to find items, be told to stay on a switch, or even breathe flames to melt ice walls. Why can't Fox use his flame staff to melt ice walls? Why couldn't Rare just leave a few barrels lying around to weigh down switches? Why can't Fox get a digging attachment for his staff? He uses the damned thing to pry open crates and bust baskets all the time.
Why don't I miss Tricky when he stays behind on a mission? Because Rare doesn't make me miss him, that's why. They don't even make me miss him when I leave him to stand on a switch.
Case in point: once or twice, Tricky has to stand on a switch to open a gate. Fox enters, and pulls a lever to reverse the river's flow, so he can jump in, and swim to the other side. Why not put an ice wall at the other side of the river, and make us wonder: Damn -- how do I get Tricky back over here?
There is no ice wall -- even if there were, we'd have no time to wonder how to get Tricky back, because, like a pat on the back from Rare for solving the puzzle, there he is, defying the command you gave him, magically teleported to your side. Where's the hardcore difficulty of Battletoads, the brain-teasing of Blast Corps?
This kind of would-be innovative dinosaur sidekick is no more revolutionary than the would-be innovative Patented Rare Music-Changing Effect -- now enhanced to peak in dramatic, tribal-drum-bashing fervor when you near the corner of a room on which the crate containing the Item Needed to Proceed is located! It is also no more innovative than money that runs away from you.
Oh, how cute -- the currency of Dinosaur Planet is scarabs. To obtain them, use Fox's staff -- the one that can't dig three inches into mud -- to pry up enormous boulders. The scarabs scatter, and run -- go get them! The faster they are, the more money they're worth! As for bomb spores -- exploited early in the game to open cracked walls, then forgotten, then brought back way, way after you've forgotten about them -- you have to use your flame command on the bomb spore plant, and then run to catch the spores, which float slowly toward the ground. Fire weeds have to be whacked out of a tree, and then whacked again to stop them from burning.
Please. You're giving us enough inane shit to do already. Any more, and I won't be able to contain my joy.
What perhaps frustrates us the most about Star Fox Adventures is how perfectly all this item-collecting is utilized. It's almost not fair -- how can they do something Zelda DIDN'T do, and actually make it work? How did they come up with the idea of the Bafomdad -- did they study Landstalker's Eke-eke, a revive-upon-death must-carry which, far favorable to Zelda's fairies, can be stored ten at a time, and require no containers of any sort? How did they come up with the spiffy idea of assigning your inventory to the C-stick? How did they make the 3D adventure genre's token camera problems vanish into thin air? Answer: I don't know. I told you, those guys at Rare are geniuses.
It's a shame that this genius is used to create a game so steeped in the conventions of platforming and moneymaking. It's a shame to see that this genius is so meticulous in creating said game that the competition it would have obliterated is already filed under "obsolete" in the backs of our brains. It's a shame to see this kind of genius put to work on a production of zero risk.
I say, to hell with conventions, Rare. Maybe now that you're off Nintendo's leash, you can pull a few dozen Smilebits. Like the now free-of-the-hardware-biz Sega, your property is suddenly in big demand. Feel no fear, I say. Give us Battletoads with finely-textured lumpy skin. Give us the hardcore shooter you've been dying to make (don't lie to me -- I played and BEAT level three of Battletoads). Give us a dark, violent adult game free of Conker's gimmicks, of Perfect Dark's pressure to follow one hell of an opening act. Concentrate on one thing at a time, even though piling them up doesn't exactly kill us.
Or give us Solar Jetman 2.
In the meantime, we'll hold on to this one. Its control is top-notch. Its characters are deliciously fuzzy. Its quest is long, and the urge to gather items grows on you. It has its problems -- what game doesn't? -- and it's a little scattered -- what isn't, these days? -- and while we can't love the game like we loved Battletoads, we'll definitely like it, maybe even a lot. If only for the fuzz, the carbon-scoring on the Arwing, and the particle lighting effects when we blow something up. Ooh, particle-effects . . . reflections . . .
I close this review with a question: When's Metroid Prime coming out again?
tim rogers wonders why he hasn't preordered Metroid Prime yet
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