Star Fox meets stone Shrek. Because sure. Why not? At this point, who cares?
Let’s take a break from all the Fire Emblem madness, shall we? Today I’d like to focus on Star Fox Adventure, the black sheep of the Star Fox family. And why not? Fox should get the chance to adventure just like anyone else. Just because he’s some hotshot pilot doesn’t mean he never needs to get out and stretch his furry little, possibly amputated, metal legs. Sure, sure, there’s that whole business of usurping the entirely unrelated “Dinosaur Planet” game, swooping in like some colonial power to slaughter the locals, swipe their resources, and rape their disturbingly sexy fox women to a borderline-pornographic jazz saxophone soundtrack—all in the name of saving them from themselves.
You go Fox! That’ll teach him to not be able to regulate his internal body temperature!
Usually I take some time to explain the storyline, but as our resident colonial power, Nintendo, demanded the story be drastically rewritten, the Star Fox cannon accepts this story with the poetic grace of a beautiful sixteen-year-old losing her virginity to a hydraulic pile driver. As this was the final game Rare developed before Microsoft purchased them to be slaughtered, then resurrected by their head voodoo priestess, let’s start with their typical formula: begin with a cute, furry, mammalian protagonist, pit them against a villain who is reptilian, green, or otherwise unappealing based on sight or stereotypical representation, and litter the landscape with enough macguffins to draw the wrath of environmental protesters. (For all their stellar reputation, Rare fell into kind of a rut after Goldeneye) From there, replace one of the heroes with Fox McCloud, sleeves ripped off his flight jacket to give him that butch just-out-of-prison look, and sex up the other hero like a prehistoric escort girl with a muzzle (because apparently “the Legend of Zelda meets Jurassic Park” can’t motivate men to action unless we also throw in “the Discovery Channel.”). Throw in some bizarre idea of gravity working backwards as an excuse to fly through space once in a while, and as long as we’re usurping the original game, let’s boot out the primary antagonist at the last minute to wedge in a final boss fight with the space love-child of King Kong and Rafiki from the Lion King using a style of gameplay entirely different from what we’ve played for 99% of the game.
I know this game and Krystal, it’s supposed would-be-hero, served as Anita Sarkeesian’s prime example of how the man-o-centric male-ocracy of video games refuses to view women in any way that prevents them from fast-forwarding to the parts with nudity, but as it turns out, the game was always supposed to have a male protagonist. Krystal, as a cat, was originally assigned a larger, more active role, but she still shared the spotlight with a male tiger named Sabre. Be it Fox or Sabre, however, the story simply feels like it needs to be about Krystal.
The pterodactyl is definitely shooting Krystal a look that says, “I’m not getting paid enough to put up with this shit.”
For starters, the game pulls a weak justification of why Fox has to use Krystal’s staff instead of his blaster—General Pepper thinks he needs to learn more subtle ways of solving problems than blasting. You know…mix it up and use blunt trauma to bludgeon the locals to death once in a while. The flight sections are fun and sort of Star Foxy, in a stripped down, take-off-your-shoes-and-step-through-the-machine sort of way, but do you know what would have been fun and made narrative sense? Flying your fire-breathing pterodactyl from place to place. They even pair up Fox with a baby styracosaurus named Tricky. You don’t have to babysit him, which automatically makes him better than Ashley Graham (score one more point for Sarkeesian’s argument), but the relationship he has with Fox displays all the warmth and camaraderie that Link has with his hookshot. He’s there to solve puzzles, giving him the functionality of an item, but at least in Zelda, the boomerang never asks you for food. On the other hand, pair him up with Krystal, who having grown up on Dinsoaur Planet has a clear investment in the culture and the dinosaurs, and Tricky could have been more endearing than that dog that made everyone cry at the end of that Futurama episode.
My first guess? Check the henhouse.
So the story forces characters with sack-of-flour personalities through so many holes and circuitous twists that if you just add water you’ll likely get a bowl of corkscrew pasta. What about the gameplay? Generally, it feels like Banjo Kazooie going through an edgy, teenage Zelda phase. You still wander around the planet collecting junk like an unemployed geo-cacher, but there’s a slight emphasis on useable items. Rare clearly missed the point of item collecting in Zelda, though. Zelda items are known for their versatility, letting players interact creatively with the game. You can write life hacks with Zelda items: “Did you know you can fight Gannon with nothing but a fishing pole and a jar of rancid marmalade like some deranged dock master?” Zelda games let players live out MacGuyver fantasies, allowing them to access power ups with nothing but a boomerang, an enchanted jock strap, and a lint roller that some fairy gave them after they dropped their tuna sandwich in a fountain. Fox, on the other hand, can’t use an item at all unless there’s some pedestal with a dozen signs pointing at it telling him exactly which item to use. I’ve seriously found more uses for old house keys than the items in Star Fox Adventures.
You feeling okay Peppy? You look a little stoned there. You wanna maybe lie down for a minute or two?
So the game isn’t without a certain amount of charm, and if I ever got stuck, Slippy would give me useful hints, thus redeeming him for flying through Star Fox 64 with dead batteries in his laser and a bullseye painted on the back of his arwing. However, while I got through 80% of the game took up about 60% of my play time. Rare filled it with tedious mini-games that were tested as thoroughly as a street-corner prostitute (and not 10% as enjoyable). Let’s see…there were two speeder chases that required me to disable enemies with no guns, no way to accelerate faster than them, and in which every obstacle—including the required ramming of enemy speeders—slowed me down…there was a button-mashing mini-game that required a tube of bengay and melted the button on my controller for the speed they wanted…and there was a Tyrannosaurus that chased me around an arena for an hour, in desperate need of electroshock therapy, but giving no predictable pattern as to when he’d casually walk through the electrodes (thank my ghost fox dad, though, that it wasn’t hungry, and felt perfectly content to croon some dinosaur lounge music every time it saw me).
So in short, I’m not saying that every Star Fox game needs to put me in the pilot seat and tell me to do barrel rolls until I feel like Donkey Kong’s best weapon against Mario. I’m just saying that between Nintendo and Rare, someone screwed up this game to the point that the most memorable thing about it was the air freshener I was supposed to give out at Sam Goody every time someone bought the game. And since no one ever did, I had plenty of those pungent little foxes freshening up my car back in college.
Video Game Underworld 