Star Fox Adventures

released on Sep 22, 2002

A remake of Dinosaur Planet

Fox Mccloud takes a break from flying his arwing and signs up for a mission on land, a beautiful, magical land called Dinosaur Planet. Although the player controls Fox for almost the entirety of the game, the first level of Star Fox Adventures involves playing as another fox called Krystal, who speaks another language, from a different planet called Cerinia. Krystal is looking for answers to the destruction of her home planet, and the murder of her parents. She lands on Krazoa Palace after receiving a distress call from Dinosaur Planet, but an unfortunate event occurs during her exploration of this location. Meanwhile, General Pepper contacts the Star Fox Team and asks them to investigate Dinosaur Planet. One of the main reasons for the investigation, is that large chunks of the planet have become detached for an unexplained reason. Fox McCloud agrees to take a look. On the planet's surface, Fox comes across a magical staff that becomes his sole weapon in the game. Fox learns from the Triceratops Queen of the EarthWalker Tribe that General Scales, a member of a different tribe, has stolen the four Spellstones from the planet's two Force Point Temples, causing the detachment of parts of the planet. To prevent the planet from breaking up further and restore it to its original unity, The player must control Fox and restore the Spellstones to the temples. Fox embarks on this quest with the help of the Queen's son, named Prince Tricky, a Triceratops who is approximately the same size as a wolf cub. Fox discovers that he must also retrieve the other five Krazoa Spirits to repair the planet, and save the life of another ally. In order for the player to restore the Spellstones and Krazoa spirits, they must navigate through the variety of environments present on Dinosaur Planet, exploring new landscapes, facing new foes and receiving help from new allies that reside there. Prince Tricky helps in certain situations by using his unique abilities. The player asks Prince Tricky to use these abilities by selecting options from a menu opened with the C-Stick. As you navigate through the game, your staff acquires new abilities, which are selected by using the same C-Stick menu. There are moments in the game that require the use of the arwing, a type of spacecraft used by the Star Fox team. However, these moments take up under half an hour of the overall game time. The game can be described as an Action-Adventure, Open World game that contains strong elements of Fantasy and some elements of Sci-Fi. It is often described as being similar to The Ocarina Of Time and the other home console Zelda Games. When engaged with an enemy, the combat is real time, meaning each of Fox's movements in combat require the press of the A button, similar to how each sword swing in Zelda or Skyrim require the press of a button.


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"Put that down! You don't have enough scarabs!"

I liked how they took a risk and tried something different with Star Fox. A fun Zelda-esque experience with decent gameplay and interesting story and world. There's some frustrating elements but overall a great Star Fox entry.

This is another game I rented as a kid, liked well enough, but never finished at the time and never got back to. With the recent resurrection of Dinosaur Planet (this game's N64 original version) via dumped files and Project64, I resolved to finally play through this game to the end. Luckily, it isn't a particularly hard to find game here or terribly expensive. I got some 96% of the content done and beat the Japanese version over the course of a couple days (like 15 or 16 hours).

Star Fox Adventures sees our titular hero on the orders of General Pepper to aid the extremely troubled Dinosaur Planet. Due to an invasion of the other kingdoms by General Scales, the planet has broken apart due to him disrupting the magical energy fields the planet is (apparently literally) overflowing with. Dinosaur Planet is, unsurprisingly, populated by various tribes of talking dinosaurs, the prince of the Earth Walkers (triceratops) ends up becoming Fox's companion on this adventure. Many remarked upon this at the time and have since, but it's a very un-Star Fox-y story that is at times irritating but overall inoffensive in setting up the stakes and core action. Oddly enough, despite this being the Japanese version, there is no Japanese voice acting, with only (even for the time, kinda amazingly terrible) English voice acting accompanied by Japanese subtitles.

The gameplay plays a lot like what it is: a long-lost Rare N64 title. From the level designs to the dialogue writing to the sheer aesthetics, this really does feel like a distant cousin to things like Banjo-Tooie and DK64. Mechanically, you're going through a fairly linear 3D Zelda-sort of action adventure game, with a slew of items to aid you along with the magic staff Fox uses to beat up dinosaurs and even blast magic at them! The prince of the Earth Walkers, Tricky, is also an important mechanic to use as you guide him around to have him dig up stuff for you, but he's ultimately not actually that invasive or important a mechanic. He's there, sure, but Resident Evil 4 this is not. He usually just teleports around to wherever you need him, and it's a clever way to minimize inventory management outside of some more complicated inventory system (which the game does manage to have regardless, just not in some Ocarina of Time-like menu screen :b).

This is much more a kin of Rare's rougher N64 titles though, and in the efficacy of its overall design I'd rank it more along more decisive titles like Jet Force Gemini and Banjo-Tooie than any of their greats. For such a linear game, the signposting can be shockingly rough at times, and even when you know where to go, walking from place to place takes ages. The combat, while quite cinematic in an impressively flashy way, is ultimately super button-mashy and gets very boring and uninteresting fast. The dungeon lengths and designs are never really awful but not ever super inspired, and are definitely more mid-/low-tier Zelda fare. None of the design is outright terrible (save for one awwwwwful joystick balancing mini-game around the game's midpoint), but it really does beg to be polished up in certain places.

The game also has some Star Fox flying segments awkwardly put into it as cool novelties/wastes of time when you go between the planet and the broken-off segments, and in a weird turn they even are used for the final boss fight. This game was a totally different game that had Star Fox put into it to help the GameCube release sell better, and these segments are very underwhelming and feel as slapped in to the gameplay loop as they indeed are. The final boss especially is a really weird choice, as it suddenly demands you start using a skill set the game has barely instilled in you at all, and the final boss ends up being pretty bad as a result. Boss fights aren't exactly the game's strong suit to begin with, but the final boss was definitely my least enjoyed out of the handful present.

Presentation-wise, it really is like an N64 game with GameCube graphics. It all looks fine and, Fox himself looks quite nice as a character model. The music is pretty damn good, as one would expect from even a not so great Rare game, but the Star Fox tunes feel super dissonant with the game's score otherwise in a way I didn't really dig. The game can hit some pretty bad framerate dips when you get to areas with lots of enemies and water, but it's never anything that prevents play, and even those dips I did get were very uncommon.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is overall sorta the epitome of "fine", and while you probably won't hate it, I can't really see many people loving this game. If you can get it for cheap and the premise interests you (like it did me), then I'd say it could be worth your money, but I think for most people, they'll ultimately feel like their time was better spent elsewhere. While a neat historical curiosity, outside of some of the awful VA, Star Fox Adventures doesn't really manage to be all that memorable for being anything but a disappointing (i.e. not a successor to Star Fox 64) Star Fox game.

The worst game I've finished in a while. It borrows a ton from 3D Zelda, and in way less graceful way than Banjo borrowed from Mario 64. The controls, the lock and key design, the finding a new item animation---none of the things that made 3D Zelda good exactly, and the absences, like the genuine sense of place, the atmosphere, the mystery, the sound work, the intuitive world design, the puzzles, the characters, it's all missing. Its a world of dinosaurs where none of them are interesting and their world feels like it was built for a fox who carries a thousand items.

But it's less than a ripoff of 3D Zelda that doesn't work, it's all embellished further by all the worst tendencies of Rare's design at the time. It's long, bloated, full of tedious backtracking, fetch quests, a load of pointless resources and collectables, embarrassing minigames, and no feeling for storytelling in the slightest. I know it's not Starfox, it's Dinosaur Planet, but would it have hurt to have the arwing segments feel more robust and better implemented than the gummi ship interludes in Kingdom Hearts? It's Dinosaur Planet alright, and like that game it still feels unfinished.

This was the first Star Fox game I ever played, so not knowing that it "went against the star fox formula" didn't spoil it for me.
This is an awesome Zelda-like adventure with lots of great puzzles and skill-based challenges, and I'd love to revisit it in the future!

Recently played through this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQD-V_4nmeE

a T. Rex is as threatening as a mushroom.
you can parkour roll.
everyone is hungry.




Listen I know this isn't very good but I enjoyed it as a kid! Star Fox (one of my favorite games from the N64) plus dinosaurs! Sounds good to me!