King of the genre in my eyes, excellent varied environments, a simple story with a fantastic cast of heroes and Villans, and iconic voice lines and appropriate voice acting, especially innovative for it's time

The ability to go down different routes adds insane replayability, when I was younger I thought only the easy route existed and the other planets on the map were just there for decoration, finding out about the hard route years later blew my mind

Gameplay is fantastic, I think even non rail shooter game players would find joy in this game, beautiful graphics as well for the N64, remember watching the old N64 ad for the rumble pak that was included with this game and the hype was unreal

Excellent game that I come back to all the time, it's short length, insane replicability and tight satisfying gameplay keep this one a classic in my eyes and still hasn't been topped. Nintendo keeps trying to chase this high but hasnt come close except with some stages from Assault

9.5/10

Star Fox walked so Star Fox 64 could run. ...or it might be more apt to say that Star Fox flew so Star Fox 64 could fly at a playable FPS. While this reboot is obviously technically superior to the original, it's a whole host of other details that make this the definitive Star Fox experience; for one, the addition of the charged shot and aiming reticle make the simple act of flying around and shooting things feel much better and less random. The addition of Saturday morning cartoon style voice acting - with just the right mix of scenery-chewing and earnest emotion - adds enough personality to both your wingmen and your enemies to ease you into the role of Fox.

However, it's one change in particular that elevates Star Fox 64 from 'excellently-done game' to 'one of my favorites'. The game's structure is far more organic than the original - rather than a preset 'easy' 'medium' and 'hard' path through the game, SF64 dynamically moves you between the various paths depending on how you do in each mission, creating a multitude of possible routes to the final stage (which itself has two variations). This variable difficulty keeps the player on their toes and rewards aggressive play with progression to the more interesting and higher-dopamine missions of the 'medium' and 'hard' routes, making Star Fox 64 a greatly-replayable score-attack game. If you manage to get to the 'harder' variation of the final sequence, hearing the increasingly-panicked enemy radio chatter as you punch through their final lines of defense makes you feel like an absolute badass, and you know what? You earned it.

Speaking of the missions, they all carry enough of a unique twist to keep the rail-shooter formula from getting stale - from an Independence-Day style level where you need to shoot down a mothership to protect a base, to a mission over a molten planet where the heat continuously drains your shields and the only way to stay alive is to destroy background objects for health pickups, to intense free-flying dogfights, to (shockingly well-done!) land and sea levels in alternate vehicles, there is so much imagination that went into these.

I'm aware that the fanbase is pretty split on the music - quite a few players prefer the soundtrack of the original Star Fox for being more eclectic and unique, but you know what? Koji Kondo's soundtrack is more 'standard' but I love it more, the same way I prefer all of Alan Menken's Disney soundtracks to any of the modern stuff. It just stirs my heartstrings and makes me want to go out there and do stuff.

To sum up: great game, absolutely essential playing as a representative of both the N64 library and of rail shooters in general. Highly recommend!

This is a game I've owned since I was little but sold before I moved to Japan. While I have beaten it before, it's got a lot of nostalgic value for me, so I picked up this Japanese copy before too long, but only just got around to playing through it. I played through it twice by myself and then twice on stream on Twitch, and it was twice through the normal ending and twice through the harder ending. I wasn't sure if I wanted to write a review for it, but since I not only haven't written one before but also wanted to comment on changes between the English and Japanese versions, I felt one was warranted. I actually managed to get onto the high score table of my own second-hand cartridge, so I call that beating it enough for me (got a very respectable 1138 points~).

Star Fox 64, like the SNES original, is a rail shooter where you play as the titular Fox McCloud. Years ago, the evil Dr. Andross (or "Andolf", as he's hilariously called in Japanese XD), threatened the Lylat system with destruction, but he was thwarted by the actions of Fox's father. However, Fox's father was betrayed by Pigma, one of his companions, and didn't make it out alive. Now that Andross once again threatens the safety of the system, Fox has taken up his father's mantel with his mercenary group Star Fox to take down this threat. It's a fine story that sets up the stakes in a good way and the way the characters banter back and forth during missions (between both friend and foe) is really entertaining and memorable.

The Japanese script is more or less pretty similar content-wise to the English version, but the tone is quite different in the slight deviations and especially the delivery. Where the English version is very silly and campy from start to end, the Japanese version is played much more straight and has moments of silliness in it. It can even get quite dark, with at one point Pigma taunting "Your daddy's waiting for you in hell!" (with the much deeper voice he has in Japanese). I don't really think it works as well as the English version does, but it does go a long way to explain the darker tones in later Star Fox games like Command and Assault. One last weird note is that the audio quality on the VA seems significantly less good in Japanese than it is in English, which is a shame, as this VA IS good, but it's just overall not quite as good a package as what the localization would become.

The game itself is a series of 7 missions where you always start on Corneria and end on one of two possible versions of Venom (the normal one or the harder, true ending one), and there are 25 possible paths to take between the stages. Most of the stages have two possible ways to complete them, with one normal route and one secret route, with the secret routes generally leading to levels that give more points but are more difficult (and lead to the true ending fight).

As a rail shooter it's super solid and well-remembered for a reason. Damn near everyone reading this likely knows just what Star Fox 64 already is and is like, so I'll be light on the details of the actual combat. You fly around collecting rings for health (or even health extensions), powerups to increase the power of your main fire, bombs to fire in emergencies, and even repair tokens to repair your wings if they get slammed off. You've gotta shoot all the enemies you can for a high score (and you know, not to die), and you can even use charged normal shots to kill several enemies at once for extra points~. Just be careful not to shoot down your companions! The bosses are super fun and challenging, and while most are in the 3rd person rail shooter sort of style most of the rest of the game is in, a handful of bosses (and even levels) are in an "all range mode" where you fly around a set map and dog fight with enemy fighters. Some levels don't have you in your spaceship at all, and you're in the land-bound Landmaster or the underwater submarine. Not all levels are made equal, but damn if they aren't super solid as a rule, and trying to get higher scores and different routes means that the fun you can have extends far beyond just getting the best ending.

Verdict: Highly recommended. This verdict likely comes as no surprise. Y'all already know this is a great game, and I'm not here to contest that. It's a game I definitely prefer in English, but its quirks in Japanese are still very interesting and I'm glad I saw what the game has to offer in the differences present in the original.

When it comes to childhood video game memories I don't have many games to call out. They either weren't played enough or I played them way too much. Star Fox 64 is a latter example. This singular entry is enough to validate anyone who calls themselves a Star Fox fan, it's a game that deserves its love. It's the only game in the entire series that got absolutely everything right and this is not a hot take. Every single thing that you ask for from a 1997 console rail shooter is right here in this N64 cartridge (besides 60fps but who knows, a PC port may be upon us in the near future!)

There's a lot to divulge from this game when discussing what makes it so fucking good to the point that it's almost overwhelming to know where to start. I could start with Corneria, and how as an opening stage it provides the most amount of visual variety, approachability and interaction-based secrets in the game, making it an extremely replayable stage despite not necessarily being the best it has to offer. Or how the branching paths allow you to create your own journey or headcanon as you fight towards Andross, choosing whether it's your fate to defeat a fake Andross, or to become a true hero and face your father's ghost in one final fiery escape; an experience that can be influenced by enjoyment, immersion or picking the stages you're the best at racking up points on. Or the more obvious choices like the fantastic soundtrack and iconic voice lines. Or the fact that the charged shot becomes one of the highest skill oriented tools in any score based game when you realise if it makes indirect contact with a target that it grants you an extra point.

I don't think anyone that hasn't played for hours upon hours realises just how addicting the charged shot is to use and optimise and it showcases just how insane people can get at this game. An average score on Corneria for a casual player varies from 100-150, a more experienced player will reach 200-230 and a world record contender will hit 330. The difference between someone who's good and someone who's REALLY good is huge and it's pure skill. This isn't just about memorising patterns, that's the bare minimum requirement. Becoming good enough to get 300 points on Corneria takes some absolutely unreal level of precision, timing and movement that comes from the result of hundreds to thousands of hours of practice. And think about it, you have 6 more stages to reach that level of mastery at yet.

I don't want to run off the more casual players with my charged shot diatribe, so I'll note more generic points that I find more relevant than given credit. The voice lines, I know everyone recognises how iconic they are. I can't really explain why they ended up being so iconic and at such a high frequency, anyone that played this game a lot knew every line after a certain point before they were even said, myself included. Something about the dialogue is just super charming. It's not bad voice acting for 1997 and the caricaturised character models help sell this cheesy but high stakes sci-fi story of saving the world. The bad guys, they're all bad fucking news. You could tell when you were fighting a boss that they were bad and you were the heroes. It plays into this classic purism where everything is black and white, something that video games have long since tried to steer away from in favour of creating more realistic narratives. Does Star Fox 64 have a well written story? Hell no. But it is a GOOD story and it's sold by your little guys flying through space, interacting every so often. Peppy yelling that it's a trap, Slippy getting cocky before his ass is bitch slapped down to Titania and Falco's no nonsense tone that always makes you feel obligated to take things seriously when he's around -- All of these little moments are what make this game so iconic. Everyone remembers these moments not just because they're fun interactions, but because you're getting these interactions while playing a dope ass game.

Star Fox 64 needs to be played by anyone who finds the characters cool but hears bad things about the franchise. I'll be the first one to tell you - Star Fox as a whole franchise sucks. But I'd say this applies to something like Shinobi as well, yet Shinobi III is one of the best 16-bit games there is. Franchises can be dealt a bad hand by continuously unlucky circumstances. Shigeru Miyamoto has no idea what makes this series special, it's why every game in the past 2 decades they put out every so often is disappointing. What makes this series special, is Star Fox 64. This game has by far aged the best of every game in the franchise and perhaps when the PC port eventually comes out more people will realise how good it really is. It was never replicated or bested, nor in its own franchise nor by indie projects heavily inspired by it. It's in a league of its own as the definitive space rail shooter.

A nice arcade style rail shooter (mostly).

For me there a lot of good moments mixed in with some bad. The on rail sections were great - they are fast paced, exciting, control well and finish with tense boss fights. The game falters when it tries to switch things up. The dogfight sections are a bit clunkier and just aren't very fun. Aquas was also bad due to the Blue-Marine being slow and hard to aim. I'm guessing they wanted to add some variety, but that isn't really necessary in a game of this length and with the core rail shooter gameplay being so good.

I was initially disappointed by the short length once credits rolled but then I found out about the alternate routes and true ending which got me to do another playthrough. I was surprised to see I had only seen about half the stages. The route required for the true ending was fairly harder than my first playthough and provided a pleasant amount of challenge.

My only other criticism is the low frame rate and slowdown present. I would love to replay it at a smooth 60 fps, hopefully someone will get a patch working or maybe even a source port in the future. I'll have to give Star Fox 64 3D a go too.

I did enjoy my time with it and I am eager to try out some other rail shooters a go. It's a shame that the genre seems to have died out.

Some good clean fun.

Played as part of the Switch N64 collection of games. Despite its age, it doesn't look half bad. The enemies are mostly indistinguishable but that's more of an "of it's time" kind of thing.

I was a Sega kid through and through growing up, but I did manage to play tiny bits of this at a friend's house. It's great to play it in full and experience the complete game. The mechanics are simple to pick up but there's definitely a degree of skill involved with mastering them to get through the hard route.

There's a lot of replay value thanks to the short length and the increasingly difficult routes. It's just not enough to keep me coming back. At least for a while anyway.