Way better than I expected.
It looks gorgeous for its time. And you can feel the RARE WARE touch in every corner. I recommend to give it a shot, and forget for a moment that it tries to emulate the Zelda formula, which for me is great, but many people seems to use this fact as something to criticize the game.
My great complain comes from the fact they never properly give you the most anticipated fight in all of the game against General Scales. That's just dumb.
As a side note, being Krystal so famous and all thanks to this game, the girl has almost no participation in the main story, and her personality is somewhat half-cooked. Having her as a second playable character in some areas would be great (aside from the prologue).

Gameplay: Ok
Music: Ok
Replayable? Nah
Streamed? No

Extra Notes? It was fun but would'tn play it again.

This rating is entirely based on my memories of playing it as a kid. So it may be atrocious. I'm not going to go back and replay it. But I liked it quite a bit back then.

Barely a Star Fox game, Star Fox Adventures is a surprisingly enjoyable Zelda game that just so happens to feature Fox McCloud. This game gets a lot of hate for not being what anyone expected of it, which is fair, but it's a fun game in its own right.

In addition to the main game, I enjoyed the weirdo shopkeeper with his squeaky voice, gambling mini-game, and haggling. It's great that he gets pissed off and kicks you out if you try to buy something for too low a price too many times.

It's absolutely not a perfect game and has a lot of issues that I probably wouldn't put up with today.

8 años después de la muerte de Andross en el planeta Venom, algo surge en Sauria. Krystal investiga el destino de sus padres y su planeta de origen, Cerinia, cuando percibe una señal de auxilio en el planeta Sauria o planeta dinosaurio.

Tras llegar al planeta, se topa con el culpable, el General Scales. Scales y la tribu SharpClaw habían conseguido someter al planeta y liberar a los espíritus Krazoa. En el palacio Krazoa, Krystal logra encontrar uno, pero es encerrada en un cristal que va absorbiendo su fuerza vital poco a poco.

Y en la otra punta, Fox McCloud, Peppy Hare y Slippy Toad se aburren de tanta paz hasta que oyen información del General Pepper. El Planeta Sauria se está rompiendo por una fuerza mágica y deben ir al planeta a ver lo que pasó. Por lo tanto, tendrán que continuar la tarea de Krystal.

El juego pecó de ser un zelda lineal y sin la originalidad de un Star Fox. Pero el juego, tiene todo el potencial de la consola e incluso es un buen regalo de despedida para Rareware de Nintendo y marcharse a Microsoft tropezando hasta volver a brillar desde 2014.

Firstly a wee bit of advice for those wishing to play this game, don’t.

Starfox Adventures (Which I’ll refer to as Adventures from now on) is a Starfox game in name only. Yes Adventures has some trad Starfox gameplay segments, but they suffer greatly from the fact they are an afterthought. Environments are samey and uninspired and the same goes for the enemies, a barrel roll being a simple L or R press feels wrong and the Starfox crew only say purely mechanical lines with no character. If I have to do the entering Dinosaur Planet mission one more time I’ll scream.

Speaking of doing things more then once, almost all terrain in Adventures you will have to walk through at least twice. You literally just walk for a few minutes in an environment that blends into itself to get to the next objective. I never really had a sense of where I am, the environments are distinct though. Maps, which must be purchased don’t even help alleviate this issue. It doesn’t help that the game avoids loading screens with extremely long animations and some puzzles have a fail state that will require you to redo other puzzles, hate shoutout to Krazoa Test #4 and #5.

While Fox obtains a few items for puzzles, 90% of the puzzles revolve shooting a target with slightly janky controls with the first item. I don’t think any puzzle in this game made me feel smart, either just going through the motions of frustrated.

The game’s ui is weird, to use an item or change Fox’s active item, you press the right control stick, which will bring up a real time menu in the top right which you navigate with the stick, this is fine I guess, if not a little scrambly in some situations, especially when on a timer, but the game feels the need to have something in every corner when 2 or 3 is fine. Health in the top left and the active item and some buttons in the top right, which makes sense when A is context sensitive, but the map (which you won’t have unless you want to buy everything, but the game’s approach to an economy is another topic) is just a waste of space and I had it off for my entire playthrough and also how much money etc… you have in the bottom right. Some of the things tracked are only used in at most 3 points in the game, so why do I need to know how many I have constantly unless I’m in combat or a cutscene?

Combat is mind numbing, you just hold R to shield if an enemy can shield themselves, block a hit and then mash a until they die. Groups of enemies will watch and perhaps even cheer on Fox beating their friends with a stick and not fight back. Money is obtained from either lifting rocks which you have to go out of your way to do, or rare enough pots. In other words you have to go out of your way to engage with the system, and yet multiple points in the game ask you to speed x money to progress. The grind is like 5 minutes at most, but still why? Why hurt it’s already poor pacing.

I’ll be honest I’m a big story person and I genuinely did not know what was going on at all. Krystal genuinely gets less screen time then some npcs. I’m sorry for anyone who wanted to know what Krystal’s deal was about because honestly I don’t know. She is British I guess that’s kinda it.

For most of my Star Fox Adventures playthrough I didn’t feel like reviewing it. I definitively look upon it more fondly than most, but even then, I didn’t think I would have much to add to the discourse.

The starting hours of Star Fox Adventures were a blast, with very few hick-ups. I really enjoyed the gameplay-loop of finding a Gatekeeper making it able for me to get to a dungeon, finding a SpellStone which makes me able to find a Krazoa Spirit and then finding a SpellStone and so on.
Gameplaywise Star Fox Adventures brought with it an eerie feeling of familiarity.

Now I’ve never been interested in the mainline games, as I’m not big into on-rail- or any kind of shooter, so this feeling took me a while to understand, but after thinking about it for a while Star Fox Adventures really felt like a proto-Kameo, which makes more and more sense the longer I think about it.

You visit pretty much the same settings in both games, the combat system can feel similar at points (though not as fleshed out here) and these are only a few of the similarities between both games, which makes sense as it’s mostly the same people working on them.

Now unfortunately this game really takes a dive in the final stretch and starts decreasing in quality around the half-way point, which is around when you have seen all Dinosaur Planet has to offer and must start backtracking. They probably had to rush the game out, considering it came out a day before Microsoft announced its acquisition of Rare and it shows.

You will have to revisit old dungeons, which repeat their previous puzzles, but a little harder, one of the Gatekeepers is just a random guy and it all accumulates (slight naming spoiler for this 21-year-old game) Dragon Rock.

Dragon Rock is the worst thing any game has ever made me suffer through and this isn’t meant as some kind of metaphor, no! It is the worst part of any game I’ve ever had the displeasure of going through and me beating it should only show you how much I liked the rest of the game before it. I should probably say that at least some of my criticism of this part of the game is partly made worse by my controller being a bit overresponsive and having a few blind spots, both of which only becoming a problem when I had to do more precise movements.
Dragon Rock doesn’t start of all to bad. You had to shoot at some turrets using the Fire Blaster, which might be the wort controlling thing conceivable, but it isn’t too bad.
After a bit you get told to save a HIghTop and this is where it all falls apart and I started to embark on a journey. This funny little guy is trapped by four fire-blaster-targets, two in the back, two more to the front, symmetrical to the HighTop in the middle. It is your task to shoot all of these 4 points within around 10 seconds. When I got to this part of the game my in-game timer showed ~15 hours.
This task doesn’t sound too bad after all, but let’s talk a bit more about the Fire Blaster.
First of the Y-Axis is inverted, which at least for me didn’t mesh well with quick thinking, the controls are already overresponsive, which only got worse with my controller, the targets are far away enough to make it really hard to exactly line up your shots and if you miss the HighTop will start stomping and shake the screen, making you miss more and making him stomp more. He is also a big moving hitbox, sometimes blocking the targets.
Now the worst aspects of the Fire Blaster. When you stop moving the cursor it will snap back to the middle of the screen and when you want to turn forget it. Fox will accelerate in a way I don’t yet fully understand and then snaps back to some position like 3 screens away. The only way to kind of understand where your camera ends up is to look at the map, which has its own problems.

I tried for around 1 hour, when I got there on April 30th, to do it the intended way, but had to give up and started to investigate if I were the only person with troubles here and unsurprisingly, I wasn’t. Look at any comment-section of this part of the game and you will find complaints.
Not too long after I found positions on both the right and the left, where I can hit two targets by only looking further up. The one on the left is more finnicky as the target on the back-left is more towards the middle than its right counterpart.
I tried it using this knowledge for 2 more hours and went to bed after, thinking about giving up, or spending a lot of money to buy a more or less new first party controller, which was when I had an idea.
Why didn’t I try creating consistent set ups using visual cues to hit the targets, so I would only have to turn to said point, aim up and shoot.
On the next day I found out, that the soot-detailing could be used for such a set-up and the ledge get-up can be used to always shoot from the same position.
Using my amateur picture-editing skills I created my first consistent set up tutorial. After printing it out I noticed that I forgot one crucial point, the turning. As I said I was kind of able to look at the map, but this wasn’t by any means optimal. This set-up was also way to slow. This whole process took me another 3 hours.
Then I had another idea, the position on the right. I had written it off, as I couldn’t make it possible to always stand on the same position, but then I had another idea after looking at my stack of transparent paper. I think you know where this is going.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t ever able to draw out a 1:1 copy of the map, and I now could only use it to know where I had to shoot to hit the other two targets, but it was better than nothing. I tried this method for around 2 and a half hours, it was still to slow and hell to set up after using all your energy and having to run out of the building to replenish.

After 5 and a half hours of trying and failing miserably at what should be an easy task I reconsidered quitting and thought to myself that I might as well go for the whole 6 hour mark. My next strategy was to do it the intended way, but to shoot from the position I tried before, rather than the middle and to my own surprise I got it, not very confidently, but still. I think I just missed the 6-hour mark. But it wasn’t over yet, because what followed was a 3-minute long auto-scroller, which if you fail it you must free the HighTop again.
I luckily did it first try and saved a dozen times.

Dragon Rock doesn’t get much better after. Luckily I found out, through watching the speedrun of the game, to see if you could skip the part somehow, that you can skip a lot of the next by lining up Fox with a line on the wall, looking a bit to the left and throwing the barrel through the wall.
What follows is another (uncapped) auto-scroller and what many say is the actual hardest part of the game, even without a non-assuming third party Wave-Bird-Controller making you struggle even more.
This time I bit the bullet and got myself a controller with turbo-functionality as my fingers started to hurt after not too long.

This is Dragon Rock. I only completed it to finish a game I had thoroughly enjoyed before it and was it worth it? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. The only thing you might be missing is the best Krazoa-Spirit task after the most lackluster Krazoa-shrine.
I should also mention that my game crashed at the final boss, setting me back half an hour, as the game apparently ceased to auto-safe after big, ingame events.

A lot of people have already talked a lot about the let’s say “interesting” final confrontation with General Scales. I personally think it would’ve helped a lot as now the last two boss fights are on-rail shooters which is a really undercooked mechanic, which is only there to remind you that you are playing STARFOX Adventures.

At the end of the day, I still enjoyed most of Star Fox Adventures, but I will never replay it completely. The TV my Gamecube is hooked up on will now forever tell the tale of Dragon Rock with its glue residue.
Play it on an emulator with some kind of Fire Blaster fix, if that exists.

A game that I really loved as a kid... and did again this time around, for about the first half.

This games strengths for me mostly lay in its exploration and beautiful setting. Also, to the credit of its level design, I never got lost or needed to buy maps (this did make the bartering & money system somewhat pointless).

However the game becomes repetitive - boring combat, backtracking (especially between Thorntail Hollow and Cape Claw, which you have to visit a number of times, meaning traveling through a maze and up and down ladders over and over), flying, button mashing mini-games and bosses, the same environmental hazards everywhere (I eventually just started walking through flaming barriers rather than waiting for them to stop)...

The backtracking in particular was a shame. I didn't mind revisiting areas exactly, and I like that you had to walk back to areas rather then warping (which tends to ruin the feeling of inhabiting and exploring a world), but in some sections it would have been nice to have been able to create shortcuts once you had traversed them the first time.

The plot too fizzles out strangely at the games climax. Nothing much comes of General Scales or Crystal, and it was unsurprising to find out that this game was originally conceived as its own entity, and Star Fox was later welded into it.

Ultimately, Star Fox Adventures is fun to run around in and play for the most part, and still looks beautiful all these years later.
But man, I wish I had played this with a turbo controller instead.

The history of Star Fox Adventures is well documented, especially considering a mostly playable build of Dinosaur Planet is easily accessible now, but to sum it up: Miyamoto took a look at this little action RPG Rare was making and suggested the lead character should be Fox McCloud. When the guy who told you to give DK a coconut gun has an opinion on what you should do with your game, you god damn listen, and so Rare threw out a bunch of key characters and changed plot points to accommodate the Star Fox crew. Ask some people and they'll tell you this is where everything went south, that Dinosaur Planet would have been a great game if not for all the Star Fox baggage.

To be fair, I kind of get this point. I think a lot of games with notoriously bad reputations made over one or two egregious flaws are dog piled on unnecessarily and are worthy of a reevaluation. Games like Dark Souls 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog have changed a lot in the public eye as people have come around on them years later. They were always great games, though. Classics, in fact. People just wouldn't give them a fair shot at the time. Star Fox Adventures is now 20 years old, so I knew exactly what it was going in, and considering I never played it back in the day, I figured I'd have a well-informed perspective that would allow me to see the game for exactly what it is and evaluate it accordingly.

This game sucks so much, holy shit.

I figured calling it a "Zelda clone" would actually be reductive, but honestly that's precisely what it is, and it is so in the most derogatory sense possible. Star Fox Adventures is to Ocarina of Time what Hydlide is to The Legend of Zelda. The puzzles in this game are so braindead easy that they just start to get dull and drag the game down, making it feel far longer than its length. You'll need to use spells Fox gains throughout the story in order to solve most of these, but they are often finicky and feel awful to use. You're also given some assistance from Prince Tricky, who I want to hold under water until the life leaves his eyes. A lot of Tricky's abilities could have been consolidated into Fox's moveset, allowing Rare to simplify the menu and streamline puzzles, but I guess they felt it was important to not have Fox experience the adventure alone and wanted to give him a sort of Navi equivalent. Developing a rare form of tinnitus where "hey, listen!" reverberates in my skull until I'm driven to madness would be preferable to Prince "I'm hungryyy" Tricky.

To be honest, for as lackluster and boring as a lot of this game is, it was probably a 2.5 for me until I got to Dragon Rock, a late game dungeon that makes frequent use of an early game ability: the Fire Shooter. This ability is exactly what it says on the tin, you activate it and can aim your staff around to shoot little fire balls. The problem is that the game forces your reticle back to the center of the screen if you're not forcing the analog stick where you want it, meaning you're constantly fighting against the controller to line up your shots. This thing swings around wildly at the slightest input, too, so it's also easy to overshoot your targets. The vast majority of Dragon Rock's puzzles are based around this one skill, with many of them being timer based as well. I know third person aiming in video games was in an altogether different place than it is now, but it's astonishing to me this made it into the finished product. Maybe they didn't have time to fix it because they were too busy figuring out how the hell to fit Andross into this thing, I don't know!

Dungeons are broken up with short flying segments modeled after Star Fox 64, but it's clear that Rare had neither the passion nor skill to create a proper Star Fox game. They just feel lazily thrown together with all the elements you'd expect from a typical Star Fox level, but without any of the nuance or design sense. Similar to how Star Fox Adventures feels like a flat version of Zelda, so too does it feel like a flat version of Star Fox. Completely uninspired from top to bottom.

The story is of course the most involved narrative in any Star Fox game to this point, but it's also very clear what parts were in the original Dinosaur Planet and what parts were shoehorned in at the request of Miyamoto. Even the way Fox is written feels distinctly out of character for him, and it's not like there was a whole lot of content out there to properly define who he was prior to that point. I haven't played Dinosaur Planet so I suppose I can't say with any authority, but Fox is written in such a way that it wouldn't surprise me if they simply swapped the lead character's model, rewrote maybe 10% of his lines to reference his crew, and called it a day.

General Scales and Krystal also seem like casualties of Rare retooling the game. Scales is the main antagonist, but he very rarely shows up and a lot of his evil deeds are told to you by other characters. In fact, he doesn't even get a boss fight at the end of the game, being done away with unceremoniously in order to move you right along into a battle with Andross. Krystal is also a total non-character, which I found a little more surprising given people's uh... fascination with her. She shows up in the prologue and is then reduced to a damsel in distress for the rest of the game. You're never given any context about who she is or why she's important, she's just a piece of meat stuck in a crystal, and to punctuate this point the first time Fox sees her you're treated to music that sounds like it's ripped straight from a 1970s adult film. It's ridiculous. When this theme shows up again during the end credits I laughed until it hurt.

Star Fox Adventures is rarely bad in a way that's actually interesting, and frankly I think it's irresponsible to not put an FDA warning on the box about its sedative nature. Sure, it suffers from the needless inclusion of Fox McCloud and his idiot friends, but it was never a good game to begin with. It controls poorly, puzzles are either uninteresting or just plain unfun, and the only real identity its able to create is owed entirely to the elements that were never meant to be there to begin with. I think a lot of games with notoriously bad reputations made over one or two egregious flaws are worthy of a reevaluation, and my evaluation is this game sucks ass.

I love Star fox and I love Zelda. So when these two things combine you’d figure I’d enjoy this. No. I find this game to be really boring. Originally this game was going to come out on the N64 as an original game. Miyamoto saw it and suggested making the game a star fox title. It doesn’t work. Gameplay wise fox controls fine and literally almost every element is taken from Zelda. Your lives, the way fight enemies, power ups, bombs. There are some Star fox like flying levels filled with enemies, rings, and bombs.The problem is, it’s not fun. I got this game for Christmas years ago and tried playing it for months but it just couldn’t hold my interest. Maybe you’ll fare better.