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.