This review contains spoilers
I have incredibly mixed feelings about the game so I think it would be best to organize what I liked and didn't like about this game
What I liked:
- For a fairly early Gamecube title, it does look really nice and is a good showcase of what the console is capable of. Character models look fairly nice and detailed and the environments are all varied and have a lot going on.
-Even though I do have issues with the game's exploration as I'll go over later, I do appreciate that the game's areas (Or at least those in the main Dinosaur Planet area) all try to feel interconnected and it does feel like you are exploring a whole planet and it's various locations.
-I thought the mechanics and controls of the Staff were handled pretty nicely and I felt a lot of the upgrades were genuinely pretty useful.
-For the most part, the game does have really good consistency in its difficulty and the tips on where you need to go next are really useful.
-The pacing was very consistent and didn't feel like many areas felt too short or took too long (Except for the final bits of the game where it did feel kind of short)
-The story, while not really having the distinct charm many Rareware games have for the writing, is fairly engaging and provides quite a bit of worldbuilding for Dinosaur Planet, on top of having really solid voice acting.
What I didn't like about it.
-So many of the mechanics and ideas of the game do feel very ambitious, but a lot of elements don't feel very fleshed out looking past what you see at face value. Such as the extremely repetitive combat, the shopkeeper prices, a lot of the items that don't get much use after the areas they are used in, and the minigames that seem to encourage replayability given the high score system but are unlikely to be played again after one playthrough, and so much more.
-There is so much fucking backtracking in this game that it makes revisiting various areas feel kind of tedious. I really do wish there was a way to actually teleport to these locations rather than continuously walk back to them (Especially since there actually is a location that teleports you to places, but only for three locations, with only one location being useful the whole game).
-Climbing up ladders and certain walls feels really slow for no reason and breaks up the pace from the rest of the game for a bit.
-While I did find the story to be rather engaging, I was kind of disappointed with how underused some of the characters were compared to others. Particularly with Krystal and General Scales since I did genuinely want to know more about them but ended up not playing nearly as big of a role as I liked. With Krystal being essentially a damsel in distress after the first 30 minutes of the game and General Scales being killed off at the very end to make room for Andross as the big bad of the game (Which I thought was really forced).
-I was rather underwhelmed by the game's selection of bosses. You think with a series like Star Fox that is known for having a lot of fun and varied bosses that they would go all out on them, but no, the 4 bosses that the game has all feel underwhelming for different reasons. The first boss is just running around and hitting the boss's weak spots, and then wailing on its insides (Yes it does happen), the second boss is just doing the exact same pattern four times while running away from it, the third boss is basically just non stop shooting while destroying mines and collecting health powerups, and the final boss is literally just the Andross fight from 64 but way more annoying and less fun.
-The Arwing sections are incredibly underwhelming and feel like they were slapped at the last minute as a way to make it slightly close to an actual Star Fox game. What doesn't help is that the environments for all of them are exactly the same just with different level designs on top of every section using the exact same remix of Meteo from Star Fox 64 as the level music, which makes it really grating since the player is required to do this every time they go to a new planet and can't be skipped.
-While I have mentioned that the game is fairly consistent in terms of difficulty, there are some really weird difficulty spikes that make the game really annoying for a brief moment, such as the LightFoot test of strength mini-game where you have to mash A incredibly hard to push the opponent into the pit or, again, the Andross fight that feels so annoying to fight.
Overall, knowing about the history of the game and how it was going to be its own thing on the N64 called Dinosaur Planet but was turned into a Star Fox game as a request by Nintendo, I could really tell just what Rare was trying to do with this game, for both good and bad reasons. I could really tell that this was an N64 game that was ported to the Gamecube and given the graphical treatment for that console, but there wasn't enough time to take advantage of the console's capabilities for enhancements to the gameplay and it really shows when playing the game itself. While the game did start off as pretty fun at first, the game's issues were becoming more and more apparent as the game went on and the game didn't take any chances to try and improve itself later on, or spice things up for the better. I really wanted to give this game a fair shot and kept an open mind about it and not dismiss it as just "It's not a traditional Star Fox game so it's bad" but by the end, I was rather underwhelmed by what the game provided. If it weren't for the game having a mostly consistent difficulty, good pacing, and the tips being incredibly helpful on where you need to go next, I probably would have dropped this game after an hour or two.
If you're planning on doing this game despite what I said, I would advise checking out the "Amethyst Edition" mod done by fans that fix a lot of the issues that I brought up. It doesn't completely fix the game and a decent chunk of the issues I brought up are still present, but the mod does fine-tune various issues with the game and provides a more comfortable experience, so I'll just leave it here if that does interest you.
https://segment6.net/sfa/amethyst
Besides that, I really don't think you're missing out on much if you were expecting this game to be one thing or the other. If you're going to this game as a traditional Star Fox game, then this ain't cutting it at all and the really underwhelming Arwing sections don't add much that Star Fox 64 already provides in spades. If you're going into this title on how it holds up as a Zelda clone, then you're just better off playing the other Zelda games available for the Gamecube or just playing something else, as much of it really is just a poor man's Zelda despite having some genuinely good elements.
What I liked:
- For a fairly early Gamecube title, it does look really nice and is a good showcase of what the console is capable of. Character models look fairly nice and detailed and the environments are all varied and have a lot going on.
-Even though I do have issues with the game's exploration as I'll go over later, I do appreciate that the game's areas (Or at least those in the main Dinosaur Planet area) all try to feel interconnected and it does feel like you are exploring a whole planet and it's various locations.
-I thought the mechanics and controls of the Staff were handled pretty nicely and I felt a lot of the upgrades were genuinely pretty useful.
-For the most part, the game does have really good consistency in its difficulty and the tips on where you need to go next are really useful.
-The pacing was very consistent and didn't feel like many areas felt too short or took too long (Except for the final bits of the game where it did feel kind of short)
-The story, while not really having the distinct charm many Rareware games have for the writing, is fairly engaging and provides quite a bit of worldbuilding for Dinosaur Planet, on top of having really solid voice acting.
What I didn't like about it.
-So many of the mechanics and ideas of the game do feel very ambitious, but a lot of elements don't feel very fleshed out looking past what you see at face value. Such as the extremely repetitive combat, the shopkeeper prices, a lot of the items that don't get much use after the areas they are used in, and the minigames that seem to encourage replayability given the high score system but are unlikely to be played again after one playthrough, and so much more.
-There is so much fucking backtracking in this game that it makes revisiting various areas feel kind of tedious. I really do wish there was a way to actually teleport to these locations rather than continuously walk back to them (Especially since there actually is a location that teleports you to places, but only for three locations, with only one location being useful the whole game).
-Climbing up ladders and certain walls feels really slow for no reason and breaks up the pace from the rest of the game for a bit.
-While I did find the story to be rather engaging, I was kind of disappointed with how underused some of the characters were compared to others. Particularly with Krystal and General Scales since I did genuinely want to know more about them but ended up not playing nearly as big of a role as I liked. With Krystal being essentially a damsel in distress after the first 30 minutes of the game and General Scales being killed off at the very end to make room for Andross as the big bad of the game (Which I thought was really forced).
-I was rather underwhelmed by the game's selection of bosses. You think with a series like Star Fox that is known for having a lot of fun and varied bosses that they would go all out on them, but no, the 4 bosses that the game has all feel underwhelming for different reasons. The first boss is just running around and hitting the boss's weak spots, and then wailing on its insides (Yes it does happen), the second boss is just doing the exact same pattern four times while running away from it, the third boss is basically just non stop shooting while destroying mines and collecting health powerups, and the final boss is literally just the Andross fight from 64 but way more annoying and less fun.
-The Arwing sections are incredibly underwhelming and feel like they were slapped at the last minute as a way to make it slightly close to an actual Star Fox game. What doesn't help is that the environments for all of them are exactly the same just with different level designs on top of every section using the exact same remix of Meteo from Star Fox 64 as the level music, which makes it really grating since the player is required to do this every time they go to a new planet and can't be skipped.
-While I have mentioned that the game is fairly consistent in terms of difficulty, there are some really weird difficulty spikes that make the game really annoying for a brief moment, such as the LightFoot test of strength mini-game where you have to mash A incredibly hard to push the opponent into the pit or, again, the Andross fight that feels so annoying to fight.
Overall, knowing about the history of the game and how it was going to be its own thing on the N64 called Dinosaur Planet but was turned into a Star Fox game as a request by Nintendo, I could really tell just what Rare was trying to do with this game, for both good and bad reasons. I could really tell that this was an N64 game that was ported to the Gamecube and given the graphical treatment for that console, but there wasn't enough time to take advantage of the console's capabilities for enhancements to the gameplay and it really shows when playing the game itself. While the game did start off as pretty fun at first, the game's issues were becoming more and more apparent as the game went on and the game didn't take any chances to try and improve itself later on, or spice things up for the better. I really wanted to give this game a fair shot and kept an open mind about it and not dismiss it as just "It's not a traditional Star Fox game so it's bad" but by the end, I was rather underwhelmed by what the game provided. If it weren't for the game having a mostly consistent difficulty, good pacing, and the tips being incredibly helpful on where you need to go next, I probably would have dropped this game after an hour or two.
If you're planning on doing this game despite what I said, I would advise checking out the "Amethyst Edition" mod done by fans that fix a lot of the issues that I brought up. It doesn't completely fix the game and a decent chunk of the issues I brought up are still present, but the mod does fine-tune various issues with the game and provides a more comfortable experience, so I'll just leave it here if that does interest you.
https://segment6.net/sfa/amethyst
Besides that, I really don't think you're missing out on much if you were expecting this game to be one thing or the other. If you're going to this game as a traditional Star Fox game, then this ain't cutting it at all and the really underwhelming Arwing sections don't add much that Star Fox 64 already provides in spades. If you're going into this title on how it holds up as a Zelda clone, then you're just better off playing the other Zelda games available for the Gamecube or just playing something else, as much of it really is just a poor man's Zelda despite having some genuinely good elements.
TheRealKaisser
1 year ago