PART II- THE UNREPENTANTLY GOOD ONE
It probably didn’t bode well that the very first time Nintendo tried to follow up StarFox, it resulted in an aborted project. Luckily, things picked up with the second StarFox game to see actual release. StarFox 64 is basically the reason I got a Nintendo 64 in the first place (though in the end, the only game I actually owned was San Francisco Rush) after playing loads of it at friends houses and lots of re-rentals.
Not even a Nintendo Power promo video could dampen my enthusiasm.
Star Fox 64 was the reason I got an N64 in the first place, though ironically, I never owned a copy of it. Being a broke kid and all, I had to make do with what I could rent or borrow, and as much as I loved awkwardly shooting dinosaurs and awkwardly bulldozing buildings with the awkward, awkward controller, it was Star Fox that really won me over. It would almost be rude not to, after Nintendo Power sent me a copy of the most awesome promotional video EVER.
Star Fox was everything a series’ first installment on new hardware should be- bigger, better, and improved without being turned into an unrecognizable polygonal mess. Luckily, Nintendo got that out of their system with the SNES installment, and dare I say that Star Fox 64 looks presentable even today even with a lack of gritty texture and brown lighting filters. Well, as long as you’re not looking at anything that’s supposed to be a living being. Even though the voice acting is pretty hilarious, you COULD understand the characters where they used to arblegarblefarble their lines. Later, of course, they would go back to nonsense huaglagluagagluag Lylatese and disappoint people expecting future memes.
Before I get started on the in-depth stuff here, I should mention this little mini-series is intended as kind of a spotlight on the rise and fall of a franchise. It’s not going to be constant fanboyish deep-throating, but I do kind of feel like the SF series got a pretty lame treatment compared to say, the explosion of Metroid games from the GC on or the increasingly gimmicky Zelda games. That out of the way, brace yourself for enthusiastic slurping sounds, because this is the high point of the ‘rise’ part, before we start the tragic and therefore more ranty and hilarious parts of the feature.
SF64 picks up where the SNES one left off. Andross is dead(?), except apparently not, because waves of big enemy butterfly ships from Planet Venom are showing up again. Because the trained personnel of a standing army are never competent enough to handle a war, the call goes out once again to hire the Star Fox Team to clean up after them. And a great time is had by all.
For starters, rather than a clear cut “easy/normal/hard mode” choice out of the gate, you’re plotting a course through the Lylat System, sometimes through clear A/B choices between stages, or as a result of how the last mission turned out. If you beat the berserk robot boss at the end of Sector X before it can bitchslap Slippy, for example, you won’t have to go sidetracking to rescue him, and another path depends on whether you fight a train boss directly, or manipulate the railroad switches to send it careening into a weapon factory, leading to a satisfyingly massive blast and another alternate route. Touches like that kind of make it feel more like a big space adventure rather than a collection of theme levels united solely because they fell between point A and B on your mission. Not that they all make sense, I’m still trying to figure out if Solar is a planet CALLED Solar that happens to be intensely hot, or the actual sun of the Lylat system.
No longer is every stage a straight up rail shooter, there are a few All-Range Mode sections, where the action changes to a sort of ‘arena’ where you have free movement and can circle, loop, and strafe to your hearts’ content. (As kind of a warplane fan, I always liked the touch of the Arwing wings spreading outward for more maneuverability during the transition.) Many boss battles take place in all-range mode, as you take the immensely satisfying process of whittling them down piece by piece until the pilot of the enemy robot/starship/lava beast explode with a last pang of ACTING!
SF64 also introduces all new vehicles to the Team, including the Landmaster, a tank that was basically a wingless Arwing, stripped of the useful tank feature called a ‘turret’, and the Blue-Marine, which had infinite bombs/torpedoes and only got busted out for one, kind of ‘bleah’ underwater level still worth playing through once for the sake of novelty. There’s also the Great Fox, the kind of awkward looking dog/goose shaped carrier for the team, and its chatty robot, ROB 64. Mercifully, he seems to have been upgraded to the point where he can pilot an entire starship without clumsily dropping gyros. In one stage, you’ll have to defend it from large missiles, meaning it also introduced escort missions to the Star Fox franchise. Gee, thanks.
But wait, there’s more! The all-range flight mode also is used to provide 4-player simultaneous deathmatches where the players can battle it out in Arwings, Landmasters, or even bazooka-toting versions of the pilot characters. Though… why?
The Star Wolf team notably makes their first ‘real’ appearance here, too, made up of Wolf O’Donnell, Pigma Dengar, Leon, and Andrew, nephew of Andross himself. As you can probably guess from the name, they’re basically the Bizarro Star Fox Team, with pretty clear cut rival counterpart types to each of the good guys. They pilot custom starfighters called Wolfens (Wolven?) that have similar capabilities to the Arwing, right down to being able to barrel roll and shake off your charge shots, forcing you to dogfight them the old-fashioned way. They show up a few times throughout the game, but leave a pretty big impression, making them shoe ins for return appearances for the rest of the series, as well as providing more disgusting slash fan fiction fodder.
With the addition of full voice acting and a more cinematic style, Star Fox 64 instantly made the Lylat System feel more like a realized universe, possibly the Nintendofied version of the Star Wars universe. They even made a few attempts here and there to make the science itself a little more consistent, like explaining the reflective property of your barrel rolls away as the work of the Arwing’s “G-Diffuser,” which nullifies the G-Force strain on the ship and redirects it into a protective barrier to boot. It doesn’t have as ‘hard’ of a sci-fi atmosphere as Metroid’s expanded universe has gotten, probably because the characters are still basically woodland creatures in 80’s sci-fi hand-me-downs, but with a backdrop of interstellar war, there was a lot of potential here for all kinds of interesting games. In fact, if Nintendo really wanted to go in a more serious direction- Star Fox Team are basically guns for hire. And they have to be doing something in between massive Cornerian defense contracts. Maybe they could follow Fox and crew taking on dangerous missions of a more grey moral nature.
Well, Nintendo did decide to explore a bit more of the universe alright. Next time: Fox McCloud Meets The Fucking Dinosaurs.
