Can't believe you're leaving the Kellogg's LCD game out of here, it's a bowl-afide classic!
On topic: the first one I played was
Star Fox Adventures, believe it or not. I knew the character from Smash Bros. 64 and Melee, where he was pretty good, and the games magazine I read at the time scored Adventures a 9/10. They praised the gorgeous graphics and Ocarina of Time-like gameplay, but with added dinosaurs and space shooter levels; I was sold.
I understand
Adventures is a rather maligned entry now, but at the time I knew nothing of the whole Rare/Dinosaur Planet situation. The game was quite incredible for the first few hours. It really is one of the best-looking GameCube titles ever released, I would go so far as saying it even gives many Wii games a run for their money. The hub world is so lifelike (remember how people always went crazy over water effects?), the Snow world had a speederbike race, there was this giant lizard dinosaur which swallowed you up allowing you to attack his tongue or something? The
chill music was incredible in this game by the way, and the
voice acting was done well too, which made up for some of its
icky moments.
The game has several infuriating segments though. The Lightfoot Village Test of Strength is just a freaking roadblock which you MUST succeed at in order to progress, for example. It's just stupid button mashing too, infuriating. Likewise, the Test of Fear shrine feels like total bullshit. I spend like an afternoon just trying that over and over again, miserable.
It doesn't help that
Adventures is very frontloaded. Most of the good levels are early on; the Lava World in particular is just total garbage. Looks ugly compared to the gorgeous earlier worlds, and the bossfight there is a really weird railshooter segment.
Then there's the final boss switcharoo which shows how the game was rushed to market. Wish Nintendo hadn't insisted on cramming Andross in there for series continuitiy.Despite the obvious flaws, the overall impression Adventures left on me was generally positive. So I borrowed a friend's N64 and their copy of
Star Fox 64. I understand this one is seen as the pinnacle of the series, but honestly I didn't absolutely love it. It had pretty frequent slowdown issues, and the graphics were rather horrible compared to the spectacular heights of Adventures. (At the time, those things determined quality to me haha.)
That said, I did finish it once and it was a good stress-reliever to shoot down a bunch of baddies. Gotta add that since I borrowed it, I never got to do multiple paths and such, which I understand are a major reason people like it. It's a good game, but I preferred Adventures at the time.
Let's speed ahead to 2016. After having dropped out of gaming for a solid generation and a half, basically missing the Wii/DS era entirely, I picked up a Wii U in January. Not sure where I saw the Xenoblade X trailer, but it blew me away. Soon after, Star Fox Guard & Zero released.
Star Fox Guard was the first one I played. I like tower defence, the graphics were impressive enough, and this game has really underrated multiplayer potential. Since you're juggling two screens, and the TV displays another 12 viewpoints at all times, it's super fun to sit around with friends for this one. People will be yelling "robot on camera 4!", "there's one near the core!", "two incoming at 10!" etc. Really fun couch experience. While I think
my old review of it here is a bit generous, this is one I can still recommend.
Star Fox Zero, I would say the hate it received was a bit undeserved. Yeah it's not great design to have two slow stealth-esque zones, which can basically not be skipped on a playthrough, sandwiched in a game known for speedrunning. I understand the controls were very strange, and it took a long time for them to click with me too. However, I think the real culprint is the right joystick here, not so much the dual-screen division. Camera adjustments I would've liked to do with a control stick, rather than through gyro only. When you instinctively reach for the right stick, your Arwing will suddenly do somersaults and the like, which is annoying Í'll admit.
Overall though, the game is forgiving enough that you can coast by just holding fire. I only used the precision aiming on the tablet screen during a few of the boss battles, really. Most of those battles were fine, too. Not to the usual degree of PlatinumGames insanity, but they felt eventful and big enough. Andross can **** right off though, took me dozens of tries.
Frankly, it feels like this one was always meant to be co-op only, and somewhere down the line a single-player mode was decided upon. It's much easier cruising if one person flies the plane on the TV, while the other does precision aiming and firing.
Concluding: of the entries I played, really none outright sucked. None of them was perfect either, but the games at least attempt to create some personalities and distinctive zones within the Lylat System. As a fan of shoot-em-up games and rail-shooters, it's a little dissapointing Star Fox never really surpasses something like the tremendous Panzer Dragoon Orta, but since they're always experimenting with the gameplay and control methods, rather than perfecting the rail-shooter, that's not surprising.
In the future I still hope to play Assault, but I've never seen that at prices I like knowing its middling reception. I also wanna give the DS game a shot, its VC release is still on my Wii U wishlist actually. Wouldn't say I'm a big fan of Star Fox games, but they tend to be better than the stuff I play on average!
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