Star Fox Zero: A Double Edge Sword For The Franchise
Since this month's class only has one main assignment (that I will post towards the end of next week), I was somewhat upset that I wouldn't be able to share much this month. But upon seeing gameplay and reviews of Star Fox Zero today, I decided to share my thoughts on the game and discuss how I feel conflicted because of it.
To start things off, let me just praise Star Fox 64 for a little bit. When I was around 10 or 11, this third-person space shooter was one of the most incredible games I had seen at the time. It had branching levels and storylines, amazing graphics, interesting characters, some of the tightest controls and gameplay on the system, and an incredible amount of charm and polish. It was simple, but also had a ton of depth. It was a space opera, where your actions and skills determined how the game and story played out. Different playthroughs might even introduce you to some secret characters or different vehicles. And even when you fast forward nearly twenty years, the game is still a masterpiece by today's standards.
But while the N64 game was a timeless classic, its successors were far from it.
Star Fox Adventures was a completely different genre of game, but with Star Fox characters tacked on. It lacked both fun and charm, and ruined the iconic characters through awful animations and voice acting. Not to mention it also added krystal as an unnecessary love interest for Fox, lacking anything even resembling a personality.
Half of Star Fox Assault was back to the original piloting formula, but the other half added on-foot missions with terrible controls and gameplay. It continued Adventure's tradition of stripping their interesting personality and charm, and giving them horrible animations and voice acting. It was also extremely linear, and lacked any real depth.
Star Fox Command fixed the poor animations and dropped voice acting altogether, but pulled a play from Sonic Team and bogged the game down with countless cliched filler characters. While the story was branching like the N64 title, it lacked the structured overarching narrative, containing about nine alternate universe endings. And the gameplay was a shell of it's former self; half of the game was a turn based strategy game, while the other half was small map battles with touch controls.
Which brings us to today. From what I've seen of Star Fox Zero, the game looks absolutely beautiful. Not only are the graphics perfect, but the art team did a fantastic job with everything. The environment is lush and colorful, and the character designs are reminiscent of the old Star Fox 64 promotional art. The cast is reset back to the originals (including the secret characters), and the plot is a reboot of the entire series. The chatter animations have a retro feel to them, and the voice acting is top notch. The levels look fun to play, and the worlds look fun to explore. The levels have branching paths, and there are plenty of secrets. The game is all vehicle based, and adds some interesting new ones as well. And I won't give a certain part away to those who haven't seen it yet, but I can say that there seems to be a lot of charm in this new title. These are all things that I have wanted Nintendo to bring back to the franchise.
So where is the problem? While the rest of the game is a call back to it's roots, the controls are anything but. The simple and elegant controls of the old games have been replaced by unnecessary motion controls. Not only that, but you have to look at your TV to fly AND look at your gamepad to shoot. This makes the game unnecessarily complicated and clunky, and is not the type of gameplay that I want in a Star Fox game. This wouldn't be so bad if they gave you an option to play with classic controls, but they refuse to. I'm a firm believer that games should have depth, but they should also be simple. A fine example of this situation is in a couple Final Fantasy games I'm playing for the first time, VI and VIII. VI had depth, but was simple, while VIII made junctioning complicated for the sake of being complicated. That's what Nintendo is doing with this Star Fox. I just wish that they could realize that there is still a market for the original controls.
But the unfortunate part is the ramifications this title will have on future games in the series. If the game does well, that sends the message to Nintendo that these controls are fine to keep, which means I'll never get the controls I want back. However, if the game flops, the consequences could be even worse. If they think people dislike the game, they may misinterpret that as people not liking the entire direction this game took, which isn't entirely true. While I don't like the new controls, the rest of the game is exactly what I would want from the series. But negative reviews could cause Nintendo to throw out all of that progress towards a good Star Fox title. This means that no matter how well or poorly the game does, this is a lose-lose situation. Star Fox Zero may be the double edge sword that ruins the entire future of the franchise for me, which upsets me after seeing the potential this game had.
