Russ Frushtick of MTV’s Multiplayer Blog recently brought Nintendo guru Shigeru Miyamoto in for an interview, and received an interesting response when he asked about titles he felt could have seen better support by the public.
“I tend to forget those games [laughs]. I’m a big fan of the ‘Star Fox’ games. Every time we make a ‘Star Fox’ game I’m hoping people will enjoy it as much as I do. Of course the goal every time is to try and make it more and more fun but, at least in Japan, the people that purchase the ‘Star Fox’ games has decreased over the years. But we still try to make them more fun and hopefully people will see the appeal in those games.”
The games haven’t just lost steam with sales though, as review scores have dropped as well. Metacritic has Star Fox 64 (N64) clocking in at an average of 88 our of 100. Not bad. Things start to cool off a little after that with Star Fox Adventures, which garners an 82. Next came the Nintendo-Namco brainchild Star Fox Assault, which (Gamecube) sits at a cool 67 percent, while Star Fox Command boasts a mildly improved 76. The series is clearly not enjoying a high point.
What Miyamoto has to realize is that the series has fallen by the wayside because it has lost its focus. The original Star Fox on the Super Nintendo was an on-rails flight game, and its successful 64-bit sequel was cut from the same cloth. The additions, like the tank, submarine and all-range mode levels fit the style of the game. But most importantly they didn’t change the focus. The bulk of the game was still on-rails and the game was all the better for it.
Star Fox Adventures changed all of that. While it started out as a completely unrelated game — Dinosaur Planet — Miyamoto and Rare co-conspired to shoe-horn the Star Fox license in. The resulting game suffered from an identity crisis. While it’s one of the Gamecube’s better titles from a visual standpoint, the pacing of the gameplay is questionable at best. Factor in one of the most infamous bait-and-switches to ever take place at the end of anything and you have a product that isn’t going to appeal to the entirety of your core audience. A return to form may have rendered Adventures a bump in the road, but Nintendo continued forcing square pegs into round holes with Star Fox Assault — a second Gamecube entry that puts the emphasis on its subtitle’s first three letters. The game was developed by Namco, who pulled Fox out of the cockpit and into a third-person shooter for approximately half the game. These sequences were poorly designed, unfortunately, and failed to appeal to a crowd that wanted nothing more than to perform barrel rolls at their leisure.
Star Fox Command, the series first and only DS entry to this point, also split itself between the flight and another foreign style, which oddly enough was strategy. This takes the player away from piloting an Arwing once again, and to make matters worse, the flight elements found in the game eschew the traditional forward progression rail-shooter levels and go completely all-range mode. It’s almost as though Nintendo hears what the fans want and they’re doling it out in controlled doses instead of developing the sequel people are asking for.
The bright spot in all of this is that Miyamoto seems to realize that the series has gone off course, and his quote could mean they’re going to focus on making the games more enjoyable, should the series continue. It could mean he’s going to listen to what the fans want and try to deliver his vision of that. It also could mean he’s going to produce what he thinks people “will see the appeal” in based on his judgement. It’s hard to argue against his track record, but building games based on what someone other than the fans would find enjoyable seems to be what got us in this mess to begin with. Miyamoto, it’s time to take the flight-stick and fly this series home.
I liked some aspects of Adventures so much that I played about a third of the title. 60% of that was painfully boring and tedious. I eventually gave up. An open range RPG game would have been cool if I had the ability to call in my Arwing to get to other places to unravel the story and find objects. Like Zelda, but with a plane instead of a horse. For a company that owns Mario, Zelda, and Samus, I don’t think Starfox will ever be important enough to get reworked into something worth buying.