StarFox Adventures is a game I had no interest in playing when I was younger, and that fact is very confusing to me. I read game magazines (EGM, hell yeah!) so I knew it wasn't like StarFox on SNES or N64. I knew it was a Zelda clone, but I also loved Nintendo and its main franchises. Through the almighty powers of Wikipedia, I've deduced a possibility. If Wikipedia is to be believed, StarFox Adventures was released on September 23, 2002. At this point, Super Mario Sunshine had only been out for about a month, so I may have been aiming to get that instead or I had just gotten it so I'd have to wait for a bit before I got another new game. Not to mention, Animal Crossing was released on September 15, 2002, so I may have been more focused on getting that as well. Well that's fine and all, but what about the actual game? Well, despite it being the third entry in the "StarFox" series, StarFox it ain't. In fact, it's so "not StarFox," that it originally wasn't even going to be a StarFox game. It would have been called, "Dinosaur Planet" and Fox McCloud wouldn't have been anywhere in sight. That certainly explains why the Arwing traveling stages feel so tacked on. Honestly, while they don't take much time, I think the game would have benefited from not having these sections at all. All they did for me was help clearly illustrate the overall mediocrity of the whole experience.
Like I said, it's a Zelda clone. Not surprisingly, it doesn't beat Zelda at its own game, but it isn't horrible either. I would complain about the massive amount of backtracking, but that's always been an issue for me with Rare games. Now hold on, before you start defending Rare to the death, I like Rare too. I still stand by the fact that Banjo-Kazooie, Jet Force Gemini, and Donkey Kong 64 all had tons of backtracking (though let me quickly clarify that those 3 games should not be grouped together, as Donkey Kong 64 is nowhere near as good as the other two). The dungeons in StarFox Adventures aren't bad, and some have decent puzzles. They're certainly the highlight of the game. The combat with regular enemies is flawed and usually just consists of mashing the A button. You have an evade and a guard, but neither seem to ever help you get past an enemy's defenses any better than just mashing the A button.
All in all what does it add up to? To be fair, the game is pretty good. The graphics aren't bad even by today's standards, which means that they're amazing for 2002. It's kind of odd to think that such an early Gamecube game would have some of the best graphics on the system, but it's true. The combat sucks, but the dungeons help make up for it. The backtracking is a serious nuisance, but I also took long breaks between sessions of the game which surely lead to confusion and getting lost, making backtracking that much more frustrating.
Before I wrap this up, though, I would like to mention that this game definitely reaches, "dangerously furry," on the furry scale. They really push the sex appeal of Krystal at the end of the game, so much so that when her theme kicked in, I honestly felt a little uncomfortable. It's a sultry, jazzy sax solo that when paired with Krystal's extremely sexual design, surely is responsible for at least a few prepubescent boys' ventures into furry fandom. Still, who am I to judge? I mean, I loved Sly Cooper (which as irony would have it, was released on the same day as StarFox Adventures).
In the end, StarFox Adventures is a decent game that falls just short of greatness and lands in the higher part of the realm of mediocrity. It was interesting to take Fox out of the Arwing, and it made for a decent game, but I much prefer his appearances on the SNES and N64. So please, Fox... listen to Guile and, "Just get in the plane!"
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