Stramfox Advongles

Star Fox Adventures is very close to being a good game, but it falls flat in many areas and is an overall pretty mediocre and lackluster experience. There's not much in the game that stands out as "bad" but there also isn't very much that stands out as amazing either, leading to a fairly average game all around. Let's go through each aspect of the game, starting with what it does best.

The Environments, atmosphere, and world:
Simply put, this is the highlight of the game. The world Rare created is beautiful. The graphics hold up surprisingly well for a GameCube game from 2002 and it's very clear that the developers put a lot of time into making each area of the game feel like it's own unique location on Dinosaur Planet. Even though most of the main areas follow a pretty standard video game cycle (grassy main area, ice area, volcano/fire area, cloud/sky world), they feel like a very natural and logical addition to the world. The ice mountain is home to the Mammoth tribe, while the Cloud/Sky temple is where the Pterodactyl dinosaurs live. Even Krazoa palace has the perfect ambiance of being a shrine to some mysterious ancient spirit. It all fits very well into the general theme of the game  did not fall into a trap of making an ice world simply to follow video game logic. This also ends up being one of the games biggest weaknesses as well, but more on that later.

Music and Sound:
Another big win for Star Fox Adventure. David Wise composed the soundtrack for this game and he hits it out of the park once again. Wise is the master at crafting ambient soundtracks that give atmosphere to the world or level you are in. Some masterpiece examples include Aquatic Ambiance and Forest Interlude from the Donkey Kong Country series, and while I don't believe SFA's soundtrack matches his work in DKC, it still stands as one of the games best aspects. Each song does an amazing job of acting as an extension to the amazing visuals without distracting from amazing world design. Without the soundtrack I don't believe I would be praising the environments and atmosphere like I did above.

Now on to the not as good stuff.
Voice Acting: The voice acting is just not bad, but it also isn't great. I attribute this less to the acting and more to the script/directing itself. There are lines that sometimes just feel awkward or are delivered weirdly, especially when they're speaking the Krazoan dinosaur language. It seriously sounds like they're just saying nonsense English words, even though there seems to be a clearly defined full language, and it's especially jarring when they just say English words like "Krazoa Palace" or "Dinosaur Planet" when there are clearly dinonese words for both dinosaur and planet. It's just weird. It's not quite bad enough to be "so bad it's good" but it's also not really good enough to consider it "good."

Combat:
The combat is just bad. It's so underdeveloped and devolves into just mashing A as there's no need to do any other sort of combos to deal with even large groups of enemies. The combat system feels like there were interesting ideas, but it ended up unfinished and was cut back to just a couple different looking staff attack. Meanwhile the targeting system is just completely awful. Targeting enemies is completely automatic and there's no way to change what enemy you are locked onto without putting away your staff completely and pulling it back out and hoping you're on a different enemy. This is also especially annoying when exploring and an enemy pops out of the ground and you are forced to lock onto it. Lastly, the aiming of the fire spell is also terrible. It looks like it was only required once during the first boss fight, but even when you are locked on to the spot you need to shoot, the game locks you in place and forces you to use the reticle to aim at the boss's weak spot. When compared to the combat of Ocarina of Time, which has a significantly better targeting and combat weapon mechanic, Star Fox Adventures falls flat on it's face.

Exploration:
While the environments and world of Star Fox Adventures is super interesting and well made, the actual stuff you can do is so barren. everything in the game feels like it is way too linear and there is absolutely no incentive to explore anything that isn't part of the main objective. There aren't any hidden/optional collectibles in the game, almost zero secret or hidden areas, very minimal side quests that rarely extend past "bring me a thing", and the only upgrades are to slightly expand your magic meter. The other issue with exploring the world is that the game seemingly punishes you for trying to go places you aren't supposed to. In typical linear game fashion, there are barriers to impede your progress in certain areas, but for some reason, Star Fox Adventures decides to add those barriers way too far into the next area, causing an issue where you have to very slowly walk (or roll) a significant distance into a new area (while also finding nothing of importance), only to find out that you're in the wrong area and have to walk all the way back to the main area. This doesn't end up wasting too much time overall, but it discourages trying to explore new areas before you are supposed to. It's such a shame that the actual planet is so interesting, but you are so limited in where you can go or what you can actually do in each area.

Puzzles and Dungeons:
The puzzles and dungeons in this game are fairly decent, but eventually start to feel repetitive as there is not much variation in the puzzles or solutions. A significant portion of puzzles just involve some variation of hitting a switch with a fire ball followed by some platforming, or using Tricky's dig and fire to collect a certain number of "things" or blowing something up with a barrel. Collect 5 mushrooms to save Tricky's mom, carry a barrel across fire shooters, collect 5 gears to activate the bridge, carry a barrel up a ramp, collect 4 gold bars, take a barrel down wind tornados, collect 5 roots for the mammoth, save the 4 birds, etc. It starts to feel like it's all the same stuff, but with a slight twist in a different area. There are some puzzles that are unique and interesting to figure out the first time, but then those too are repeated several times and it falls back into the uninteresting category.

Other stuff:
I'll use this section as a miscellaneous "rest of the stuff I want to talk about" section. Starting off with the Arwing sections, this may honestly be the most disappointing aspect of the game for me. The arwing sections, to put it simply, are just boring. There are so few enemies present and each level consists of dodging some asteroids and flying through enough golden rings. Several times, I flew through the required rings, then put down my controller, and still completed the level. There was no sense of actually having to try and it ended up being more of a required bad mini game than a fun portion of the game. Not to mention you have to do this every single time you go to and leave a dungeon, and they're all almost the exact same. It gets way too repetitive and boring. The general pace of the game is also a bit too slow. There are way too many cutscenes throughout the game, that I frankly did not care about, and every single time fox got an item, there would be a relatively long animation of him actually collecting the item, even if 3 seconds prior there was something that said Fox was just given an item. It would constantly interrupt gameplay and started to get tedious. Even when using certain items, like the bomb flower or rocket boost, it would take several seconds to plant the seed or charge up your rocket, just to clear 1 small obstacle and it just slowed down gameplay significantly.

Conclusion:
Star Fox Adventures is not a bad game but there's very little about the game that makes it anything more than mediocre at best. Any aspect that I talked about would not be a deal breaker on their own, but when combined together make an overall boring and tedious experience while playing this game. If exploration was more rewarding with secrets or collectables, the puzzles were diversified more, the combat was fleshed out a little more to add combos using other buttons and staff powers/weapons, the arwing sections were made more interesting, and the overall pace of the game were all improved, even just slightly, then I think Rare would have a fairly decent and enjoyable game. 6/10