YMMV / F-Zero 99

• Abridged Arena Array:
  • If Mute City I or Big Blue appear on the map rotation, they will almost always be the majority vote, likely due to their relative ease compared to Sand Ocean and Death Wind I and popularity from appearing in the Super Smash Bros. franchise and Mario Kart 8. (Note that, at launch, these were two of only four options of tracks to choose from in normal races.) This has expanded to Mute City II and III now that they're available.
  • Prior to version 1.1.0, Port Town I (in the normal race pool) and Port Town II (in Pro Tracks) more often than not got the majority vote^note Port Town I had to compete with the three Mute City courses and Big Blue, but usually got picked over Sand Ocean, Death Wind I, and Red Canyon I; the only pro track that could compete with Port Town II was Red Canyon II as well. This is because the courses contain a large shortcut achieved by using the jump plates on the front straightaway to jump to the other side of the course, and it was something intermediate-level players could pull off with some practice, thus giving them a leg up over major portions of the field. However, the 1.1.0 version release included a nerf to the tractor beam that pulls the machine back a ways on the track by making it take longer to put the machine down, which negated the advantage of the shortcut. As a result, the Port Town tracks have lost a lot of their appeal.
• Breather Level: Some of the Mirror courses are less technically demanding than their standard counterparts (of course, this doesn't mean they're easier to win):
  • Mirror Sand Ocean adds boost arrows after two of the sharpest corners on the track, so slower-accelerating machines don't necessarily have to boost to recover the speed lost from making those turns.
  • Mirror Red Canyon I has a jump plate that bypasses the three consecutive 135-degree turns completely, and removes the other jump pads and all the floor magnets.
• Broken Base: The Lucky Bumper has people who absolutely despise it and those that are in favor it. Those who are against the Lucky Bumper argue that it adds luck to a skill based game and punishes those who are ahead of the pack since it's controlled by another player and they can swerve and spin into others purely to screw with them while getting nothing out it besides trolling. Some people that gain control of a Lucky Bumper will intentionally self destruct as soon as possible so they can get to a new race sooner rather than stick around in a race they lost in. People who are in favor of the Lucky Bumper point out that the randomness of when one spawns and having the Lucky Bumper intentionally screw with others is the whole point behind it and it also prevents skilled players from easily coasting by if they are ahead.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Interestingly, every craft is popular for different reasons depending on the specific player due to the relatively stable Competitive Balance, and as such it is not uncommon to see rooms fairly split between all four vehicles, give or take some. An individual player's choice in vehicle tends to boil down to playstyle above all else.
  • The Golden Fox being Rescued from the Scrappy Heap means that many, many players gravitate towards it for its high regeneration and frontrunning capabilities. A highly-skilled Golden Fox player can boost straight into the lead and maintain a massive frontrun for almost the entire race. It's not much of a surprise for at least 25% of the lobby to consist of Golden Fox players, and it is considered arguably the best machine in the game due to its incredible performance given a high enough skill level.
  • The Wild Goose is very popular, especially among beginner players, for its fantastic ability to take punishment and dole it out in turn. Its ability to stay in the middle of the pack without much frustration makes it the most easily accessible machine since its durability compensates for a lower skill level and you don't get punished as hard for being bounced around by 10+ different players on all sides, allowing you to bide your time and wait for either a KO opportunity or Super Boost to jump ahead. All this plus the ability to go safely through a lap only needing one boost due to its durability and speed probably makes it, to some, the best machine to use in Grand Prix. Its tankiness makes it especially suitable for Team Battle, since it can just hang around the middle of the pack to farm points by attacking opponents.
  • The Fire Stingray is practically unchanged from its SNES incarnation (high top speed and grip coupled with decent durability and only poor acceleration as a glaring weakness), meaning that a sizeable portion of many lobbies can also consist of them. This also makes it the best machine in Classic Race by extension since it is objectively the fastest vehicle and has less to worry about compared to your standard 99 Race.
• Contested Sequel: This game's existence has been quite polarizing from the get go, thanks to a longstanding collective desire for a new F-Zero game and the expectations that stemmed from it. On one hand, there are players who are upset that they waited nearly 20 years for a new F-Zero game only to be met with a multiplayer remake of the original that doesn't incorporate any of the lore or other content from later games, and wanted something similar to or even topping the critically-acclaimed F-Zero GX or at least something that salvages the series after F-Zero: GP Legend and F-Zero Climax were met with series-stopping disappointment. Others are just glad that a new F-Zero title exists in the first place and consider it one of the best fits for the Battle Royale Game format, upgrading the game for modern times while keeping true to the look and feel of the original and being an addictive, fun game in its own right and not just nostalgia-pandering. At the end of the day, 99 still managed to amass a strong playerbase and is the frequent subject of YouTube videos and streams that showcase the game, but a considerable plurality would instead prefer or also want a hypothetical fully-new F-Zero game.
• Demonic Spiders: Red Bumpers. You generally won't see them unless you're at the front of the pack, at which point watch out. They deal substantial damage and a careless race leader can find themselves faced with an abrupt CRASH OUT (even more humiliating if they're among the first casualties of the race) if they don't carefully weave past these vehicles, resist the urge to boost constantly and instead set some energy meter aside just in case of a Red Bumper collision or two, or drop back a few places on purpose and let some other opponents take a few hits for them. It gets even worse near the end of the race, as if you're anywhere close to the front of the pack, you'll see them in HORDES.
• Fan Nickname: The names of the Mystery stages haven’t been revealed so fans started referring to them by the combined names represented by the stages they are inspired from:
  • White Death / White Wind: a combination of Death Wind I and White Land I & II.
  • Mute City VI / Mirror City: a combination of elements from the Mute City tracks and mirrored.
  • Mirror Blue: a track that is basically Big Blue reversed with some additional elements.
  • Fire City: a track with elements mixed from Fire Field and Mute City tracks.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Lucky Bumper is a mechanic specifically designed to turn a dead player into an annoyance. The mechanic is that if a player Crashes Out, there is a chance they will respawn as a Lucky Bumper, appearing in front of the pack in a blue car with the camera facing backwards and getting up to 30 seconds to ram into as many other vehicles as possible to earn a bonus point for each vehicle they collide with. The Lucky Bumper drives at a fixed speed, allowing the player to only control its steering and Spin Attack. Due to being able to see every player behind them, Lucky Bumper players have the opportunity to absolutely ruin other players' days by shoving them around the track and disrupting their flow for nominal gain other than cathartic value. An extremely unfortunate player can even wind up dead because of a Lucky Bumper swerving into their path at low health and pushing them into a barrier or other hazard.
  • Classic Race brings back the brown Bumpers from the original game, which are tougher than grey Bumpers which is not helped by the lack of the Spin Attack; even if you do destroy them, they don't award anything. As such, they exist solely to hamper the player, and hamper they certainly will especially if you're frontrunning.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • In the months since the game's release, the Golden Fox's presence has been elevated from normal Complacent Gaming Syndrome into this. Players discovered that at extremely high levels of gameplay, the Fox's inherent weaknesses basically vanish entirely since it does not have to worry about poor grip or durability if it just stays ahead of everyone else and navigates turns and Bumpers skillfully enough to make them a complete non-issue. This eventually lead to some players becoming frustrated with the Fox's sheer dominance as seeing max rank players piloting the Fox makes games feel almost unwinnable unless the opponent completely screws the pooch.
  • In Classic Race, and by extension Classic Mini Prix, virtually all of the balancing changes for this game are reverted thanks to this mode using the old Super Jet system (wherein players get one use of the boost for each lap completed), meaning that the Fire Stingray becomes by and far the best machine to use due to being the best both in terms of top speed and grip and not having to worry about rationing boost or the Blue Falcon and Golden Fox being able to recharge their Energy gauges much faster, which is part of their advantages in the 99-player modes. As such, this mode ends up being derisively called "Fire Stingray mode" or "Fire Stingray 20". It is still possible for a non-Stingray user to win against the average Stingray player through better acceleration and thus recovery from mistakes, but at the highest levels of play, a Stingray will have them beat.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Blue Falcon is often seen as a sign that someone is completely new to the game or just likes Captain Falcon and/or the Blue Falcon and doesn't care about machine stats, as the general consensus is that it's too average of a machine to fully compete with the strengths and weaknesses of the other three. It is still very possible to win with the Falcon, but doing so requires more skill than one would expect due to having to compete with machines that have distinct specialties to work with.
  • Classic Race once again turns the Golden Fox into this. With the removal of the modern Boost mechanic, the Fox struggles to keep pace with its superior counterparts and largely relies on its opponents misplaying to steal wins.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The robotic "KO!" clip returns from previous 99 games and is just as cathartic as ever, especially if you ice an opponent when you're low on health and get that sweet free refill to go the distance.
  • The immensely satisfying fanfare, a reprise of the title theme, that plays when you make 3rd place or higher.
• Older Than They Think: This game uses four-lap races, which feels like a step down when past pseudo-3D F-Zero games feature five-lap races...except for the game's immediate predecessor, F-Zero Climax, which uses three-lap races. This is largely not known in the West since Climax was released in Japan only.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Golden Fox was always viewed as the weakest machine in the original F-Zero because it had pretty much nothing going for it besides high acceleration and the highest turn speed, to the point clearing the Grand Prix in higher difficulties with that vehicle was considered a miraculous feat. This game, however, plays to the Golden Fox's strengths as the better acceleration allows it to lose less speed in case of collisions (which is an inevitability when you have 98 other racers in the same track). It also has single-handedly the best boost reward and regeneration in the game, meaning its poor normal top speed ends up not being that much of a deterrent as long as you don't run low on Hit Points. Also, it is able to recharge Hit Points a lot faster than highly-armored vehicles like the Wild Goose or Fire Stingray, so it is able to boost a lot more often than those two. Balance is also helped by the fact that the vehicles with the highest normal top speeds in this game tend to be highly-armored vehicles that are slow to recharge Hit Points. This may have Gone Horribly Right, however, as a skilled player makes the Fox really difficult to catch up to, turning it into a High-Tier Scrappy.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic: The boost arrows in the original F-Zero were quite problematic due to also greatly reducing the player's control over their vehicle, especially on the Death Wind courses. In this game, the speed boost and loss of machine control are nerfed, making it far more viable to tag the arrows.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Annoyingly, if you Crash Out near the end of a race in a Prix, you cannot leave the match immediately and must instead wait for the race to complete and tally scores, then wait for the next race to begin (if applicable) before you can exit. This was addressed in the 1.1.0 update.
  • The controversial Lucky Bumper, which is essentially a meterstick of how much of an asshole you want to be to your competitors. Some players hate racing against Lucky Bumpers because they add an additional element of volatility to races that they'd otherwise perform better in without the interference of another player piloting a machine specifically designed to obstruct and punish them for being in the lead. In that same token, some players don't like playing as a Lucky Bumper as they view it as extra padding that could be spent on getting to the next race sooner instead of being a nuisance for minimal gain.
  • The Boost and Super Boost are bound to the same button. This is partially deliberate as the idea is that you can't use a Boost while you have a Super Boost primed for balance reasons, but this tends to cause accidents where you push the A button when you want to Boost but wind up on the Skyway instead because you either forgot that you had a Super Boost primed or your Super Boost meter filled right before you pushed the A button.
  • The rotation system only allows players to pick from one of five event modes every 20 minutes. While the intent is to avoid spreading the queue across multiple modes and decreasing the amount of players available for each, several players have expressed frustration that they must wait for their favorite modes such as Classic Race or Grand Prix to show up while they are not always guaranteed to be available, and most importantly that not all tracks are available to play in the main F-Zero 99 mode, instead being exclusive to Grand Prix and Pro Races.
  • During the weekend, full Grand Prix runs are available every half-hour instead of every hour. This can be great for players who want to do those but normally can't catch them during the weekdays, but this also locks out Mini Prix and Classic Mini Prix until Monday. Version 1.3.0 made this worse by making Mirror Knight League the only Prix race available and in the same frequency, and later Mirror Queen League when that was introduced.
  • Some players dislike the voting system, as due to Abridged Arena Array most players gravitate toward Mute City (any iteration) or Big Blue, making it difficult to play on any of the other stages unless the Mute City courses or Big Blue are randomly excluded from the polling options.
  • If you're in a Power Down state, recharging enough energy to be brought out of it takes a second or two, which means it's all too possible to get KO-ed even when you're in the pit area.
  • The secret tracks only appear in F-Zero 99 mode and their appearance is pseudo-random. If you aren't aware of this and don't end up using an online tool that tells you when they appear, you might wind up just sitting at the menu waiting for them to show up if you want to play them.
  • Private Lobbies allow you to race with only players who you give the lobby code to, making it great for community events, but it has a couple glaring problems:
    • The matchmaking timer is still 60 seconds like in a public lobby, which is a relatively narrow period of time to sign players on. Anyone who doesn't punch in the code within the same minute ends up getting locked out.
    • If there are fewer than 99 opponents in most modes or 20 opponents in Classic Race or Classic Mini Prix, the remaining slots are forcibly filled by CPU opponents, with no way to exclude them.
• Tainted by the Preview: Quite a number of existing F-Zero fans were vocally displeased when the game was revealed on Nintendo Direct, primarily because after a long Sequel Gap they had expected Nintendo to bring the franchise back with an entirely new full-fledged installment that could be a successor to the highly acclaimed GX rather than (what the trailer made out to be) another 99 Battle Royale Game conversion of the original SNES game (instead of turning F-Zero into an online multiplayer battle royale game being a way to revitalize the series). Fortunately, the complaints almost completely ceased once the game was released, as it turned out to be both a great modernization of the SNES original and a surprisingly great fit for the Battle Royale genre.
• That One Achievement: One of the unlockable border graphics for your pilot card requires you to match 5 Lucky Ranks at once. Since you have no idea what numbers to match, it's essentially a Luck-Based Mission. You do get the silhouette(s) of which vehicle(s) to use for a guaranteed match, but that will only net you one or two at best. Even more frustrating is that you can only try for it once a day, meaning that it will likely take weeks if not months to get.
• That One Level: Has a page shared with the rest of the series here.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Mirror coursees not only flip the courses so that left is now right and vice versa, they also modify elements of the course to give them a new twist. Not all of these new twists are welcome, however:
  • Mirror Mute City II installs a jump plate at the "donut" section, meaning that unless you are going too slow to make the jump, the gimmick is completely neutered. While the two forks now have spark plates as compensation in an attempt to add strategic considerations, taking those routes is still longer compared to just jumping.
  • Mirror Red Canyon I not only adds a jump plate to completely bypass the 135-degree turns at the start of the course, but also removes all of the other jump plates and floor magnets, taking away much of the course's identity in many players' eyes.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Pro Races put you on "advanced" courses, but at launch, only two of them were available: White Land I and Port Town II. The update that added Queen League eventually added one extra course, Death Wind II, and the King League updated another one extra course, Red Canyon II. Meanwhile, the regular mode started with four courses and the Queen League update added three more to the rotation (Mute City II, Port Town I, Red Canyon I), with the King League update contributing Mute City III.
  • For some reason, you can only race the final races of the three Grand Prix circuits - Silence, White Land II, and Fire Field - as the final races of the three Grand Prix circuits (which is ironic as the launch trailer showcases gameplay of Fire Field with 45 racers, 25 more than the number of players that can actually enter a Grand Prix final). Technically, you can race them in Practice mode, but to do even that, you still have to have survived to those particular races in a Grand Prix (although you can do the Grand Prix in a private lobby and only have to deal with AI racers). You couldn't even race these courses in Classic Race until version 1.3.0 where they were added to the new Classic Mini Prix.

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