YMMV / Star Fox Adventures

• Anti-Climax Boss: General Scales, whose fight against Fox only lasts for a few seconds til the actual Final Boss shows up. Andross himself sadly isn't the strongest last fight ever.
• Applicability: Fox McCloud in this game is Only in It for the Money and aggravated by anything that prolongs his stay on Dinosaur Planet, a stark to being an All-Loving Hero in the rest of the franchise. Many take this sudden characterization shift as a mouthpiece for how Rare felt making the game, as Dinosaur Planet was reworked into a Star Fox game to bolster sales, with Fox’s impatience stemming from the rush to get this game completed before the impeding Microsoft buyout.
• Ass Pull: Andross being revealed as the real villain of the game. Considering it was an eleventh hour addition to the game, there is no foreshadowing or buildup to it, and the game gives no explanation for how he came back after being killed in Star Fox 64.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Krystal seems to be the one thing in this game most people talk about.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The game starts with one: controlling Krystal riding a CloudRunner, the player has to defeat the Galleon, a Living Ship with an giant, animate, fire-breathing dinosaur head at the helm. This is done by shooting blue fireballs at it; it's not obvious if it's Krystal or the CloudRunner shooting them, especially since neither are shown possessing the ability to do after the battle (though CloudRunners are shown to possess a more traditional fire breath). After the battle, Krystal boards the ship, meets a captive baby CloudRunner, retrieves a key from the hold, and is unceremoniously thrown off by General Scales. The only things relevant to the rest of the game are some tutorials and the introduction of General Scales - the ship itself or the CloudRunner chick are never mentioned afterwards. The fact that the fight is completely impossible to lose, despite Krystal appearing to take damage whenever the ship's attacks hit her, only adds to the strangeness of the sequence.
• Bizarro Episode: Aside from the Genre Shift, the game has a lot of fantasy and mystical elements that are not seen in the other Star Fox games, which are firmly in the realm of Science Fiction.
• Breather Boss: The Krazoa Test of Strength is significantly less brutal than either the Test of Fear (the previous Krazoa test) or the Lightfoot Test of Strength (which uses the same mechanics) both being noticeably more difficult.
• Complete Monster:
  • Andross returns. See that page for details.
  • General Scales is the brutal leader of the SharpClaw tribe who wishes to rule Dinosaur Planet. With the aid of Andross, Scales steals the Spell Stones, slaughtering the EarthWalkers sent to stop him. This causes the planet to become dangerously unstable, threatening to affect the entire Lylat system if it explodes. Scales then imprisons the Gatekeepers as well as the EarthWalker Royal Family. Scales forces the SnowHorn Gatekeeper's daughter to open a Gate to DarkIce Mines by threatening to slaughter her tribe, and fulfills his promise not to kill them by enslaving them in said mine. He conquers the SkyRunner Fortress and has his men beat and imprison the CloudRunner Queen. He releases the vicious RedEye Tribe into the Walled City, driving the EarthWalkers out of most of the City. He transforms Dragon Rock into a wasteland and performs experiments on dinosaurs to turn them into dangerous bioweapons. Cruel even to his own tribe, Scales stands out as one of Star Fox Team's cruelest foes.
• Contested Sequel: It is generally agreed that it isn't quite like Star Fox 64. Whether or not it's good in its own right is another matter.
• Continuity Lock-Out: The game is a stand alone that never refers to the previous games until Andross suddenly shows with no explanation of who he is.
• Cult Classic: It's one of the least popular Star Fox titles, but it has its fans.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final portion of the game, with General Scales being a Cutscene Boss and Andross showing up out of nowhere for an unexpectedly hard boss fight using a mechanic you haven't had much time to get used to is generally agreed to be a major low point of the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Krystal. She definitely has a pretty solid fandom, and was even one of the more requested characters for the Super Smash Bros. Brawl game^note she did eventually appear as an assist trophy character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but is a bit character in the actual game. Her Hatedom dying down quite a bit over the years has probably helped.
• Fan Nickname: Thanks to JonTron, some have taken to calling this "Stairfax Temperatures".
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Many people wish that this game would have been finished in the original scope and vision of Dinosaur Planet, as there is TONS of interesting content in it that never made it into the final game, along with Krystal having a much more prominent role in the game as a Deuteragonist, a darker atmosphere and tone, a much more complex and in-depth story with plenty of lore and worldbuilding, and a more interesting main villain who is actually foreshadowed.
• Fridge Brilliance: The "tattoos" Krystal has are white. This means they're probably freeze brands, which—apart from the more familiar hot-iron method of branding—is the only way to "tattoo" an animal that has fur.
• Fridge Horror: The design of Drakor is similar to that of the Sharp Claws, implying that Scales had one of his own species transformed into the monster.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Not that the game is hard to begin with, but the staff's energy shield removes any kind of tension from certain encounters. The shield envelopes Fox in a dome of light that blocks all damage and it can be used indefinitely since, unlike other abilities, it isn't tied to your magic meter. Don't want to put up with dodging fire on the conveyor belts in the Dark Ice Mines? Use the shield and just ride them out. Don't want to keep running away from the King RedEye? Use the shield and watch as he walks over you harmlessly.
  • The staff powers completely trivialize combat against regular enemies. The Fire Blaster will kill any enemy in four hits, is picked up very early in the game, can be fired rapidly, and doesn't even need to be aimed once you've locked onto an enemy. It's only downside is that it can be blocked and uses up your mana. The Ice Blaster breaks the game even harder, however, as it cannot be blocked, can freeze multiple enemies at once, and frozen enemies die in one hit. It still requires mana, but replenishing mana is never hard, and enemies will sometimes drop mana for you anyways.
• Goddamn Bats: Bloops, literally. If you get anywhere close to them, they will automatically fly directly above Fox and start lowering and kicking him repeatedly while constantly laughing, guaranteeing to blow up any object he's carrying, and will chase him for quite a distance before they stop. Fox can't lock on to them, so the only way for him to kill them once they start attacking him is to swing at exactly the right time as they lower to kick him. The little bastards are everywhere, and it's possible to get more than one attacking Fox at once.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Over the course of the game, you can buy and later deliver Cheat Tokens to unlock cheats or special messages. The very last Token (buyable in the Ocean Force Point Temple once Fox is on the way to put into place the final Spellstone and then proceed to the last part of the game) unlocks the following message upon being delivered in the Warpstone's maze in Thorntail Hollow: "There is sorrow ahead. A close friend does not have much time left. It will be hard to accept but you will grow". In-game, this message is foreshadowing the farewell between Fox and Tricky, but becomes doubly somber when you remember that this game, released in September 2002, was the final game released by Rareware before their departure from Nintendo after they were bought by Microsoft, going to them literally the day after the game came out, finishing a successful partnership that released many popular video games in the past. The only consolation is that, as far as the Star Fox universe goes, Fox and Tricky met again in Star Fox: Assault.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: While Star Fox Adventures is often compared to The Legend of Zelda, the later-released The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has some amusing similarities to it, including:
  • Both games being on the GameCube and the first Teen-rated entries in their respective franchises.
  • A plot twist that involves the respective overarching Big Bad of the series revealed to be The Man Behind the Man, posing as a god to manipulate the apparent main villain to help him return.
  • Link can turn into a wolf, which is a canine like Fox, and is the same species as scrapped protagonist Sabre. Relatedly, both characters are imprisoned at one point and can only escape by using an alternate physical form (Link taking advantage of his then-new wolf form, Fox turning into a SharpClaw thanks to an invention by Slippy).
  • Both games have two sets of Plot Coupons: Krazoa Spirits and Spellstones in Adventures, Fused Shadows and fragments of the Mirror of Twilight in Twilight Princess. The Spellstones and the fragments of the Mirror of Twilight are also alike in that they have to be retrieved for their placement in their respective original locations, because their removal has led to very harmful effects.
  • Both Fox and Link bid a bitter farewell to their respective sidekicks, Tricky and Midna, after their adventures conclude.
  • The protagonists of both series being playable in all Super Smash Bros. games while the newly-introduced female leads of both games (Midna and Krystal) having non-playable appearances in the form of Assist Trophies.
  • Neither game was originally conceived as they are in their released form. The developers at Rare intended to release Dinosaur Planet as a new IP before Shigeru Miyamoto gave them the idea of rebranding the game as Star Fox Adventures. Nintendo themselves originally planned to create a direct sequel to the Wind Waker until, due to the latter's low sales and the awkwardness of animating Toon Link trying to ride a horse, Aonuma asked Miyamoto for the game to take a different, more realistic direction and eventually turn it into Twilight Princess.
  • Finally, both games are regarded exactly the opposite way by their respective series' fanbases: Twilight Princess is sometimes criticized for being too formulaic for a Zelda game, while Star Fox Adventures is criticized for being too much of a departure from the rest of the Star Fox series.
  • Unlike Zelda, which typically uses the A/B buttons for combat, "Star Fox Adventures" instead uses the right control stick (C stick) for such; amusingly, 19 years later, the HD port of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword would end up using the same control scheme.
  • Sonic Unleashed also has a similar plot to Adventures with parts of the planet being broken up into pieces floating around it, and needing Plot Coupons (Spellstones and Krazoa Spirits in Adventures and Chaos Emeralds in Unleashed) to put them back in place.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Notably averted, as unlike most games in the series, clocks in on reported playthroughs of 15-20 hours. This where the game has its defenders, with the game having much more meat due to the Genre Shift as opposed to its one-sitting rail shooters.
• Memetic Mutation: "*random incoherent babbling* GENERAL SCALES"... ^ExplanationFrequently used to mock the game's use of the dinosaur language and how it completely falls apart with how characters still refer to themselves and others in perfect English even when using it.
• Misblamed: Most people blame Shigeru Miyamoto for the game being rushed and simplified compared to Dinosaur Planet. In reality, he was only the one who gave Rare the idea to make the game a Star Fox game, with Nintendo being very hands-off on development. The reason the game was rushed and so much content was removed was because Microsoft bought out Rare during production, forcing them to have to scrap more than a third of the game that they had planned to get it out on time before the deadline.
• Narm: The Dinosaur Planet's native language. So developed that the dev team actually had a guide in the manual over what vowels and consonants replaced each other... Yet, apparently, there are no words in their language for any proper nouns such as the characters' names, since they're always spoken in perfect English whenever they're addressed. In particular, General Scale's infamous introduction line where he speaks ominously in dino language, only to speak his name in perfect English in an overly dramatic fashion is often brought up as a prime offender of this trope.
  • The impact of the scene where the SharpClaws brutally beat Queen CloudRunner is undermined by the use of stock scream and punch sound effects.
• Narm Charm:
  • "Nobodeh ever brings me gifts anymore!"
  • "You pay THIS much!"
  • Fox's rapid expression changes, when he gets an item.
  • Everything the Lightfoot dinosaurs say.
    "Mah baybehs are sooooooo naughteh! Huh! They like to play underground."
    "Look out for my three babies! I think they're in the foh-rest!"
  • Andross' death scene. His facial spasms are incredibly ridiculous but they are easily overshadowed by the ensuing explosion with Fox and Falco surviving it.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The RedEye Tribe, especially the RedEye King.
  • The shopkeeper is this to some people. He acts very friendly but his voice makes him sound very sinister. Compounding it is also this line that wouldn't be too out of place in Saw.
    "How about playing a little GAME?"
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Sadly, the game seems to be best, if not exclusively known for the Executive Meddling that happened behind the scenes than for its own merits.
• The Scrappy: True, you don't have to be pressured into saving your companions, especially Slippy from getting shot down, but Slippy still has this, Even though he' voiced by Chris Seavor this time, he speaks with a jarring falestto.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Haggling with the Shopkeeper. Given there's not really much of a mechanic to it aside from "try your luck and see if he'll sell you that 50 scarab item for 47 instead", the fact that 1) he generally refuses any offers more than 2 scarabs less than his designated price, which leads to 2) haggling hardly saves you anything at all in the long run unless you're particularly tight for scarabs and NEED him to come down on the price of one item so you can afford one more in one sitting, and haggling really just isn't much use at all, especially since if he refuses your offer three times in a row, he basically tells you to get lost. Given it's not too hard to find extra scarabs, and you could just make some more by playing the Shopkeeper's minigame, haggling probably won't ever really see much use in a game unless you just wanna stick it to him. Sometimes you MIGHT get lucky, but it's pretty rare.
  • The day and night cycle, while common to adventure games, holds no positve merit here. The only thing that will happen at night is that the music will change and friendly NPCs will go to sleep. In some cases, these are the same NPCs that you need to talk to in order to advance the plot or solve a puzzle. A notable example is your first trip through the Snowhorn Wastes where you need to feed a Snowhorn two roots in order for him to give you the means to leave. When night comes, Fox can do nothing but stand around and wait for the sun to come up in order to advance.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The game has some very broken effects-heat distortion, water reflections, and floor reflections are incorrectly programmed, marring the graphics of an otherwise-graphically-impressive game. Reflections of the characters models are shown upside down above the head.
  • Fox and Krystal share some animations, which may be out of character with one another.
  • When talking to an Earthwalker as Krystal, she will crouch down with her legs spread apart.
• That One Boss: Drakor is going to give a bad time to those who aren't used to Button Mashing, especially since he and Fox are moving very fast through the battlefield during the fight.
• That One Level:
  • The Lightfoot Test of Strength, which only the most button-mashing-happy will have some chance of beating the first time off.
  • The Krazoa Test of Fear will make even the most patient gamers toss their controllers in a fit of rage, as it is an Unexpected Gameplay Change to a focus based minigame where the player must keep a line inside a bar as it swings from side to side wildly with little input as to where it's going to swing. It lasts a full minute, and if you fail you have to go all the way back to the start. Not to the start of the Test itself, but instead all the way back to the beginning of the area and have to go through all the, admittedly easy if tedious, puzzles all over again. To say it grinds on the nerves is an understatement.
  • The mission to protect a Thorntail's egg nest from incoming reptilian thieves, until you learn that the easy way to beat it is to use your Groundquake (which miraculously doesn't crush the very eggs you're supposed to protect).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Krystal was originally meant to be the Deuteragonist, but was reduced to being a Damsel in Distress.Even more egregious is that she had an elaborate backstory in the original Dinosaur Planet and her own sidekick, Princess Kyte. Even in the current draft, the story about her figuring out what happened to her homeworld, Cerinia, is not brought up again after the intro.
  • General Scales could have been a threatening villain but ends up being The Unfought. Worst yet is how he was still a chance to do something different than Andross but ends up getting shafted rather quickly and anti-climatically.
  • The whole Star Fox crew sans Fox. Falco is missing for most of the game, while Peppy and Slippy are relegated to Mission Control, never stepping foot on the planet proper.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Krystal's entire reason for coming to Sauria, finding out what happened to her homeworld as well as her parent's deaths, is brought up only in the introduction sequence of the game and then never brought up again. What makes this even more of a missed opportunity is the fact that Krystal seems to recognize Andross as she is pushed into the crystal, but nothing comes of this later either. None of the later games bothered addressing this plotline either.
  • The rivalry between the Earthwalkers and Cloudrunners could have made for an interesting subplot after the Queen Cloudrunner mentions it in her introduction, it's almost never touched on again. Making this worse is the fact a Cloudrunner companion, Kyte, was intended to be in the game originally but was cut when Dinosaur Planet became Star Fox Adventures. Her inclusion could have shed more light on this subplot as well, possibly having to get along with Tricky, the other companion and Earthwalker Prince.
  • Despite an implied history behind the lore, with Scales noted to have been fighting the tribes for years by the Queen Earthwalker, the game gives little backstory about the history and events on Sauria prior to Star Fox's intervention. Most of the information given is rather shallow and concise, although the Star Fox series has never really been big on worldbuilding.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Arwing sections feel tacked-on just to give the game more of a connection to the prior Star Fox games. Unfortunately, the final boss is fought entirely in the Arwing.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: It's not uncommon to hear fans refer to the Shopkeeper as a "she". The character is actually male, but he has a voice that makes him sound like an old woman (which is actually provided by a man).
• Vindicated by History: The game's reputation still isn't perfect, and still not up to the level of Star Fox 64, but even those who dislike it are grateful for the fact that unlike Star Fox Zero, which is seen as a little more than a rehash of 64, this one at least tried to do something new and different with the series. This also applies to Star Fox: Assault as well.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Rare pushed the boundaries big-time in their final first-party Nintendo game, and it shows:
  • Environments have tons of detail, with great polygon counts and textures, yet the game still runs at a mostly consistent 60 fps.
  • Fox and other fuzzy characters actually have fur! The GameCube isn't powerful enough to actually render individual hairs, so the developers figured out a brilliant workaround based on a much more efficient technique called shell texturing. ^note  Essentially, a bunch of concentric layers above the basic model, with each layer having a cross-section of the volumetric look you're trying to achieve. Unless you look really closely, the shell layers blend together and it just looks like real fur!
  • Some games, such as Super Mario Sunshine, used pre-rendered, compressed video for their voice-acted cutscenes. In this game, everything is rendered in-engine. The most impressive part of this, though, is the incredibly detailed facial animation system used for the characters, most notably on Fox. As a result, this game, out of the entire franchise, does the best job of selling Fox as a real, relatable character.
  • The game uses a rather unique technique for rendering its water, and thanks to that the game accomplishes something that many games even today struggle with: the water actually looks wet.